Submission 985
Senate Submission: National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the
NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Submitted to: Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs Submitted by: , AuDHD coach and neuroinclusion practitioner Role: NDIS participant currently under review; parent of three children with NDIS plans;
Location: , Western Sydney, NSW Date: May 2026
My daughter was locked in a supply cupboard at school because she was so frightened she cried, and the school could not handle it.
Her psychologist made a mandatory report to child welfare.
She cannot hear the word school now. She missed finishing primary school with her peers. She missed starting high school with her peers. She barely leaves the house. She has no friends.
I have not requested a plan review for her, even though she has moved from Level 2 to Level 3 autism and does not have enough support. I handle it at home myself. The reason I have not asked is simple: I am more afraid of the system taking away what little she has than I am hopeful it will give her what she needs. That fear is not irrational. It is the conclusion every family I know has reached after watching what happens to people who push back.
This is my life. This is the life of my family. And this is what this Bill, in its current form, will make permanent.
Who I Am
I am AuDHD, diagnosed at 48. I am an NDIS participant currently under review. I am an AuDHD coach. I am the , a neuroinclusion social enterprise, and I have worked directly with the autistic and neurodivergent community for five years.
I am also the parent of three children who all hold NDIS plans.
My eldest waited eight months for funding approval. My son was declined and I took his case to tribunal. My youngest has never had a plan review despite her needs increasing significantly. I have spent $20,000 of my own money on reports and assessments to access and maintain funding across my family. That is not unusual in this community. That is the norm.
I homeschool two of my three children. Not because I chose to. Because the systems that were supposed to support them caused trauma instead.
Before my diagnosis at 48 I was chronically burnt out. Not occasionally tired. Chronically depleted, for decades, in ways I could not explain or name. I was not seen by the diagnostic system because the diagnostic system was not built to see me. The research on autism and
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ADHD was developed primarily on male samples. The assessment tools reflected that. Women and girls mask differently, present differently and internalise differently. The system was not designed for that presentation and so it missed it, in me, for 48 years.
That is not ancient history. It is the direct context for what this Bill proposes to do with standardised functional capacity assessment.
I live in , in Western Sydney. I sit on the Access Committee of Penrith City Council. I work formally on improving access and inclusion for people with disability in one of the fastest growing regions in Australia. A region getting a second international airport. A region receiving billions in infrastructure investment. A region that remains chronically underserved when it comes to disability support.
I am speaking out here because I still have a voice. Many people in my community do not, or cannot, or are too burnt out to use it right now. The cost of using mine is real. I am doing it anyway.
What Is Already Happening
For five years I have run community events for autistic and neurodivergent people in Sydney. Many have been free. In the past six months, since the threat of NDIS changes began accumulating publicly, attendance has collapsed. Events that regularly drew 30 people now draw fewer than 10.
The people who stopped coming are not disengaged. They have not lost interest in community. They are in burnout.
Autistic burnout is a clinically recognised condition, distinct from general exhaustion or depression. Research consistently identifies it as a chronic state of depletion resulting from prolonged stress and unmet support needs, characterised by long term exhaustion, loss of function and social withdrawal (Raymaker et al., 2020; Higgins et al., 2021). It is the most strongly endorsed outcome of sustained masking and systemic pressure across every qualitative study published to date. Research by Mantzalas et al. (2024) found that 46.2 percent of autistic adults surveyed had experienced burnout four or more times. For many it is not a single episode. It is the shape of a life.
The threat of losing NDIS support is not a minor stressor for this community. It is a sustained neurological event for people whose nervous systems are already operating beyond capacity. The withdrawal I am watching in my programs is a symptom, not a choice.
This Bill has already caused harm. Before it has passed. The harm is measurable if anyone is willing to measure it.
Research published in the Australian Journal of Social Issues identifies that uncertainty about the future of NDIS support directly destabilises participants’ wellbeing and recovery trajectories (Choi et al., 2025). Separate research documents that NDIS participants experience a particular form of moral injury when the system that is supposed to help them
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becomes a sustained source of threat (Hamilton et al., 2023). These are not impressions. They are findings.
Issue One: Narrowed Eligibility and the Problem of Invisible Need
Moving from diagnostic criteria to functional capacity assessment has surface logic. Measuring the real impact of disability on daily life should be more useful than a label. But the way this Bill proposes to do that will harm a specific population: people with non visible, fluctuating, or environmentally variable disability. That is most neurodivergent people.
Researchers from UNSW have identified directly that disabilities which are “less visible, harder to quantify, or fluctuating” will face greater scrutiny under the proposed framework. My daughter’s disability is all three.
On an assessment day, in a clinical room, with a structured interview, many autistic and ADHD people will perform above their actual sustained capacity. This is not deliberate. It is masking: the continuous suppression of autistic traits to meet neurotypical expectations. Masking is the most consistently reported driver of autistic burnout across the research literature. It is cognitively exhausting and its long term costs are serious.
A standardised tool cannot capture the difference between how my daughter presents in a one hour appointment and what Tuesday afternoon looks like in our house. It cannot capture a child who was locked in a supply cupboard at school and now cannot hear the word. It cannot capture what it costs her to get to that appointment in the first place, or what it costs our family for days afterwards.
Her Level 2 plan reflected a clinical presentation. Her Level 3 reality reflects something the system has never properly seen.
There is a reason for that, and it is documented. The diagnostic tools used to assess autism and ADHD were developed and standardised predominantly on male samples. Research confirms that current diagnostic criteria and assessment instruments are largely built on a male centred understanding of autism, potentially overlooking the distinctive features of how autism presents in women and girls (Murphy Lonergan, 2021; PMC, 2025). The most widely used tools, including the ADOS-2 and ADI-R, show reduced sensitivity to masking and subtle social presentation in females. Women receive their first neurodevelopmental diagnosis an average of four to nine years later than men. Many are never diagnosed at all.
I was diagnosed at 48. I was chronically burnt out for decades before that. The system did not see me because it was not built to look for me.
My daughter is being assessed by tools built on the same foundational bias. A standardised functional capacity assessment, applied consistently, does not produce consistent outcomes when the standard was built around someone else. For autistic girls and women, “consistent” has historically meant “invisibilising.”
This Bill proposes to make that invisibility more efficient.
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The Bill adds a further barrier. Under the new eligibility rules, an impairment is not considered permanent if a person has not tried every appropriate treatment available in Australia. The Bill states explicitly that this assessment is made regardless of a person’s financial circumstances or geographical location. If a treatment exists, the Bill treats it as accessible.
That is not true. Specialist neurodivergent assessment and treatment is expensive, wait listed, and geographically concentrated. I live in Western Sydney. I sit on a council access committee. I know precisely how thin the service map is out here. The nearest specialist services are often across the city. Public wait lists run to years. Private costs run to thousands. The provision as written will be used to exclude people not because they do not need support, but because the treatment that might have helped was never genuinely within reach.
Western Sydney is the fastest growing urban region in Australia. We are getting an international airport. We have not got adequate disability support infrastructure. Billions are being invested in concrete and steel while families like mine are rationing the supports we already have because asking for more feels too dangerous. That is the real picture of what “available in Australia” means from where I sit.
What needs to change:
Functional capacity assessments must explicitly account for fluctuating capacity, masking, and the gap between clinical presentation and sustained daily function. Assessors must hold mandatory training in neurodivergent presentations before conducting any assessment, including specific training in female and non binary autistic and ADHD phenotypes. Assessment tools must be reviewed for gender bias before being deployed in eligibility or planning decisions. The “appropriate treatment” provision must be amended to require that treatment is genuinely accessible given a person’s actual financial and geographic circumstances, not merely available somewhere in Australia.
Issue Two: Plan Review Rights and the Rational Fear of Asking
My youngest daughter needs more support than her current plan provides. I have not asked for a review.
The calculation is not complicated. In a system where plan reviews can result in reduced funding, where the evidence burden is substantial and the process is lengthy and uncertain, staying still is the rational choice. An inadequate plan is still a plan. A plan under review is a plan at risk.
This is not a failure of courage. It is the predictable outcome of a system that has made the downside of asking larger than the potential upside of receiving.
This Bill narrows the grounds on which decisions can be challenged and limits the scope of the Administrative Review Tribunal. Under the proposed changes the Tribunal cannot vary a participant’s plan. It can only trigger reassessment by the original decision maker. The same decision maker who made the original decision.
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That is not a review pathway. That is a loop.
Underneath all of this sits the evidence burden, which the Bill does not address. To access the NDIS, to change a plan, to request additional funding, families must provide clinical documentation. Occupational therapy reports. Functional capacity assessments. Psychology assessments. Specialist reports. Each costs money. That money is frequently drawn from within the participant’s own support budget, which means disability support funding is being spent not on support, but on proving that support is needed.
I have spent $20,000 doing this across my family. I have professional expertise in this system. I know how to navigate it. And I am still here telling you it cost me $20,000.
Restricting review rights without addressing the evidence burden does not make the scheme more sustainable. It makes it more impenetrable. Families who are already afraid to push back will simply stop trying. Their needs will not decrease. Their visibility to the system will.
What needs to change:
Review rights must be maintained and strengthened. Clear, low barrier pathways must exist for participants to initiate a review when circumstances have changed. Assessment and evidence costs must be funded through the scheme independently of a participant’s support budget. The Administrative Review Tribunal must be empowered to vary plans directly, not merely send people back to the beginning.
Issue Three: Automated Decision Making Without Accountability
This Bill introduces explicit provision for automated systems and AI to make or inform NDIS planning decisions. Minister Butler has said that the lessons of Robodebt are front of mind. That acknowledgement is not sufficient.
Robodebt did not fail because anyone was careless. It failed because an automated system was applied to human circumstances it was not equipped to understand, with no meaningful human override and with review rights that could not catch the errors at scale. The government of the day defended it until it could not. People lost money they did not owe. Some lost more than that.
This Bill introduces algorithmic decision making into the NDIS while narrowing review rights at the same time. That is not a reform. That is a structural repeat of the conditions that made Robodebt possible.
People with Disability Australia, alongside multiple disability representative organisations, have stated formally that computer generated decisions cannot explain how they reached a conclusion, what assumptions were prioritised, or whether the model was built to minimise cost. A person cannot challenge a decision they cannot understand. When opacity combines with weakened review rights, the correction pathway shrinks precisely when it is most needed.
Submission 985
My son’s case went to tribunal because an initial human decision was wrong. Under a system with automated budget setting, limited explainability and narrowed review rights, the same wrong decision would be harder to identify and harder to contest. The error rate does not improve. The ability to fix the error does.
For neurodivergent participants, whose needs are by definition non standard, systems optimised for consistency across populations are a structural mismatch. Disability representative organisations have been explicit: automation works best for average cases. Disability is rarely average.
Australia has no comprehensive legal framework regulating the use of AI in public administration. This Bill proposes to deploy it inside one of the most consequential welfare systems in the country before that framework exists.
What needs to change:
Automated systems must not serve as the primary determinant of eligibility or plan budgets. Every algorithmic decision must be explainable to the participant in plain language before it takes effect. Review rights must be strengthened before any automated tool is deployed at scale. An independent oversight mechanism with genuine disability community representation must be operational before the I-CAN tool or any equivalent is implemented. A legal framework for AI in public administration must be developed and enacted first.
Issue Four: Ministerial Power to Override Expert Assessment
The Bill gives the Minister the power to cut or reduce a person’s NDIS funding even where the NDIA has assessed that person as needing it. This removes the independence of expert assessment and places ultimate funding authority with an elected official whose accountability is to political sustainability, not to individual need.
The government has committed publicly to reducing NDIS participation from 760,000 people to 600,000 by 2030, and cutting projected costs from $70 billion to $55 billion. These are specific numerical targets. The ministerial override provision in this Bill creates the legislative mechanism to reach those targets regardless of what individual assessments determine.
When a Minister can override the scheme’s own expert findings, those findings become advisory. That is a fundamental change in what the NDIS is. It should be named as such.
I understand the sustainability argument. A scheme that cannot sustain itself fails everyone who depends on it. But the Independent Review identified eight design failures that have driven cost growth. This Bill does not fix those failures. It reduces the number of people who can access the scheme while the failures remain. Those are not the same thing.
Reducing access to a broken system is not the same as fixing it.
What needs to change:
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The ministerial power to override individual NDIA funding decisions must be removed. Sustainability must be pursued through structural reform. Any changes to the scheme’s funding envelope must be subject to parliamentary scrutiny and mandatory, genuine consultation with disability representative organisations before implementation.
On This Process
This Bill was introduced to Parliament on 14 May 2026. Submissions close 29 May 2026. The Senate has been given until 16 June to report.
The people most affected by this legislation are people in burnout. People managing the cognitive demands of disability alongside the administrative demands of the NDIS. People whose support workers are not funded to help them write submissions. People who could not read this document without assistance. People like the ones who used to fill my community events and no longer can.
They have been given days to respond to changes that will shape their lives for years.
I am one of the people who can still write. So I wrote.
I am asking this committee to slow down, read carefully, and remember that behind every submission is a family like mine. A child who cannot say the word school. A mother who spent $20,000 proving her children’s needs are real. A community in Western Sydney, one of the most underserved disability regions in the country, that is already contracting under the weight of what has not yet passed.
The cost of getting this wrong is not financial. It is human. And it is already being paid.
Summary of Recommendations
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Eligibility: Require functional capacity assessments to account explicitly for fluctuating capacity, masking and the difference between clinical presentation and sustained daily function. Mandate neurodivergent specific training for all assessors, including training in female and non binary phenotypes. Require assessment tools to be reviewed for gender bias before deployment. Amend the “appropriate treatment” provision to assess genuine accessibility, not theoretical availability.
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Plan review rights: Maintain and strengthen review rights. Create low barrier pathways for review when circumstances change. Fund assessment and evidence costs independently of participant support budgets. Restore the Administrative Review Tribunal’s power to vary plans directly.
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Automated decision making: Prohibit automated systems from making primary determinations of eligibility or budget. Require plain language explainability for every algorithmic decision. Establish independent oversight with disability community
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representation before deployment. Develop a legal framework for AI in public administration before proceeding.
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Ministerial override: Remove the ministerial power to override individual NDIA funding decisions. Require parliamentary scrutiny and mandatory community consultation for any changes to the scheme’s funding envelope.
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Process: Extend the submission and inquiry timeline to allow genuine consultation with people with disability, their families and the organisations that support them.
References
Arnold, S. R. C., et al. (2023). What is autistic burnout? A thematic analysis of posts on two online platforms. PMC.
Choi, A., et al. (2025). Supporting the recovery of NDIS participants with psychosocial disability: A narrative literature review. Australian Journal of Social Issues.
Hamilton, S., et al. (2023). Impeded choice and control within the NDIS: Experiences of people living with psychosocial disability. Disability and Rehabilitation.
Higgins, J. M., et al. (2021). Defining autistic burnout through experts by lived experience. Autism.
Mantzalas, J., Richdale, A. L., and Dissanayake, C. (2024). Measuring and validating autistic burnout. Autism Research.
People with Disability Australia, et al. (2025). Joint statement: Disability representative organisations call for transparency on computer generated NDIS plans.
Raymaker, D. M., et al. (2020). Having all of your internal resources exhausted beyond measure and being left with no clean-up crew: Defining autistic burnout. Autism in Adulthood, 2(2), 132-143.
Murphy Lonergan, R. (2021). Gender balance in the validation of diagnostic tools for autism: A systematic review. European Psychiatry.
PMC (2025). Female gender and autism: underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis, clinical and scientific urgency. PMC.
PMC (2025). A qualitative study on the experiences of adult females with late diagnosis of ASD and ADHD. PMC.
UNSW Newsroom (2026). NDIS eligibility will be based on ‘functional capacity’, not diagnostic labels. But what does that mean?
van Toorn, G. (2026). NDIS reforms to give more power to minister, boost automated decision making. Croakey Health Media.
Submission 985