National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submission 94
I am making this submission in relation to the proposed changes to NDIS access, cuts to community participation funding, and the return of the state-based block-funding model of disability supports. I am an Autistic man from New South Wales living with profound barriers to social and community access, nil formal supports, as well as interrelated housing and employment instability. I am disgusted by Federal Labor’s use of people living with disabilities, our barriers, and our support needs as a political football under the paper-thin pretense of social license.
I am not an NDIS participant and received no support as a child under the previous NSW state-based support systems despite my diagnoses, functional impairments, and my family’s socioeconomic instability and related dysfunction. I sat in a systemic blind-spot and the few times the state noticed my conditions, it shrugged off any responsibility for me as a young and vulnerable citizen. I was left to try and scrape together a life worth living on my own, forced to rely on informal supports that have left me ridiculously open to exploitation and abuse by past informal supports.
I wouldn’t wish my life or experiences on anyone else, much less any Autistic young person. I have no community connections outside of my employment. I have my husband, and his own illnesses make it impossible for him to support me in the area that I need assistance with. I made it to my 30th birthday without a single mate to text ‘happy birthday’ my way. I’ve relied on licit and illicit substances to try and numb out the pain of living in Australian society at such a significant communication mismatch until my body and mind couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve got a psychologist and a care coordinator through a Koori community program now, but before that I was alone with my challenges and frequently thought of suicide as my way out - planned it multiple times.
I have a home I barely leave with a balcony spot and sofa bed I basically never leave. I have a job that puts me behind a screen for too many hours in a day, a supportive manager who has urged me to make an NDIS access request, a string of failed roles behind me before this one, and not a lot else. I don’t have anyone to go bushwalking with that isn’t going to try and manage me, no access to the closest thing I have to a church, no Communion as I experience it. No friends, estranged family, nothing besides work, husband, and appointments to attend. This isn’t a life, it’s preparing to live if I’m admitted to the NDIS, preparing to work off the debt associated with my assessment costs and end my life if I have no access to support that can help me live a life that’s more than this shambling stagnation.
This is the life of one Autistic guy in modern Australia without supports. The proposed changes to the NDIS are a sentence that would see others end up where I am now or worse. I don’t want that for any other person living with disabilities, and the cost to Australian society will be greater than the fiscal savings Federal Labor expects to achieve by denying access to reasonable and necessary supports. Do better.