Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Committee
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 Submitted by a person with lived experience of disability and an active matter before the Administrative Review Tribunal
Who I am
I am a disabled person with direct, lived experience of navigating the NDIS. I am currently engaged in proceedings before the Administrative Review Tribunal, where I am facing pressure toward dismissal. I am writing this submission while grieving the death of my mother. I say this not for sympathy but because it is the reality of what it means to be a disabled person engaging with these systems: the bureaucratic and the profoundly personal are never separate. And yet, in the midst of all of this, I am compelled to respond to yet another rushed legislative proposal that will shape the lives of people like me, with almost no time to do so.
This submission focuses on three issues where I have both deep personal concern and direct experience: the process failures that produced this Bill, the expansion of automated decision-making, and the new suspension and contactability powers. I also raise specific concern about the impact of this Bill on people with active tribunal matters.
Issue 1: The process that produced this Bill is itself a harm
This Bill was not co-designed with the disability community. It was not developed through genuine consultation. It has been put forward about us, without us, and the compressed timeframe for submissions draws reasonable suspicion about the government’s confidence in its likely reception.
This is not the first time. This is the third major NDIS amendment that has not been co-designed with the people it most affects. Each time, the disability community has been told there were “engagement opportunities.” Each time, those opportunities have amounted to being briefly consulted rather than genuinely included—present in the room but not operative in the outcome. We are invited to participate in processes where the decisions have already been made, and then thanked for our input. That is not co-design. That is performance.
When this government came to power, the disability community was promised a new dawn. What followed instead was a blitz of reform after reform, each arriving faster than the community could process, each demanding response under impossible pressure. The first NDIS review consultation gave us insufficient time. The second did the same. This Bill continues that pattern without shame or acknowledgement. I am preparing this submission while in grief, while managing a tribunal matter, while trying to live my life and I am being given days, not months, to engage with legislation of this magnitude.
The Office of Impact Analysis’s own guidance on best-practice consultation sets a clear standard that this process does not meet. I draw the Committee’s attention to: https://oia.pmc.gov.au/resources/guidance-oia-procedures/best-practice-consultation
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 975
I ask the Committee to formally recommend that the feedback period be extended to a minimum of 60 days, and that the government issue an apology to the disability community for the cumulative impact of reforms introduced without adequate co-design. Disabled people are not naughty children to be managed. We are nuanced, experienced members of society whose participation in decisions that affect our lives is not a courtesy. It is a right.
Issue 2: Automated decision-making without adequate safeguards
Schedule 3 Part 2 of the Bill allows significantly greater use of automated systems in NDIS administration and decision-making. Under current arrangements, participants can generally understand the reasoning behind their plans through engagement with human planners. This Bill moves toward a model where decisions affecting disabled people’s lives may increasingly occur through automated processes, with reduced human oversight and limited ability to challenge outcomes.
This is deeply alarming. We have already seen, through the Robodebt scandal, what happens when government automated systems are trusted to make consequential decisions about vulnerable people without sufficient transparency or accountability. The disability community cannot afford to repeat that experience. People with communication barriers, cognitive disability, or limited advocacy support are least able to navigate opaque automated decisions and most likely to be harmed by them.
There is a deeper principle at stake here too. Automation must not preclude our input. When systems make decisions about disabled people’s lives through hidden criteria and algorithmic logic, the practical effect is to remove us from the conversation entirely. We cannot meaningfully participate in decisions we cannot see, question, or influence. A scheme that automates away our voice is not a scheme built for us it is a scheme built to manage us. That distinction matters enormously.
I ask the Committee to require that any use of automated decision-making in the NDIS be subject to: mandatory human review rights, full transparency about the criteria and data sources used, independent auditing, and accessible dispute pathways for all participants regardless of their communication needs.
But dispute pathways, while essential, are not enough on their own. They are a remedy after harm has occurred. What the community needs is genuine co-design embedded from the very beginning of the process starting at the planning meeting itself. A participant should be an active author of their plan, not a recipient of one. And before any plan is approved, the participant should be required to sign off on it. I am aware this will be resisted as impractical or costly. I put it on the record anyway, because it is right. A scheme that approves plans about people without their agreement is not person-centred. It is administrative convenience dressed up as support.
Issue 3: Suspension and contactability powers are a danger to the most vulnerable
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 975
Schedule 1 Part 7 of the Bill gives the NDIA broad powers to suspend a participant’s plan and ultimately revoke their status if they are deemed “not contactable.” If a suspension lasts 90 days, participant status itself may be at risk.
This provision assumes that disabled people will always be administratively reachable: organised, stable, able to respond to bureaucratic correspondence on demand. It does not account for the reality of living with disability. People experiencing homelessness, hospitalisation, mental health crisis, family violence, or cognitive and communication difficulties may become unreachable not because they are disengaged, but because their disability makes consistent contact impossible. The very people this provision would most harm are those whose disabilities affect communication, stability, and executive function.
I speak from direct experience. My preferred method of communication is text. This has been communicated to the Agency repeatedly and is on record. Despite this, I have had the NDIA call me by phone, including on one occasion eight times in a single day, leaving voicemail messages even though my outgoing message explicitly states that I do not answer calls or listen to voicemail. They then followed up by emailing me to ask me to call them back. I discovered those missed calls months later, because voicemail is not my method of communication and I had no reason to check it.
Under the contactability provisions in this Bill, that experience could have resulted in the suspension of my plan. Not because I was absent or disengaged, but because the Agency chose to contact me in a way that does not work for me, despite knowing this. The Bill places the entire burden of contactability on the participant, with no corresponding obligation on the NDIA to actually use the communication methods a participant has nominated. That is not a reasonable or equitable standard. It is a standard designed around administrative convenience, not around disabled people’s lives.
I ask the Committee to restore stronger procedural safeguards before any suspension or revocation, including: proactive outreach requirements using multiple communication methods, welfare checks for participants who cannot be reached, clearer definitions of “reasonable attempts to contact,” and independent oversight of prolonged suspensions. Critically, the NDIA must be required to use a participant’s nominated communication method before any contactability finding can be made. Anything less is not a genuine attempt to reach someone. It is paperwork.
Issue 4: This Bill creates unacceptable uncertainty for people with active tribunal matters
I am currently a party to proceedings before the Administrative Review Tribunal. I am being pressured toward dismissal. This is already an extraordinarily stressful process, made more so by the personal circumstances I am navigating. The Bill’s transitional provisions create significant uncertainty about how future legislative changes may affect current plans and active tribunal matters.
But I want the Committee to understand something about what the tribunal process actually is for participants like me, because this Bill does nothing to address it and may make it worse. The ART is not a level playing field. On one side is the NDIA, a well-resourced government agency with legal expertise, institutional knowledge, and
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submission 975
unlimited time. On the other side is a disabled person, already depleted by the experience that brought them to tribunal in the first place, spending money they do not have, energy they cannot spare, and cognitive and emotional resources that their disability makes finite.
The Agency is the primary cost avoider in this process. Their institutional interest is in not funding us. And yet we are the ones who must fight, document, attend, respond, and persist, often without legal representation, often while managing the very conditions that are the subject of the dispute. We are spending resources we do not have to try to access the resources we need. That is not a justice system. That is a system designed to exhaust us into giving up. There is a profound irony at the heart of this imbalance. In the context of plan formation, we are also the primary cost avoiders. We are the ones who know our own bodies, our own conditions, our own lives. We hold the information. The NDIA holds the power. A well-designed system would treat those two things as complementary: our knowledge informing their decisions, our voice shaping our plans. Instead the system is structured to privilege institutional power over lived knowledge, to trust the Agency’s assessment over our own account of our needs. That inversion does not serve disabled people. It does not even serve the scheme. It produces worse outcomes at greater cost, because decisions made without our knowledge are decisions made in partial blindness.
Participants already fighting their cases also face the prospect of having the legislative framework shift beneath them mid-proceeding. The rules under which my case was brought may not be the rules under which it is resolved. That compounds an already unjust imbalance.
I ask the Committee to strengthen transitional protections so that participants with active tribunal matters are explicitly protected from new provisions until their matters are resolved. I also ask the Committee to look squarely at the structural power imbalance in the ART process itself, and to consider what genuine access to justice looks like for people who are already disabled, already under-resourced, and already being asked to do too much.
Conclusion
The NDIS was, and still can be, something extraordinary a world-leading model of inclusion, one that recognises that investing in disabled people pays dividends for all of society. Research consistently shows that every dollar invested in disabled people returns more than two dollars to the broader economy. The scheme’s original vision was built on the understanding that disability is shaped not only by impairment but by inaccessible systems, poverty, discrimination, and exclusion. This Bill moves away from that vision.
Even where the Committee cannot fault the content of specific provisions, I urge you to act on the process. Extend the consultation period. Require genuine co-design before further reforms proceed. Demonstrate through your actions that this government means what it said about a new dawn for disabled Australians.
We are already disabled. We do not need to be hobbled further.
Submitted by a person with lived experience of disability
Submission 975
24 May 2026