National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. I Read It. I Have Questions. You Should Have Questions Too..

I have spent a number of years inside this system. Not observing it from a boardroom or a parliamentary office but living it. Supporting real people with real disabilities through a scheme that was supposed to change their lives, and in many ways still could, if the people running it could correctly identify where some of the the problems are actually coming from.

I am tired.

But if I am tired, imagine how tired the participants are. Imagine how tired the families are. Imagine how tired the carers are who have been filling the gaps this system refuses to fund, quietly, invisibly, at the cost of their own health, their own careers, their own relationships.

I chose this work. They did not choose their circumstances.

I am not writing this to be controversial. I am writing this because I sat down this week and read the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 from cover to cover. All 113 pages of it. I also read the second reading speech Minister Butler delivered in Parliament on 14 May 2026, the day the Bill was introduced.

And I am genuinely mortified.

Not surprised. Not concerned. Mortified.

This Bill has not passed yet. And you need to understand what is actually in it, because the government's own fact sheet is not telling you, the media coverage is not telling you, and by the time most people find out, it may already be law.

Before you read on. There is something you can do right now.

The Senate has referred this Bill to the Community Affairs Legislation Committee for inquiry.

Submissions from the public are open until 29 May 2026. That is less than two weeks away.

You do not need to be an expert. You do not need to write pages. If you have questions, concerns, or a story of your own, the committee wants to hear from you. Put it on the public record before this Bill passes.

Submit here: aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Community_Affairs/SecuringtheNDIS

The window is open. Use it.

Before the Bill. What Was Already Broken.

Before I take you through what this legislation actually says, I need to tell you what it is being built on top of. Because this Bill is not fixing a working system. It is dismantling a broken one without fixing what broke it. We can all agree that fraud is rife. I don't need to go over that. Some providers rort the system. Some participants rort the system. That needs fixing. But there are other points that no one talks about and we need to address these too.

FOI Document showing the Top 1,000 Providers by Direct Payments (01/07/2024 - 01/07/2025)

This has not made headlines. Document FOI-25/26-0656. Top 1,000 Providers by Direct Payments from 1 July 2024 to 1 July 2025. Official. Verified. Released by the NDIA itself.

Here is what it shows:

Department of Health, Disability and Ageing: $190,695,787.74

Department of Human Services: $123,425,472.57

Department of Families, Seniors, Disability Services and Child Safety: $74,120,569.31

Department of Families, Fairness and Housing: $37,692,555.19

Disability Services Commission: $29,257,363.76

Metro North Hospital and Health Service: $7,667,781.23

Total: $462,859,529.80

Combined, government agencies and councils drew approximately $462 million from the NDIS in a single year. The Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, the department that oversees the NDIS, billed nearly $191 million from the scheme it administers. The overseer of the scheme is also one of its largest beneficiaries.

These payments may reflect legitimate services delivered to NDIS participants. But whether legitimate or not, they represent something the government has never once mentioned in its public narrative about scheme sustainability. Not in the Treasurer's budget speech. Not in Minister Butler's second reading speech. Not in a single ministerial media release about the unsustainable cost of disability support.

The government is announcing the removal of 160,000 current participants from a scheme it calls unaffordable. Why has half a billion dollars billed by its own agencies and councils not been part of that conversation?

The Legal Cost

The NDIA spends tens of millions of dollars fighting participants at the Administrative Review Tribunal (previously the Administrative Appeals Tribunal).

According to the NDIA's own Independent Expert Review Program Evaluation Report from October 2023, the average cost of a 2.5 day hearing is $29,899, hearing days only, not including all pre-hearing legal costs. And according to the AAT Quarterly Report for 2020-21, 98 per cent of cases never reach a hearing. They settle or overturn before that point.

If the NDIA's decisions are correct, why are 98 per cent of cases settling or overturning before a hearing? If the decisions are defensible, why are they not being defended?

And if they are settling because the decisions were wrong in the first place, why is the answer to introduce legislation that makes it harder for participants to challenge them?

I would love for the Minister to release two things publicly. How much has been spent at the Administrative Review Tribunal in total. And how many cases the NDIA has won versus how many it has lost. That information alone would give every Australian taxpayer the context they need to understand that the media narrative, and the government narrative, is not always accurate.

"We Don't Read Reports"

In February 2025, NDIA CEO Rebecca Falkingham publicly acknowledged that NDIA staff often do not have time to read the medical reports submitted by participants.

Let that land for a moment.

To access the NDIS, to change a plan, to request additional funding, families are required to provide evidence. Not suggested. Required. Occupational therapy reports. Functional capacity assessments. Psychology assessments. Speech pathology. Specialist assessments. The scheme demands this evidence at every turn. That evidence is not free. It is often funded from the participant's plan. Participants are spending thousands of dollars obtaining the clinical documentation the NDIA mandates.

And the CEO of the agency administering the scheme stood up and said her staff do not have time to read it.

The planning system built on that evidence is equally broken. Two people. Identical disabilities. Identical functional capacity assessments. Identical allied health recommendations. Identical support needs. Two completely different plans. Not because their needs differ. Because they were assigned different planners.

How is it that two people with identical needs, identical evidence, and identical recommendations can receive completely different plans? And how is it acceptable that planners can make life-altering decisions about vulnerable people with no meaningful accountability and apparently no obligation to read the evidence placed in front of them? If you get a planner who understands your specific disability, you get a plan that reflects your needs. If you get a planner that has no idea, your plan is dismal.

The LAC Issue

Every NDIS participant is assigned a Local Area Coordinator. Their job, as defined by the NDIA itself, is substantial. They are supposed to be the participant's main point of contact throughout their entire NDIS journey. Check in regularly. Connect participants to supports and community. Step in during crises. This service costs participants nothing. It is separately funded by the NDIA through contracted partner organisations, valued at $2.76 billion in total contracts to December 2024.

The LAC model was always going to struggle under the weight of what it was asked to do. LACs carry caseloads that make genuine, ongoing, individualised engagement structurally impossible. They are set up to fail by a system that funds the role without resourcing it adequately.

I support participants across two branches of Loving Life Support Services.

Not one of them hears from their LAC. Not one. Except to be reminded that their plan end date is coming up.

I've heard of people having great LACs. But again. It's like the planner lottery. A government funded lottery. With people's lives as the prize.

I know of a family who was told by a planner that their severely disabled family member did not need a Support Coordinator because Support Coordination was being phased out and their LAC would fill that role instead. That is not in any legislation I have read. It is not in any policy I can locate. How a planner arrived at that position is unclear. What is not unclear is the outcome.

$2.76 billion. For a service that is supposed to replace Support Coordination for the most vulnerable participants in the scheme. A service that is functionally invisible to the people it is supposed to serve. Not because the people in those roles don't care. Because the system has made caring at that scale impossible.

The Bill Is Here. And Minister Butler's Own Words Tell the Story.

On 14 May 2026, Minister Butler stood in the House of Representatives and delivered his second reading speech for this Bill. I have read it in full. And some of what he said deserves to be examined carefully alongside what the Bill actually does.

He said: "This government will not repeat those mistakes."

He was talking about Robodebt.

Then he introduced a Bill that gives an algorithm the legal power to form a state of mind about a disabled person's support needs, with no requirement for human review of any particular decision, governed by instruments Parliament cannot disallow.

He said: "One in five plans are currently subject to an unscheduled reassessment every year. And the average result of these reassessments is a 20 per cent increase in plan value."

He is right that this is a problem. Plans being consistently 20 per cent too low is a problem. But has he misidentified the cause?

One might even suggest that plans are coming in 20 per cent too low because planners are not reading the clinical reports they mandate and participants fund. The CEO said so herself.

And here is a question the Minister has not answered. Does that one in five figure include plans corrected through proceedings at the Administrative Review Tribunal? Because if it does, he is counting tribunal wins by participants as evidence of a reassessment problem. Which means his solution to participants successfully challenging wrong decisions is to make it harder to challenge them.

Plans are being reassessed and found to be underfunded. Participants are using the only mechanism available to them to correct a planning system that consistently gets it wrong. Butler sees the correction and calls it unsustainable growth.

The answer to undertrained planners producing wrong plans is to train planners. Require demonstrated understanding of disability. Require mandatory engagement with clinical evidence. Make planners accountable for decisions that are demonstrably inconsistent with the evidence placed in front of them.

Instead, this Bill removes the human brain from the process entirely and replaces it with an algorithm. Which will produce wrong plans at scale, consistently, with no one accountable and no mechanism to correct them.

If planners are not reading the evidence and plans are consistently underfunded as a result, is the solution really to make it harder for participants to correct those plans? Is making it harder to get a wrong plan fixed really the answer to wrong plans?

He said: "The NDIS was never intended to replace health, rehabilitation and treatment services."

He is right. But at the National Press Club in April, he acknowledged that mainstream services had collapsed and families had nowhere else to turn. He said all governments had failed them.

He is still right. All governments did fail them. The NDIS stepped in to fill the gap. His solution is to use the ongoing failure of those services as justification for restricting NDIS access, while those services remain just as collapsed, with no funded plan to fix them.

He said: "The Fraud Fusion Taskforce has identified eight recurring design failures in longstanding government programs, that make them susceptible to fraud. The NDIS has all eight. It also has none of the seven fundamental building blocks for high-integrity programs."

He is right. The system is fundamentally broken. If the system has all eight design failures and none of the seven building blocks for integrity, how does reducing the number of people who can access the program fix any of those failures? You do not fix eight design failures by reducing the number of people who can access the program. You fix the design failures.

Now let me take you through what the Bill actually says.

Schedule 1, Part 1: How They Assess Your Disability.

What the old law said: Your functional capacity was assessed in the context of your actual life. Your supports, your environment, your circumstances were all part of the picture.

What the new Bill says: Functional capacity will now be assessed without assistive technology, without home modifications, without help from other people, and excluding your personal and environmental circumstances.

In plain English: The NDIA will assess you as if your wheelchair does not exist. As if your home modifications do not exist. As if your support worker does not exist. As if the environment you actually live in does not exist.

Here is the thing. In principle, this is actually the right approach. If you assess someone's functional capacity while they are already using their supports, you get a picture of how well the current system is working, not a picture of the underlying disability. Assessing without those things gives you a truer baseline of genuine need.

Done properly, this should result in more accurate funding, not less.

So why does it concern me?

Because this definition does not exist in isolation. It sits alongside every other provision in this Bill. And the question the government has not answered is this: if the assessment correctly identifies the true extent of someone's disability, what guarantee is there that the rest of this Bill will fund it adequately?

The treatment requirement may exclude the impairment entirely. The "directly" wording may exclude supports for its cascading effects. The ministerial determination may cut the funding category by 50 per cent. The auto-renewal may lock in an inadequate plan indefinitely.

Getting the assessment right is only half the equation. The government needs to explain how the other half of this Bill doesn't undo it.

There is another question the government has not answered about this provision, and it sits at the heart of the entire Bill....

Part 6 of this Bill codifies parental responsibility and informal supports as factors the CEO must consider before approving funded supports. The planning decision is supposed to account for what families and carers can provide.

But the functional capacity assessment in Part 1 explicitly excludes the impact of other people from the assessment.

So, the assessment says your family does not exist. And then the funding decision says your family can do it.

The government is using the absence of informal supports to measure the true extent of your disability and then using the presence of those same informal supports to justify not funding what that assessment reveals. The participant gets the worst of both positions. Assessed as if alone. Funded as if supported.

The government needs to explain how those two things are consistent. Because I cannot reconcile them.

Schedule 1, Part 2: Getting a Reassessment.

What the old law said: If you requested a reassessment of your plan, the NDIA had 21 days to respond.

What the new Bill says: 90 days. And you can only request an unscheduled reassessment if you can prove a significant and ongoing change in functional capacity that substantially reduces your ability to perform daily activities.

Butler's justification was that one in five plans are reassessed annually, at an average 20 per cent increase. He presented this as a scheme out of control.

But let's be very clear about something. Participants do not have the power to change their own plans. NDIA staff do. Every single reassessment that results in a 20 per cent increase is an NDIA employee correcting another NDIA employee's work. Butler is not describing a participant behaviour problem. He is describing an NDIA accuracy problem. So why is the solution aimed at participants rather than at NDIA accuracy?

One might even suggest that plans are coming in 20 per cent too low because planners are not reading the clinical reports they mandate and participants fund. The CEO said so herself.

And if you need any further evidence that the NDIA is systematically underfunding participants, look no further than their own legal spending. As outlined earlier, the NDIA spends tens of millions of dollars at the Administrative Review Tribunal. 98 per cent of cases settle or overturn before they even reach a hearing. The reassessment data and the legal spending data are telling the same story. Plans are wrong. Participants are correcting them through the only mechanisms available to them. The internal reassessment process and the tribunal.

Restricting reassessments does not reduce the cost of correcting wrong plans. It redirects it. From an internal administrative process to an external legal one. At significantly greater cost to the taxpayer. And with significantly greater burden on the participant.

If the problem is NDIA accuracy, why is the solution to make it harder for participants to correct the result?

Beyond that, this provision contains a fundamental internal contradiction with the Bill's own early intervention principles.

Most people think early intervention is about young children. It is not. It stretches in every direction. It applies to anyone whose condition, if left unsupported, will deteriorate. It applies to the school leaver whose structured environment disappears overnight at Year 12. It applies to the adult whose ageing parents can no longer provide the informal support they once did. It applies to anyone for whom early action now prevents crisis later.

Section 25 of the existing Act is explicit. Fund support where it is likely to reduce the impact of disability, reduce the need for future supports, and improve functional capacity. Act before deterioration occurs. Prevent crisis rather than respond to it.

This provision requires you to prove substantial deterioration before you can ask for help.

The early intervention framework says act before the decline. The reassessment framework says prove the decline before we act. Written into the same piece of legislation. By the same government.

Think about what this means for someone with a degenerative condition. Multiple sclerosis. Motor neurone disease. Early onset dementia. The whole point of early intervention is to increase support before function is lost, to slow progression, to maintain quality of life. This provision says come back when you are substantially worse.

Think about what it means for a child with ASD Level 3 leaving school. School provides structure, routine, therapeutic support, and a contained environment with trained staff.

When that disappears overnight at Year 12, the impact on functional capacity is immediate and profound. But unless that deterioration clears the significant and ongoing substantial reduction threshold, they just get last year's school-based plan automatically renewed. For a world that no longer exists for them.

The government needs to explain how early intervention and this reassessment threshold coexist. Because I cannot reconcile the two.

Schedule 1, Part 3: What Your Support Has to Be Connected To.

What the old law said: Supports must be "arising from an impairment."

What the new Bill says: Supports must be "arising directly from an impairment."

One word. Directly. And the government has provided no guidance whatsoever on what it means in practice.

Butler's stated purpose was to address situations where participants have multiple impairments, some meeting NDIS requirements and others not, and to ensure funding is limited to impairments that meet eligibility requirements. On its face, that sounds reasonable.

In practice, it is anything but.

Disability rarely operates in a straight line. It operates in chains. An intellectual disability creates communication difficulties. Communication difficulties create social isolation. Social isolation creates anxiety and depression. Anxiety and depression create sleep disorders. Sleep disorders worsen the intellectual disability. Every link in that chain is real, documented, and currently fundable because all of it arises from the impairment.

Under the new wording, the question becomes whether the support arises directly from the impairment. The anxiety does not arise directly from the intellectual disability. It arises from the isolation that arises from the communication difficulties that arise from the intellectual disability. That is two or three steps removed. Depending on how a planner, or an algorithm, interprets the word directly.

For autistic people this is particularly dangerous. Anxiety in autistic people arises from the interaction between autism and a world that was not designed for them. Under a strict reading of directly, the anxiety supports are not directly arising from autism. Which is exactly the kind of argument a cost-cutting planner, or a cost-cutting algorithm, might make.

The government needs to answer these questions publicly before this Bill passes. Not after.

What does directly mean? Who decides? Is a secondary mental health condition caused by living with a primary disability direct enough? Is a sleep disorder caused by autism direct enough? Will there be a definition? Will there be guidelines? Will the algorithm be programmed with a threshold?

Or will directly simply mean whatever someone (or the algorithm) decides it means on a given day, producing exactly the same planning lottery the current system already delivers, but with a new legislative justification for denial?

Schedule 1, Part 4: The Minister Can Cut Your Funding. By Decree. Forever.

What the old law said: Funding decisions were made through an individualised planning process based on your specific needs and circumstances.

What the new Bill says: The Minister can, by legislative instrument, reduce the funding for an entire category of supports by a set percentage across every plan simultaneously. No individual assessment. No consideration of specific participant needs. The Minister writes a number. Community participation drops by 50 per cent across the board.

And these determinations are exempt from sunsetting provisions. They do not expire. They do not need to be reviewed. They do not need to come back to Parliament. Once made, they stay until the Minister chooses to change them.

The Bill explicitly states this is valid even if the result is that a participant's plan no longer covers the full cost of their reasonable and necessary supports.

That sentence is in the legislation. In black and white.

Butler's justification was that social, community and civic participation spending has gone from $4 billion to $12 billion in five years, and would reach $20 billion by the end of the decade if unchecked. He described this as a scheme growing too fast.

Here is a different way to read those numbers. The supports that allow disabled people to leave their homes, connect with others, and simply exist in the world alongside everyone else have tripled in five years. That is not a sign the scheme is out of control. That is a sign that for decades before the NDIS existed, those supports were being denied, and people were finally getting what they needed.

The entire foundation of the NDIS Act is that supports are reasonable and necessary for the individual. Not for a category of people. Not for a budget line. For that specific person, based on their specific needs. Does this provision bend that principle or legislatively override it entirely? The Bill's own language suggests the latter.

And this power is held by whoever happens to be the Minister at the time. Unchecked. Unsunsetted. Unilateral. Forever, unless they choose to change it.

Is unchecked, unsunsetted, unilateral ministerial power over the funding of 760,000 disabled Australians consistent with the individualised planning principles the Act was built on? That is a question the government has not answered.

Schedule 1, Part 5: Your Plan Renews Itself. Nobody Checks.

What the old law said: Plans were reviewed before renewal to ensure they still met your needs.

What the new Bill says: When your plan reaches its end date, it automatically renews as an identical copy. No reassessment. No review. Unspent funds disappear. One-off funding disappears. The same plan, for another year.

Butler described the current system of rolling over unspent funds as inflating plan values beyond what was originally considered reasonable and necessary. But unspent funds in a disability plan are not excess. They are often contingency. They are the buffer that allows a participant to respond to unexpected health events, equipment failures, or increased needs without waiting months for a formal reassessment. Removing them removes the safety net.

And here is where it gets particularly alarming. The ministerial funding cut power from Part 4 can reduce what you are able to spend within a support category by any percentage the Minister chooses. No individual assessment preceded that decision. No consideration of your specific needs. No parliamentary vote. It applies to every participant in that category simultaneously. And your plan auto-renews with that reduction in place indefinitely, unless the Minister chooses to change it.

Is this what it looks like when a government tries to run a scheme without employees? Remove the human review. Let the plan roll over. Let the algorithm handle the exceptions. Let the Minister adjust the numbers. Nobody needs to be in the room.

The NDIS was built on the principle of a human being sitting with another human being and working out what that person needs to live a good life. Does this Bill systematically remove every human touchpoint from that process while keeping the legislative language of individualised support intact? The words stay. The humans go.

Schedule 1, Part 6: What Counts as Reasonable and Necessary.

This is where the Bill rewrites the heart of the scheme. Multiple changes happening simultaneously.

Financial sustainability is now a legal test for your support.

The Bill amends Section 3(1)(d) to say the NDIS will provide supports "so far as is consistent with the financial sustainability of the scheme."

Those words have never been in this Act before. The budget is now part of the legal test for whether your support is reasonable and necessary. If the scheme cannot afford it, it does not matter that you need it.

There is a new hierarchy of evidence.

Peer reviewed published research comes first. Individual clinical evidence second. Outcomes from previous plans third. If there is limited peer reviewed research on a therapy that works for your specific presentation, the CEO can refuse it regardless of what your clinician says. Many therapies for rare conditions, complex presentations, or newer approaches have limited peer reviewed literature. Is this a mechanism that could defund anything a bureaucrat or an algorithm cannot find in a journal, even when your treating team knows it works?

Parental responsibility is now codified in law. The question is what that means in practice.

The Bill defines what parents are legally expected to provide. Supervision. Personal care. Transport. Emotional support. Behavioural support. Assistance with activities of daily living. The CEO must not approve a support if its primary purpose is to reduce parental burden below what is reasonably expected.

And for all participants, not just children, the CEO must consider the desirability of maintaining and strengthening informal supports rather than replacing them with funded ones.

The NDIS was not created because families were not doing enough. It was created because they were doing too much. Because the informal support system was collapsing under the weight of needs it was never designed to carry. Because parents were leaving the workforce, destroying their health, ending their marriages, and burning out completely trying to fill gaps the state refused to fund.

The entire economic argument for the NDIS, the one the Productivity Commission made, the one the government used to justify creating the scheme, was that investing in formal supports reduces the catastrophic cost of informal carer breakdown. It keeps carers in the workforce. It keeps families intact. It prevents the downstream crisis costs that always follow when informal support networks finally give way.

Does this Bill legislatively reverse that founding rationale? The Productivity Commission's own modelling would suggest so.

And here is the downstream cost the government is not accounting for. When parental responsibility becomes the legal default and formal supports are cut, parents leave the workforce. Centrelink picks up the carer payment. Centrelink picks up the disability support pension. Mental health services pick up the carer who breaks down. Hospital emergency departments pick up the participant in crisis.

None of that appears in the NDIS budget line. All of it costs more than the support that was cut.

The government is projecting savings of $37.8 billion over four years from this Bill. That is savings from the NDIS budget only. There is no whole of government accounting. No calculation of what Centrelink, Medicare, state mental health services, hospitals, and housing services will spend picking up what the NDIS drops.

The Productivity Commission built the case for the NDIS on whole of government cost modelling. Invest here, save there. Is this government doing the opposite? Cutting here, while the costs flow somewhere else? And calling that a saving?

Schedule 1, Part 7: Miss a Phone Call. Lose Everything.

What the old law said: There was no provision to revoke a participant's status simply because they were not contactable.

What the new Bill says: The CEO can suspend your plan if you are not contactable after reasonable attempts. If you remain suspended for 90 days, your participant status can be revoked entirely. No hearing. No formal decision against you. No tribunal. Gone.

Reasonable attempts is not defined in the Bill. The NDIA decides what it means. There is no minimum number of attempts specified. No requirement to try different communication channels. No requirement to contact known providers or support workers who might be able to reach the participant.

Think about who this will hit first and hardest.

Someone with schizophrenia in an acute episode may be hospitalised, unable to manage their communications, with no one managing their affairs. Plan suspended. Ninety days later, status revoked. They come out of hospital with no plan, no funding, no supports to help them stabilise. Which increases the likelihood of another acute episode.

A parent who works during business hours, because they still have a job, because their child's plan currently covers enough support that they can, misses the NDIA's call. Reasonable attempts exhausted. Plan suspended. Ninety days later, revoked. The very support that allowed that parent to remain in the workforce is gone. Because nobody answered the phone at 2pm on a Tuesday.

Although perhaps the government has thought of this. They have, after all, just amended the parental responsibility provisions in Part 6 in a way that makes it significantly harder for parents to remain in the workforce. So, they will be home. Waiting by the phone. Because they have no choice.

Dark humour aside, the people this provision will catch are exactly the people least equipped to navigate its consequences.

Schedule 1, Part 8: You Must Try Every Treatment First.

What the old law said: If your impairment was likely to be permanent, you were eligible for the NDIS.

What the new Bill says: Your impairment is not considered permanent unless you have tried every appropriate treatment available in Australia. Treatment may be considered appropriate regardless of whether your individual circumstances restrict you from accessing it. The Bill explicitly states that individual circumstances include financial circumstances and geographical location.

So if a treatment exists in Australia, if it is evidence-based, if it can reliably help your condition, it is appropriate treatment. The fact that you cannot afford it does not matter. The fact that the nearest clinic is six hours away does not matter. The fact that the public waitlist is two years long does not matter.

Butler said in his speech that "the NDIS was never intended to replace health, rehabilitation and treatment services." That is true. But it was explicitly designed to step in where those services failed. Butler acknowledged in April that those services have failed. Not that they don't exist, but that they are so underfunded, so overstretched, and so out of reach for so many families that they might as well not exist. Is his solution to make access to the NDIS conditional on first accessing services that he has already admitted are not working?

This provision does not reduce demand on those services. It redirects it. From a scheme the government funds to services the government also funds but refuses to adequately resource.

Public paediatric clinics already running six to twelve month waitlists are about to receive every child who needs to prove they tried treatment before the NDIS will consider them.

And for rural and remote Australians, this provision creates a geographic lottery for NDIS access. If you live near services, you can try treatments and prove permanence. If you live where services do not exist, you cannot try treatments, but that is legally irrelevant, and you may not qualify.

The NDIS was supposed to reduce inequality of access for people with disability. Does this provision reduce inequality of access, or entrench it?

Schedule 1, Part 9: If Your Disability Came From an Accident, You May Not Qualify.

What the old law said: NDIS eligibility was based on the nature and impact of your disability.

What the new Bill says: If your impairment was caused by a motor vehicle accident or a work related injury, and a compensation scheme exists for it, that impairment is excluded from your NDIS eligibility assessment.

The intent is arguably reasonable in the short term. People with access to compensation should not be double dipping.

But compensation is not always lifelong. Compensation covers loss of wages, medical expenses, and economic loss. It has caps. It has time limits. It runs out. And when it runs out, the person is left with a permanent disability, no compensation, and now no NDIS eligibility because their impairment is excluded.

A person who loses both legs in a workplace accident receives workers compensation. That compensation covers immediate medical costs, rehabilitation, and lost wages. It is not designed to fund a support worker for the rest of their life. But under this Bill, their impairment is excluded. And when the compensation runs out, the person is left with a permanent disability and no NDIS eligibility because their impairment was excluded from the start.

Schedule 1, Part 9 (continued): The Blanket Power Nobody Is Talking About.

But buried within Part 9 is a third category that goes far beyond compensation schemes and has no limits whatsoever.

The Minister can declare any support an alternative support for any impairment by legislative instrument. Not just for motor vehicle accidents. Not just for workplace injuries.

Any impairment. Any support. By ministerial decree. No parliamentary vote required.

If the Minister declares that Thriving Kids is an alternative support for developmental delay, children with developmental delay have an excluded impairment. No NDIS. Thriving Kids instead.

If the Minister declares that a Medicare rebated psychology session is an alternative support for anxiety arising from autism, that impairment is excluded. Ten rebated sessions a year to address a lifelong condition. By ministerial decree.

If the Minister decides any existing government service is an alternative support for any disability, that disability is excluded from the NDIS. No debate. No vote. No sunset. Just a legislative instrument and a press release.

Should that concern everyone? I think it should.

Schedule 2: The Fraud Measures. The Story They Want You to Focus On.

Butler's second reading speech spent considerable time on fraud. He cited eight design failures. He described criminal gangs and cash kickbacks. He described plan managers with integrity risk flags.

He is right about all of it. The fraud problem is real. The enforcement gap is real. And the fact that only 0.22 per cent of over 7,000 fraud reports led to prosecutions is a genuine disgrace.

For what it is worth, most of Schedule 2 is the right call. Record retention, claim time limits, conflict of interest rules for plan managers, accountability measures that apply to providers and participants alike. Both can defraud the system. Both should be accountable. These measures are overdue. They should have been done years ago using the powers the regulator already had but chose not to use.

Schedule 2 is not the problem.

But the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission already had the power to investigate registered and unregistered providers. Their own Compliance and Enforcement Policy stated this clearly. Did they choose not to use it? The prosecution rate suggests so. The question the government has not answered is why.

So the question is not whether stronger fraud powers are needed. The question is whether giving more powers to an agency that demonstrably failed to use the powers it already had will produce different results. Or whether Schedule 2 is the story the government wants you to focus on while Schedule 1 does the actual work of reducing the scheme.

If the fraud measures were the real mechanism for savings, Schedule 1 would not exist. You would fix the enforcement, let the new powers run, measure the result, and then reassess whether participant restrictions were still necessary.

Instead, the government has done both simultaneously. Which raises the question. If Schedule 2 is the real mechanism for savings, why does Schedule 1 exist at all? You would fix the enforcement, measure the result, and then reassess. Instead both arrived simultaneously. Draw your own conclusions about which one is actually expected to deliver the $37.8 billion.

Schedule 3: A Minister With Unlimited Pricing Power. And an Algorithm Making Decisions About Your Life.

Pricing.

Pricing decisions now sit with the Minister. By legislative instrument. With no sunsetting. Meaning a price set today can remain in force indefinitely without Parliament ever seeing it again.

Butler described this as establishing "a clearer and more transparent mechanism to set and enforce prices." Clearer, perhaps. More transparent, no. A determination that does not sunset, made by a minister, published on a website, that Parliament cannot disallow. Is that transparency? Or is it the removal of parliamentary oversight dressed up as administrative efficiency?

Combined with the Part 4 power to cut funding categories by percentage, this gives one person, whoever holds the ministerial office, unchecked power over what the NDIS pays for and how much it pays. Forever. Without Parliament. Without review. Without consultation.

Automation.

Butler said: "When used properly, technology can help deliver decisions more quickly, more consistently and more fairly. It can also free up the skills and judgements of our public servants to focus on the interactions where human involvement matters most."

Then: "This government will not repeat those mistakes."

Then he introduced a Bill that gives a computer program the legal power to form a state of mind about a disabled person's support needs.

Has the government gone from planners who do not read reports or understand the legislation they are paid to uphold, to an algorithm nobody can read at all? And called it an improvement?"

Nobody has answered the questions that matter. What data goes in? Who enters it? What training do they receive? How does the algorithm reach its conclusions? What happens when the data is wrong? What happens when the participant's circumstances do not fit the categories the algorithm was built around? How do you appeal a decision made by a process you cannot see or understand?

None of that is in the Bill. All of it is left to instruments that Parliament cannot disallow.

The Royal Commission into Robodebt handed down its findings in 2023. The government that commissioned that Royal Commission, that received those findings, that stood up in Parliament and promised it had learned its lesson, introduced this Bill three years later.

"This government will not repeat those mistakes."

Minister Butler said that. Out loud. In Parliament. On 14 May 2026. While failing to explain HOW this algorithm will work.

Schedule 4: A Blank Cheque Called Reform.

The new planning framework is barely outlined in Schedule 4. The broad structure exists. The detail does not.

What does a needs assessment look like? How is functional capacity measured in practice? What methodology produces a funding amount? How do you challenge the result?

None of that is in the Bill. All of it will be determined after the Bill passes. By the Minister. Through instruments.

This is the legislative equivalent of being asked to vote yes before anyone knows what yes means.

The disability community is being asked to accept a framework that will fundamentally reshape how 760,000 people access support, without knowing what the assessment looks like, without knowing how the funding methodology works, and without any guaranteed mechanism to reject those rules once they arrive.

That is not consultation. That is ratification of a blank cheque after the fact.

This Is Not Reform. These Are the Same Doors. Slamming Shut Again.

Let me say plainly what this Bill actually is.

It is not reform. Reform fixes the problems. The planning is broken. This Bill does not fix planners, it replaces them with an algorithm. The fraud went unprosecuted. This Bill gives more powers to the same agency that chose not to use the powers it already had. The LAC service is a ghost. This Bill auto-renews plans with no review and calls it efficiency. The pricing is dysfunctional. This Bill hands unchecked pricing power to a minister with no disability background and no sunset clause.

Butler himself acknowledged in Parliament that the NDIS has all eight design failures that make government programs susceptible to fraud, and none of the seven fundamental building blocks for high-integrity programs. The answer to that is not to restrict who can access the program. The answer is to fix the program.

The NDIS was created because doors kept slamming in people's faces. Every door. Every time. Mainstream services said no. Schools said no. Hospitals discharged and walked away. Families were told to manage until they couldn't.

The NDIS opened a door. Not perfectly. Not without problems. But it opened one.

This Bill is slamming it shut again. And the people behind it when it closes are the people it was built to protect.

A Note to Every Australian Taxpayer. Not Just Those Connected to Disability.

This Bill came about mostly because of public outrage. And some of that outrage was legitimate. There is fraud in the NDIS. There are providers doing the wrong thing. There are participants gaming the system. This post has not pretended otherwise.

But was the outrage curated? It was fed by years of media coverage that focused almost exclusively on the rorts and almost never on the systemic failures. The coverage that got clicks was the coffee and the fishing trips. Not the government departments billing $475 million from the scheme. Not the NDIA spending tens of millions fighting participants at tribunal and losing. Not the CEO admitting staff do not read the reports they mandate.

And the media coverage of provider fraud was not wrong. There are rogue providers. Registered and unregistered. That reporting was warranted.

But here is the question nobody asked while that outrage was building. What was actually investigated? What reports were actioned? What prosecutions resulted from the thousands of fraud reports lodged with the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission?

0.22 per cent. That is the answer. Out of over 7,000 fraud reports, 0.22 per cent led to prosecutions. Not because the power to investigate did not exist. The Commission's own Compliance and Enforcement Policy stated clearly it could investigate registered and unregistered providers. The power was there. It was not used.

The new narrative is that mandatory registration will fix it. Does it fix anything? Registered providers rort the NDIS at alarming rates. The organised criminal networks that defraud the scheme at scale are not stopped by registration requirements. They are stopped by enforcement. Enforcement that they have not pursued, using powers it already has, while the fraud builds up and the public outrage grows.

Did the NDIA take accountability for that failure? The evidence suggests not. Instead the outrage that built during years of inaction became the political justification for cutting participant access. Did the inaction become the participant's punishment?

The public was given half the story. The half that pointed at participants and providers. And on the basis of that half story, the government now has political permission to remove 160,000 current participants from a scheme the law promises them certainty under. It also dismembers the support that the remaining 600,000 will have access to.

But here is what every taxpayer needs to understand, whether they have any connection to disability or not.

This Bill does not save $37.8 billion. It moves $37.8 billion.

When parental responsibility becomes the legal default, parents leave the workforce. Centrelink pays carer payments. Centrelink pays disability support pensions. Mental health services absorb the carer who breaks down. Emergency departments absorb the participant in crisis. The justice system absorbs the participant who falls through every gap. Housing services absorb the family that finally collapses.

None of those costs appear in the NDIS budget line. All of them are paid by taxpayers. All of them cost more than the support that was cut.

The government is telling you it had no choice but to cut disability supports to save money. But is it cutting from one pocket while the costs flow into every other pocket you have?

That is not a saving. That is cost shifting with a press release.

What Needs to Happen Before This Bill Passes.

I have worked inside this system for a number of years. I have provided over $13,000 in unpaid support to keep a participant safe, a participant the scheme already failed, and I was told by a planner it was a business decision.

It was not a business decision. It was a safeguarding decision. Because the scheme failed him and I refused to walk away.

I am asking for answers. Public answers. On the record. Before this Bill passes.

Minister Butler. Minister McAllister. Every Senator and Member of Parliament who will vote on this Bill.

1. What does "arising directly from an impairment" mean in practice? Who decides? Will there be a definition, guidelines, or a programmed threshold before this commences?

2. If the functional capacity assessment correctly identifies the true extent of someone's disability, what guarantee is there that the rest of this Bill will fund it adequately?

3. The functional capacity assessment excludes informal supports and family. The reasonable and necessary assessment requires the CEO to consider what family and informal supports can provide. How are those two things consistent?

4. What happens to people with degenerative conditions under a reassessment framework that requires substantial decline before review?

5. What happens when circumstances change? A carer becomes unwell. A child leaves school. A participant loses their housing. How does a participant correct an inadequate plan without proving they have already substantially deteriorated?

6. How does a reassessment threshold that requires proof of substantial deterioration coexist with early intervention provisions that require action before deterioration occurs? Both are in this Act. Both cannot be true at the same time.

7. What constitutes reasonable attempts to contact a participant before their plan is suspended? How many attempts? Over what period? Through what channels? Is there any requirement to contact known providers or support workers?

8. How will the automated planning system work? What data goes in? Who enters it? What training do they receive? How does the algorithm reach its conclusions? What happens when the data is wrong? What happens when a participant's circumstances do not fit the categories the algorithm was built around? How does a participant appeal a decision made by a process they cannot see or understand?

9. How much has the NDIA spent in total at the Administrative Review Tribunal? How many cases has it won versus lost? If 98 per cent of cases settle or overturn before a hearing, what does that tell us about the quality of the original decisions?

10. What is the whole of government cost accounting behind the $37.8 billion in projected savings? What does Treasury expect Centrelink, Medicare, state mental health services, hospitals, housing services, and the justice system to spend picking up what the NDIS drops?

11. What does the new planning framework actually look like in practice? Not in principle. In practice. Before this Bill passes.

These are not trick questions. They are the questions every Australian who will be affected by this legislation, including taxpayers, deserves answered before it becomes law.

This Bill has not passed. There is still time to scrutinise it properly. Share this post. Contact your MP. Contact your Senator. Ask them if they have read the 113 pages. Ask them if they can answer these questions.

And if you have questions of your own, or a story of your own, make a submission to the Senate inquiry before 29 May. The details are at the top of this post.

The window is open. But it will not stay open for long.