Submission 802
1 June 2026
RE: Submission on the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Introduction
This submission is authored by Dylan Barrett on behalf of Bedrock Support. I hold a Master of Psychology from the University of Glasgow and am currently a PhD Candidate in the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales. Over the past six years, I have worked exclusively in the psychosocial disability sector, spanning roles as a community support worker, team leader, and currently as the Director of Bedrock Support.
Bedrock is a specialised NDIS service provider operating in the Greater Sydney area, dedicated exclusively to supporting NDIS participants with severe mental illness. We provide intensive community support for participants with primary psychosocial disabilities (the NDIS framework for severe, enduring mental health conditions), relying on in-house training, close collaboration with allied health and familial support networks, and professional staff supervision to actively manage severe mental health risk on the frontline.
Our cohort includes individuals living with treatment-resistant psychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia and complex PTSD, who frequently present functionally with avoidance, suicidality, severe emotional dysregulation, substance use, disordered eating, active hallucinations, and complex mental health histories. To date, we have successfully supported 88 participants in the community, and we currently maintain an active team of 35 dedicated staff supporting a caseload of 45 individuals.
Core Argument
While Bedrock fully supports the objective of scheme sustainability, applying a physical disability framework to the proposed legislative reforms, specifically regarding Ministerial budget determinations (Schedule 1, Part 4) and New Framework Planning (Schedule 4), will cause immediate harm to participants with severe mental illness. Furthermore, these reforms will inadvertently undermine a vital training pipeline for Australia’s future mental health workforce.
Part 1: Ministerial Discretion and the Definition of “Critical Care” (Response to Schedule 1, Part 4)
Schedule 1, Part 4 of the legislation grants the Minister sweeping powers to unilaterally cap or reduce budgets, explicitly targeting “social, civic and community participation.” The justification for these cuts frequently relies on protecting “critical care”. For psychosocial participants, supported community access is the critical care intervention. Removing flexible, community-based supports exacerbates psychosocial disability (Hamilton, Hancock, & Scanlan, 2023).
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As one of our frontline workers accurately summarised: “Psychosocial support can genuinely change the trajectory of someone’s wellbeing and quality of life. These supports are not a luxury, they are essential.”
Far from being discretionary “lifestyle” supports, community participation funding actively facilitates the following clinical and economic outcomes:
● Healthcare Integration and Care Coordination: We act as a vital link between participants and the broader medical system, helping to reduce systemic inefficiencies. Many participants experience severe executive dysfunction, persecutory fears, and a profound trauma-related distrust of medical institutions. Our support workers help overcome these barriers to enable attendance at essential appointments, reducing missed appointments and billable cancellations. As one of our staff noted regarding highly complex clients: “Many participants are unable to manage doctor’s appointments, blood tests, specialist consultations, or monthly psychiatric appointments. Without consistent support, these vital touchpoints simply do not happen.” Beyond facilitating attendance, we coordinate extensively with the wider support network to practically implement clinical goals and provide real-time updates to treating teams. ● Hospital Avoidance and Economic Viability: Crucially, this proactive community engagement helps clients avoid high-cost crisis services and recurrent acute psychiatric admissions. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the average cost of a public psychiatric inpatient day in 2023–24 was $1,665 (AIHW, 2025), compared to the current NDIS price limit of $70.23 per hour for community participation support (NDIA, 2025). This means a single inpatient day costs the equivalent of more than 23 hours of community-based support. A brief two-week admission alone represents approximately $23,000 in public hospital expenditure that consistent frontline support may have prevented. In Australia 14.4% of individuals are re-hospitalised within 28 days of discharge from a psychiatric admission, with lack of connection to community-based treatment and support identified as a significant contributing factor (Scanlan et al., 2017). Targeted community support directly interrupts this cycle; in one Australian peer-delivered program, 49 packages of transitional support resulted in an estimated reduction of 300 hospital bed days (Lawn et al., 2008). This aligns with a broad consensus of ongoing research demonstrating that targeted psychosocial interventions consistently reduce both the duration of high-risk hospital stays and the frequency of readmissions, producing substantial savings that effectively offset the costs of frontline staff (Davidson & Guy, 2012; Sledge et al., 2011; Trachtenberg et al., 2013). ● Continuous Risk Monitoring: Every support session functions as a frontline welfare check. While assisting participants with practical tasks like community access, our workers continuously monitor rapid fluctuations in mood, behaviour, and wellbeing. By catching early warning signs of crisis, our team has successfully de-escalated and managed 24 instances of suicidal ideation, 4 incidents of self-harm, and navigated 5 medical emergencies during routine support. ● Mitigating Social Isolation: Social isolation is a core driver of severe mental health crises. Extensive research confirms that loneliness acts as a profound stressor, directly intensifying depressive, anxious, and psychotic symptoms (Bornheimer et al., 2020;
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Hämmig, 2019). This creates a vicious cycle: worsening mental illness triggers further social withdrawal, which in turn amplifies the underlying pathology (Linz & Sturm, 2013). As our frontline team observes, the support worker’s presence is often the only protective factor capable of breaking this feedback loop. Removing this support guarantees deterioration. ● Mitigating Harmful Coping Mechanisms: Consistent community support encourages positive emotional regulation and routinely diverts participants away from harmful coping strategies, directly mitigating risks like substance abuse, aggression, avoidance, and consequent housing instability. ● Stabilising Informal Supports: For participants with family, specialised mental health support prevents carer burnout. It allows family members to maintain their own mental health and remain actively engaged in the workforce. The support is not just for the participant; it stabilises the entire family structure around them. ● Early Intervention and Economic Participation: Community support provides the foundational stability required for self-efficacy, which ultimately leads to employment and educational engagement. Early, consistent support redirects young participants from a trajectory of systemic dependency toward economic contribution. For example, our team has successfully helped participants transition out of adolescent and adult mental health wards, maintain independent tenancies (paying rent), and enter tertiary education pathways.
Part 2: The Inadequacy of Functional Capacity Assessments for Mental
Health (Response to Schedule 1, Part 1 & Schedule 4)
A shift toward standard Functional Capacity Assessments (Schedule 1, Part 1) and the rigid “budget method rules” outlined in New Framework Planning (Schedule 4) risks excluding psychosocial participants if the assessments are built around physical metrics. A participant may be perfectly capable of showering or feeding themselves unassisted, but chronic suicidality, severe emotional dysregulation, active hallucinations, and severe executive dysfunction mean they remain at high risk without intensive support. Physical capability does not equal mental capacity.
Furthermore, generalised FCAs and automated budget rules fundamentally fail to capture the lived reality of psychosocial disability, particularly regarding “masking” and episodic fluctuation. During a short, formal assessment, a participant may expend massive amounts of energy to mask their symptoms and appear highly functional, hiding the true extent of their struggles from assessors who lack specific mental health training.
Compounding this issue is the inherently episodic nature of mental illness. Standardised processes that do not flexibly account for these rapid fluctuations fail to capture a participant’s true support needs. Furthermore, they fail to recognise that a participant’s “good day” is often the direct result of consistent, preventative baseline support. Cutting this ongoing maintenance funding based on a temporary period of stability guarantees the participant will rapidly deteriorate into “bad days,” leading directly to acute hospitalisation. This rigid approach to
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budgeting is particularly devastating for older participants who never received early intervention; cutting their maintenance support now, after decades of systemic neglect, is profoundly unjust.
Part 3: The Unintended Consequence: Threatening the Mental Health
Workforce Pipeline
The government has overlooked a massive, unmeasured value-add of the current NDIS framework. NDIS core funding, such as social and community access funding, currently acts as an invaluable, practical training ground for the future allied mental health workforce.
To date, Bedrock has employed and trained 45 allied health university students (psychology, social work, counselling) as frontline support workers. Through this model, these students gain irreplaceable, hands-on, face-to-face experience with people living with severe, complex mental illness before they even graduate. They receive mandatory, paid monthly professional supervision, learning vital skills in professional boundary setting, severe mental health risk management, and burnout prevention.
If the Minister slashes core support budgets under Schedule 1, Part 4, providers like Bedrock will not be able to employ these students or afford to provide professional supervision or training. The government will inadvertently sever a crucial pipeline that is currently upskilling Australia’s future mental health workforce during a time of critical national shortage.
The value of this frontline experience is best articulated by the allied health students themselves:
“Hands-on exposure to diverse presentations (non-verbal clients, clients in crisis, clients with different communication styles) has built comfort and adaptability that university theory alone couldn’t.”
“Knowing how to respond when a client discloses suicidal ideation is something you can only [truly] learn in the moment.”
“The main growth has been in patience, managing expectations, and learning to read clients without projecting, seeing the ‘real’ version of a person in their own home, on their hardest days, rather than masked for a brief clinical appointment.”
“Working directly with clients across presentations (schizophrenia, PTSD, ADHD, chronic illness) gives practical grounding that complements counselling studies in ways placement alone can’t replicate.”
Conclusion and Formal Recommendations
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1. Exempt participants with a primary psychosocial disability from sweeping Ministerial budget reductions to social and community participation (Schedule 1, Part 4), recognising it as an essential therapeutic and preventative healthcare intervention. 2. Co-design psychosocial-specific Functional Capacity Assessments (Schedule 1, Part 1) that are executed exclusively by credentialed mental health specialists who adequately weight episodic fluctuations, suicidality, emotional dysregulation, and executive dysfunction over physical independence. 3. Ensure that “budget method rules” (Schedule 4) retain built-in flexibility for psychosocial cohorts, preventing rigid funding caps that fail to accommodate rapid, severe fluctuations in mental health. 4. Acknowledge and protect the role of specialised NDIS providers in training, supervising, and expanding the future allied mental health workforce.