Submission 896
Submission on the NDIS Amendment Bill
I am a:
☑ Disabled Person
- My connection to this issue I am a disabled person living with a permanent and complex physical disability that significantly affects my mobility, self-care, independence, and ability to participate in everyday life.
I am a full-time power wheelchair user and require formal daily supports to continue living safely in my own home and to participate in work, healthcare, and my community. I also rely on disability related equipment, allied health, nursing support, consumables, and assistance with essential daily activities.
Without these supports, my ability to live independently would not be possible.
I continue to work and contribute to my community; however, my ability to do so exists because disability supports make participation possible.
The NDIS is not something that improves my quality of life in an abstract way, it provides the practical supports that allow me to meet basic daily needs, maintain my health and safety, remain in employment, participate in my community, and continue living outside of hospital and institutional care.
Because I rely on the NDIS every day to maintain my independence and safety, the proposed changes in this Bill are not theoretical to me. They have the potential to directly affect whether I can continue living the life I currently have.
- My overall view of this Bill I oppose this Bill in its current form.
My concern is not with accountability, responsible use of public funding, or ensuring the long-term sustainability of the NDIS. I support a scheme that is fair, sustainable, and available for future generations.
My concern is that the proposed changes appear to shift increasing responsibility, administrative burden, and risk onto participants who are already managing significant disability-related demands.
From my perspective, this Bill creates additional barriers for people who rely on supports not to improve convenience, but to meet basic daily needs, remain safe, participate in work and community life, and continue living independently.
I am deeply concerned that increased administration, stricter engagement requirements, reduced flexibility, greater reliance on standardised processes, and broader system-level funding decisions will disproportionately affect people with the highest and most complex support needs. I am also concerned that the cumulative effect of these reforms risks moving the NDIS further away from its original purpose, enabling disabled people to participate in society, and toward a system that prioritises compliance over outcomes.
Submission 896
This Bill risks creating a system where disabled people spend more time proving they are disabled than receiving the supports they need.
I believe reforms should reduce unnecessary administration, improve accessibility, strengthen participant safeguards, and ensure supports remain responsive to individual circumstances rather than creating additional barriers for people already living with permanent disability.
- My main concerns ☑ CommunicaIon and accessibility ☑ AdministraIve burden ☑ Loss or reducIon of supports ☑ Community parIcipaIon ☑ Crisis situaIons / “not contactable” rules ☑ Eligibility or assessment changes
3a) Communication and Accessibility My disability affects my ability to consistently manage administration independently.
My days are already structured around support, appointments, equipment, health management, personal care, and maintaining basic daily functioning. Adding tighter communication expectations and stricter response requirements assumes participants have unlimited capacity to engage with administration.
Many disabled people do not.
If I miss communication because I am unwell, attending appointments, managing a health issue, in hospital, exhausted, relying on others to assist, or simply unable to respond within a short timeframe, that should not place my supports at risk.
3b) Administrative burden The NDIS already requires participants to repeatedly prove disability, gather reports, coordinate clinicians, and spend enormous amounts of money and time maintaining access to essential supports.
Participants should not need to repeatedly justify supports that are clearly established and ongoing. The current system already creates significant administrative burden through repeated reassessments, extensive evidence requirements, and costly reports.
If there is concern about sustainability, I believe government should also examine the enormous amount spent repeatedly reassessing people with permanent disabilities and requiring thousands of dollars in reports to justify supports that are already known to be necessary.
3c) Loss or reduction of supports My supports are not optional.
They allow me to safely complete daily living tasks, access healthcare, manage disability-related needs, maintain employment, prevent deterioration, and remain living in the community.
If support flexibility is reduced or broader categories of support funding can be adjusted at a system level, my concern is that individual circumstances will become secondary to budgets.
Submission 896
A reduction in support for me would not mean inconvenience.
It would mean reduced access to personal care, reduced ability to leave my home, reduced access to work, increased health complications, increased reliance on family, and increased risk of hospitalisation.
3d) Community participation I work in paid roles and contribute professionally despite significant disability. I participate because support allows me to.
Community participation should not be treated as optional or a luxury.
Support workers, assistive technology, transport, nursing support, and disability-related supports are what allow me to maintain employment, relationships, independence, and connection to my community.
Removing or reducing these supports creates isolation.
3e) “Not contactable” provisions and crisis situations This section of the Bill is a huge concern.
Disabled people may become temporarily unreachable for many reasons.
- Hospital admissions
- Medical complications
- Communication barriers
- Reliance on others to manage administration
- Burnout and exhaustion
- Equipment failure
- Crisis situations A person being unable to respond should not automatically place essential supports at risk. Supports should not disappear simply because a disabled person cannot engage with administration during periods of instability.
3f) Eligibility or assessment changes I am concerned about reforms that move toward more standardised assessments, stricter reassessment pathways, or increased expectations to demonstrate permanence, treatment history, or ongoing justification of support needs.
Disability does not become less disabling because a person has lived with it for a long time. People with permanent physical disabilities should not be required to repeatedly prove established support needs through expensive reports, repeated reassessments, and administrative processes that consume time, energy, and funding that could otherwise be directed toward actual support. My support requirements exist because of functional impact, not because of whether I can produce additional evidence every plan period.
I am concerned these proposed changes could create situations where people who have already demonstrated significant and ongoing disability are repeatedly reassessed or required to justify supports despite there being no realistic expectation that those support needs will disappear.
Submission 896
For me, support needs are tied to maintaining safety, independence, health, work participation, and community living.
If assessment frameworks become more restrictive or rely more heavily on standardised approaches, I am concerned that the complexity of real-life disability will not be adequately captured.
Disability does not always fit neatly into categories, timelines, or administrative systems. I want the committee to understand that reassessment should exist to respond to change and improve supports where needed, not become an ongoing process of repeatedly proving eligibility for supports that remain essential.
This concern is particularly important where people already face significant costs and burden obtaining updated reports and evidence to maintain access to supports that are established and ongoing.
- What this looks like in real life For me, these changes would not simply mean inconvenience.
Without reliable, flexible, and adequately funded disability supports:
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I would be unable to safely leave my house consistently
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I would lose access to work and meaningful participation in society
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I would become increasingly dependent on informal supports that are already stretched and unsustainable
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I would lose independence and control over my daily life
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Essential daily tasks including personal care, health management, and participation would become unsafe or impossible
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Delays in accessing support could result in worsening health outcomes and avoidable hospital admissions
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Access to community, relationships, and opportunities would reduce significantly
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Equipment delays, reduced flexibility, or interruption to supports would create serious risks to my safety and functioning
This is not theoretical.
For people with significant physical disability, disability supports are not optional extras or lifestyle choices, they are what make daily life possible.
When disability supports reduce, the consequences do not disappear. They shift elsewhere.
They shift to emergency departments, hospitals, informal carers, families, and crisis systems. Reduced supports do not reduce need, they reduce safety.
For people like me, delays, reductions, reassessments, or interruptions to essential supports can mean loss of independence, deterioration in health, reduced participation, preventable hospitalisation, and increased risk of serious complications.
The goal of disability reform should not simply be reducing expenditure.
Submission 896
It should be ensuring disabled people can continue living safely, participating in their communities, maintaining dignity, and avoiding preventable harm.
- What I want the committee to understand I want the committee to understand that disabled people already spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and money repeatedly proving disability and support needs that are already permanent, severe, and extensively documented.
Participants are frequently required to obtain updated reports, specialist letters, allied health assessments, functional assessments, assistive technology assessments, and review documentation during reassessment cycles, even where there has been no reduction in support needs.
This process costs thousands and thousands of dollars across the scheme and places substantial burden on disabled people, families, clinicians, and providers.
I question whether some of the pressure on NDIS sustainability could instead be reduced by decreasing unnecessary administrative burden, reducing repeated reassessments for permanent disability, and limiting expensive review processes that duplicate existing evidence, while redirecting those resources toward frontline disability supports.
I am concerned that if the response to rising costs is reducing supports instead of reducing administration, disabled people will carry the consequences.
For people like me, reduced supports are not a budget inconvenience.
Reduced supports mean reduced personal care, reduced access to work and education, reduced community participation, delayed access to healthcare, worsening health outcomes, increased hospitalisation, increased reliance on informal carers, and increased risk of serious and preventable complications.
The reality is that disability does not become less disabling because time passes.
People with permanent disability do not need more barriers.
Disabled people should not need to repeatedly prove their existence, justify established support needs, or risk losing essential supports because they could not answer a phone call, respond to paperwork in time, or afford another round of reports.
The NDIS should exist to enable people with disability to live safely, participate in society, maintain dignity, and remain in their communities, not to create additional barriers to accessing supports that are already known to be necessary.
- My position on this Bill I do not support this Bill in its current form.
I ask the committee to reconsider changes that increase administrative burden, reduce flexibility, introduce “not contactable” risks, expand automated or standardised decision-making, increase reassessment requirements, or reduce access to individualised supports.
Submission 896
I support reforms that improve the sustainability and long-term future of the NDIS; however, sustainability should not be achieved by creating additional barriers for disabled people or reducing access to supports that maintain safety, independence, participation, and health.
The NDIS exists so disabled people can live safely, participate in their communities, maintain dignity, pursue work and education, and avoid preventable deterioration and hospitalisation.
People with permanent disability should not spend more time proving they are disabled than receiving the supports that allow them to live.
Any reform of the NDIS must remain centred on participant outcomes, accessibility, individual circumstances, and the original purpose of the Scheme, enabling disabled people to live ordinary lives with the support they require.
Those outcomes should remain at the centre of reform.
- Final statement Disabled people are experts in our own lives.
Reform should not happen to disabled people; it should happen with disabled people.
Decisions about disability policy, supports, and the systems that shape our lives should not be made without meaningful involvement from the people who live with the consequences every day.
Nothing about us, without us.