Submission 973
Genevieve Hohnen
24 May 2026
To:
Committee Secretary
Senate Standing Committees on Community Affairs
PO Box 6100, Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
community.affairs.sen@aph.gov.au
Submission to the inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
About this submission
I am the mother of an autistic child I will refer to in this submission as Darcy. I am writing as an individual, as a parent, and as a working Australian who has watched the National Disability Insurance Scheme do exactly what it was promised to do: make it possible for a disabled child and his family to participate in life, socially and economically.
I am disgusted by what this Bill represents. It is being marketed as protecting the future of the Scheme. In practice, the people it targets first and hardest are disabled autistic children and the families who care for them. I do not accept that framing, and I do not accept the process that is being used to push these changes through.
I oppose the Bill in its current form. The Committee should recommend it not be passed unless the changes set out below are made.
Recommendations
I ask the Committee to recommend the following:
1. That the Bill not be progressed on its current timetable. The reporting date of 16 June 2026 does not give participants, families, providers, advocacy bodies or this Committee the time required to scrutinise a 109-page Bill that reshapes individual entitlements for hundreds of thousands of people.
2. That the proposed 50 per cent cut to social, civic and community participation funding, and the 10 per cent cut to capacity building daily activity funding, be removed from the Bill. These categories are not luxuries; they are the supports that allow children like my son to grow into adults who participate in society and the economy.
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3. That any proposed Ministerial power to reduce funding for groups of supports be removed, or at a minimum bounded by mandatory, public, evidence-based review; statutory consultation with people with disability; and full merits review rights.
4. That cost-saving measures be redirected from participants and their families to the middle of the market. Plan managers, large registered providers charging professional-services rates, and intermediaries that have grown wealthy from the Scheme are where scrutiny and structural reform should begin.
5. That the Bill be paused until the Scheme has been in operation long enough to produce meaningful longitudinal evidence on outcomes, particularly for children who entered early intervention. It is not possible to honestly claim that the Scheme is failing to deliver value when it has not yet been allowed to run long enough to measure it.
6. That any future reform process be genuinely co-designed with people with disability and their families, in accessible formats, with realistic timeframes.
The NDIS is, at the macro level, an economic policy
The public conversation about the NDIS too often treats it as welfare, as charity, or as a cost line to be managed down. It is none of those things. At a macro level the Scheme is an investment designed to do two things at once: enable disabled Australians to participate in life socially, and enable them to participate in life economically.
Those two goals are inseparable. A child who is supported to communicate, regulate, attend school, build relationships and develop independence becomes an adult who can work, pay tax, contribute to a community and require less, not more, from the state across the rest of their lifetime. A parent who is not drowning becomes a parent who can stay in paid work, keep a household solvent, and raise siblings who themselves grow into contributing adults.
Cutting the supports that make that participation possible does not save money. It pushes the cost out of the Scheme and into Centrelink, the health system, the justice system, the housing system, and the lost productivity of carers who have been forced out of the workforce. The Bill, as drafted, does not appear to reckon with that arithmetic at all. Putting aside the individual impact it is economically the incorrect choice.
The claim that there was a functioning system before the NDIS is a lie
One of the rhetorical devices being used to justify these cuts is the implication that the NDIS replaced something workable, and that we can safely retreat toward a leaner version of what existed previously. That is not true.
There was no functioning system of support for disabled children and their families before the NDIS. There were waitlists measured in years. There were means-tested scraps. There were charity programs with eligibility rules that excluded most of the children who needed them. There were families remortgaging houses to fund therapy, families splitting up under
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the financial and emotional strain, parents leaving paid work entirely because there was no other option, and disabled children going without the support that would have changed the trajectory of their lives. And to be clear for all the noise around pricing for us it has been a roughly $30 an hour increase. It was already $170 an hour for therapy before the NDIS. The NDIS did not substantially change the price beyond inflation for most therapists.
Whether your child got help was, in practice, a function of your postcode, your savings, your private health cover, your ability to navigate bureaucracy, and your capacity to keep fighting. It was a system in which the children of well-resourced parents were sometimes supported, and everyone else was not. The NDIS was built precisely because that was unacceptable. Any reform that quietly returns us to that world should be named for what it is.
My son Darcy
Darcy is autistic. Without the early and ongoing supports made possible by the NDIS, the most likely trajectory for him would have been lifelong care. That is not a dramatic statement; it is the realistic baseline for many autistic children with his level of need before this Scheme existed. It would have meant a life in which he could not work, could not live independently, and could not participate in the community in the ways he now can.
It would also have meant a life in which I could not work. Caring for a child with high support needs without the supports the NDIS provides is, in practical terms, a full-time unpaid job. I would not have been a taxpayer. I would have been in and out of the system asking for help that was not there. Two Australians, instead of contributing economically, would have been excluded from doing so. Multiply that across the families this Bill is aimed at and the cost to the country is enormous, and entirely self-inflicted.
The cuts proposed in this Bill, particularly the 50 per cent reduction to social, civic and community participation funding, would directly attack the supports that make Darcy’s current trajectory possible. The Government cannot simultaneously claim it wants disabled Australians to participate in economic and community life and then strip out the funding that enables that participation.
It is too soon to claim the Scheme has failed to deliver value
The NDIS has not been operating long enough to produce mature longitudinal evidence on outcomes. The first cohort of children to enter early intervention under the Scheme are still children. We do not yet know how many of them will go on to complete school, complete training, enter the workforce, live independently or require less intensive support later in life because of the investment made now.
Any honest cost-benefit analysis of the Scheme has to wait until that evidence exists. Cutting supports now, before the data is in, and then citing reduced cost as a success, is circular. It guarantees worse outcomes and then uses those worse outcomes to justify the cuts that caused them.
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If sustainability is genuinely the goal, the responsible course is to let the Scheme run long enough to evaluate it properly, and to invest in the data infrastructure to do so.
The process is too fast, poorly advised, and an insult to the people it targets
A Bill of 109 pages, which changes who can access the Scheme, how plans are built, how decisions are reviewed, and which gives the Minister broad power to reduce funding for groups of supports, has been referred to this Committee with a submission window closing on 29 May 2026 and a reporting date of 16 June 2026.
That is not a process designed to hear from the people affected. It is a process designed to limit how many of them can respond before the decisions are locked in. Parents like me, who are already running households, jobs and complex care arrangements, are being asked to read, understand and respond to legislation of this scale in days. Disability advocacy organisations are being asked to do the same with limited resources.
If these changes are as carefully considered as the Government claims, they should withstand a proper timeline of scrutiny and co-design. The fact that they are being rushed suggests either that they would not survive that scrutiny, or that the people they affect are not considered important enough to consult properly. Both possibilities are unacceptable, and both are an insult to the thousands of families and children the Bill is aimed at.
The wrong people are being targeted
If there is genuine cost pressure in the Scheme, the rational place to look is the middle of the market, not the children at the end of it.
In particular, the Committee should examine:
• Plan managers. In many cases these are, functionally, highly paid administrative assistants processing invoices. The fees paid for that function across the Scheme are not trivial and are not commensurate with the value delivered to participants.
• Large registered providers charging professional-services rates for services that do not require professional-services skill levels. Hourly rates that approach what one would pay a lawyer or specialist consultant, for routine support work, have become normalised.
• Intermediaries, consultants and corporate structures that have grown up around the Scheme to extract margin between the participant and the worker actually providing the support.
• Procurement and pricing rules that have allowed those margins to expand without commensurate scrutiny of outcomes.
These are the structural cost drivers in the Scheme. Reform aimed at them would protect participants while genuinely improving sustainability. Reform aimed at participants protects
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the middle of the market and harms the people the Scheme exists for. The Bill, as drafted, does the latter.
In closing
The NDIS exists because the alternative was unacceptable. Disabled children were being failed, and their families were being broken, in a way that no modern country with our resources should have tolerated. The Scheme has, in the time it has had, started to change that. It has allowed my son a future. It has allowed me to remain a working, contributing member of society. It has, at a national level, started to build the data, the workforce and the expectations that will produce a generation of disabled Australians who are part of the economic and social life of this country, not shut out of it.
This Bill, in its current form, will reverse that progress. It will do so quickly, without proper evidence, and at the direct expense of the people the Scheme was created to support. It targets the wrong people, on the wrong timeline, for the wrong reasons.
I ask the Committee to recommend that the Bill not pass in its current form, that the proposed cuts to community participation and capacity building be removed, that any structural reform be directed at the middle of the market, and that the disability community and the families of disabled children be afforded the genuine, accessible, properly resourced consultation that decisions of this magnitude demand.
Fundamentally remember that the only difference between me and you, and my son and you is chance. Tomorrow the people you are targeting right how could be you, your family. And I firmly believe we are better than this. Australian’s are better than this.
Thank you for the opportunity to make this submission. I consent to this submission being published with my name attached.