Submission 840
Senate Submission: NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
SENATE SUBMISSION | Community Affairs Legislation CommitteeWhen Sustainability Becomes a Barrier: Real-World Impacts of the NDIS
Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 on
Children, Families and Providers
Submitted by: Kids That Go Therapies and Be Brilliant
Paediatric Occupational Therapy Practice | Paddington, Brisbane QLD
Contact: 07 3087 1904 | admin@kidsthatgo.com31 May 2026
About Us
Kids That Go Therapies is a paediatric allied health practice based in Brisbane, providing occupational therapy, nursing support and dietetics to children and families. As a clinic we work with NDIS, Medicare and fee for service clients. Be Brilliant is an education and health promotion program developed from within our OT team, focused on supporting early childhood services and families to navigate toileting, hygiene and developmental milestones. The team includes experienced occupational therapists with specialisation in continence, sensory processing, child development and executive functioning.
A significant proportion of our NDIS clients are young children, many neurodivergent, many with complex or multiple diagnoses, accessing early intervention. We see week to week how funding decisions translate into real outcomes. This submission is written from that vantage point.
Our Position
We understand why reform is necessary. Fraud in the NDIS causes real harm and unsustainable growth threatens the scheme’s long-term viability. We do not oppose the intent of the Bill. What we are asking the Committee to examine carefully are the practical consequences of several key provisions, particularly for children whose needs are complex and for the small specialist providers who support them.
Our concerns fall into two areas. The first three are addressed briefly. The fourth, on automated decision-making, is where we focus most of our attention, because we believe it represents the least visible but potentially most significant structural risk in this Bill.
- The Direct Link Test and Children with Complex Needs Schedule 1, Part 3 requires that NDIS supports address needs arising directly from a qualifying impairment. In practice, the children we see rarely present with single, cleanly bounded diagnoses. A child whose primary qualifying impairment is autism may have toileting difficulties, anxiety in school environments, and feeding challenges that are clinically understood to arise from the interplay of sensory processing, interoception and behavioural patterns that are core features of their autism. The new direct link test risks excluding supports for these needs on the basis that the connection to the qualifying impairment is not sufficiently immediate.
We ask the Committee to ensure that implementation guidance for this provision requires individualised clinical consideration rather than a rigid causal test, and that a clear review pathway exists when decisions conflict with treating clinician recommendations.
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Submission 840
Senate Submission: NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
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Reassessment Restrictions and Child Development Schedule 1, Part 2 limits plan reassessments to situations involving a significant, ongoing and unanticipated change. Child development does not move in predictable annual cycles. A child who was managing in a small kindergarten setting may need substantially different supports when they start school. That is not a change in diagnosis. Under this Bill, a request to reassess that child’s plan could be declined, leaving families to fill the gap at considerable personal cost. We ask the Committee to ensure that the threshold for reassessment in children’s plans reflects developmental reality, not just clinical change.
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Support Determination Caps Schedule 1, Part 4 allows the NDIA to set intensity limits on therapy supports across the scheme. The Explanatory Memorandum uses an example of 25 hours per therapy discipline per year. For children requiring intensive early intervention or those who have multiple time sensitive goals, this is insufficient. Evidence strongly supports higher-intensity therapy in the early years producing better long-term outcomes. A blanket scheme-wide cap applied without accessible clinical override is inconsistent with the original purpose of early intervention funding. We ask that any support determination applying to children be developed in consultation with clinical professional bodies and include a transparent, timely exception pathway.
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Automated Decision-Making and the Displacement of Clinical Expertise Schedule 3, Part 2 introduces formal legislative authority for the NDIA to automate administrative actions. The Explanatory Memorandum describes this as enabling computer programs to take administrative action under CEO oversight, including evaluative determinations, meaning a computer program may exercise discretion, form a state of mind, or make evaluative judgements about participants.
We understand the operational reality that the Agency processes over 660,000 claims per day and requires computer assistance to function at scale. We are not arguing against the use of technology in administration. What concerns us is the specific combination of provisions this Bill creates, and what it means in practice for children with complex needs.
The problem is not automation in isolation. It is automation layered on top of other restrictive changes.
This Bill introduces tighter eligibility rules, a stricter direct link test, reassessment restrictions, therapy intensity caps and a stronger presumption of parental responsibility. Each of these changes narrows the circumstances in which a support will be approved. Now add automated decision-making applied to claims processing, plan grouping and potentially eligibility assessments, and what you have is a system where the most consequential decisions affecting vulnerable children may be made by a computer applying rigid criteria, with no clinician involved and no real opportunity for the nuance of a child’s situation to be heard.
In our practice, we write detailed clinical reports to support NDIS funding. We explain not just what a child cannot do, but why, what the evidence says, and how the supports we are recommending connect to functional outcomes. The current system is far from perfect in how it uses that information, but there is at least a pathway for clinical reasoning to be considered. Automated systems do not read between the lines. They do not weigh clinical context. They apply rules.
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Submission 840
Senate Submission: NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
The standard operating procedure problem
Where automated actions involve evaluative determinations, the Bill requires the CEO to establish a standard operating procedure instrument setting out how that determination should always be made. The word ‘always’ is significant. It means the computer must be able to resolve the question by applying a consistent, objective rule. The problem is that the children presenting to our clinic do not fit consistent, objective rules. A child may have the same diagnosis as another child and require five times the level of support. The factors driving that difference, family capacity, school environment, the presence of trauma, the interaction of multiple conditions, are exactly the kind of contextual variables that standard operating procedures are designed to exclude.
The Explanatory Memorandum states that automation is not intended to displace human delegates for complex decisions, and that substituted action is available where the CEO is satisfied a computer decision is not correct or preferable. In theory, this is a safeguard. In practice, a family in Brisbane or a therapist in Townsville has no visibility into when a decision was made by a computer, no reliable pathway to flag that it was wrong, and no guarantee that the system will escalate cases that fall outside predictable parameters. The volume of claims the Agency processes means that the proportion of automated decisions that receive meaningful human review is likely to be very small.
The equity problem
The NDIS Review itself found that administrative data showed participants in higher socioeconomic deciles received higher plan budgets, partly because they had greater capacity to gather and present the evidence required to justify supports. Automated systems will amplify this inequity. Families with the resources, knowledge and professional support to present their child’s needs in the precise format a system expects will achieve better outcomes than families who cannot. A child in a regional area, a child from a non-English speaking background, a family dealing with carer fatigue, will be disadvantaged by any system that reduces the space for human judgment and clinical context.
The provider perspective
From a provider standpoint, increased automation will change the nature of the work. Instead of clinical reasoning being the centrepiece of advocacy for a child, therapists will increasingly need to learn how to present information in a format that systems will process favourably. That is a distortion of clinical practice. It means the therapist’s job becomes partly about navigating an administrative system rather than supporting the child. For small practices without dedicated administrative teams, this creates a real compliance burden and undermines the therapeutic relationship that makes our work effective.
We are also concerned about the absence of any published framework for how the NDIA will monitor whether automated decisions are producing systematically different outcomes for different groups of children. Without transparency in how these systems function, how errors are detected and how clinical evidence is factored in, there is no meaningful accountability.
Recommendations
We support the goal of protecting the NDIS for future generations. These recommendations are practical and do not require abandoning the reform agenda.
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Submission 840
Senate Submission: NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
• Require that automated decision-making systems used for NDIS participants include a mandatory human clinical review pathway that is triggered by specific indicators of complexity, including child participants with multiple diagnoses, children in the early intervention cohort, and cases where a treating clinician has provided a report that conflicts with an automated outcome. • Before any provisions involving automated evaluative determinations are activated for child participants, publish the standard operating procedure instruments in draft for public consultation, including consultation with allied health professional bodies, and require that they demonstrate how clinical context beyond objective criteria will be handled. • Establish an independent audit function with the power to examine whether automated decisions are producing systematically inequitable outcomes across different participant groups, including by age, diagnosis, geography and socioeconomic background, and require that audit findings be tabled in Parliament. • Ensure clear, accessible and timely notification to participants and their treating clinicians when a decision affecting a child’s plan or eligibility has been made by an automated system, and provide an accessible escalation pathway that does not require legal representation. • Review the direct link test and reassessment restrictions with specific reference to children in early intervention, and ensure implementation guidance is developed with input from paediatric allied health clinicians before those measures commence.
The children we work with have fought hard to get the support they need. Their parents have spent years gathering evidence, attending appointments and navigating a system that was not designed with them in mind. This Bill, in its current form, risks replacing the limited human responsiveness that currently exists with something more efficient but less capable of seeing the child in front of it. We ask the Committee to take that risk seriously.
Becky Khan
Director and Occupational Therapist
Pamela Kosmidis
Practice Director
Megan West
Clinical Lead Occupational Therapist
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