National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 853
Submission to NDIS Committee
I write to you as a husband and father of NDIS participants in South Australia. I am genuinely dismayed and disillusioned by the proposed NDIS reforms, and I suspect I am not alone in that feeling.I write to share my strongest concerns about the proposed changes to the NDIS, and I trust that you will consider and act to mitigate them.
Giving Equality With One Hand, Taking It Away With the Other
I acknowledge and support the Government’s efforts to address inequality through tax and fiscal reform. But equality of opportunity cannot be selectively applied, and I cannot reconcile that commitment with changes to the NDIS that will push Australians with disability further from equal participation in society. A government that champions a fairer Australia in one breath cannot, in the next, condemn our most vulnerable citizens and their unpaid family carers to a less equal life.
Reform… on the Back of Women’s Unpaid Labour
The proposed reforms will have a predictable and unfair impact not just on NDIS participants themselves, but also, and for the most part, on women. The Government rightly champions reducing the unpaid care burden on women. Yet the practical consequence of these cuts is that Australians with disability will increasingly depend on unpaid family carers, who are overwhelmingly women.
Abandoning Participants to Non-Existent State Supports
The Government has justified some cuts by pointing to State-based supports that pre-dated the NDIS. I accept that in a Federation, responsibilities can be shared across levels of government. What I cannot accept is cutting Federal supports without first ensuring adequate State alternatives actually exist. Those services were largely dismantled after the NDIS was established. Directing people to State supports that no longer exist is not a support pathway; it is sending already heavily burdened people into a void.
Laws Are Not Written for the Governments We Trust; They Should
Be Written for the Governments We Fear
The Bill proposes to make the purposes of funding reviewable while explicitly placing funding amounts beyond review, severing two things that are, in practice, inseparable. Funding amounts are integral to a funding decision and cannot be meaningfully separated from the purposes that funding is meant to serve. Making purposes reviewable while quarantining amounts from review is a structural gap that will invite bureaucratic trickery and produce poor administrative outcomes.
This concern is not abstract. NDIA decisions are currently overturned at external review approximately 75 percent of the time, the highest overturn rate of any government agency in
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 853
Australia. Removing review rights is not a solution; if anything, it makes the underlying problem less likely to ever be addressed.
Compounding this, the proposed reforms grant the Minister expanded powers with insufficient oversight or parliamentary scrutiny. While the Government may regard itself as a trustworthy steward of these powers today, the Australian people rightly expect that laws are written not for the governments we have, but for the governments we might get.
I trust that you share these concerns. I ask that you consider the adequacy of alternative supports before cuts commence, the gender equity contradiction at the heart of this reform, and the absence of meaningful review rights, and act accordingly.
Let not short term expediency jeopardise the real aspirations of our fellow Australians with disability and of their families, now and in the future.
Thank you.