News

1 July 2026

I move these amendments to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 in the hope of putting forward some targeted, practical amendments that will complement the many other amendments that have been moved by my fellow crossbench members of parliament. The amendments I moved today seek to ensure that sustainability is not achieved by removing basic fairness, basic review rights or the individualised nature of the scheme. Procedural fairness should be a basic which is underwritten in this legislation. I simply fail to understand why the government and the minister are not agreeing to these practical, sensible amendments. The NDIS was built on a simple promise that Australians with disability would have access to the reasonable and necessary supports they needed to live with dignity, participate in the community and exercise choice and control over their own lives. The NDIS must be sustainable. It must be well governed. It must be able to deal with waste, fraud and poor practice. Sustainability cannot become a slogan used to justify blunt instruments and poor legislation, especially when there are clear double standards of accountability being applied by this government. Rather than fix the system, the government is choosing to leave vulnerable Australians behind. Reform must not mean that participants lose supports without a proper pathway to challenge the decision. Reform must not mean that people are locked into plans that no longer meet their needs. Reform must not mean that people are pushed away from work, study or volunteering because the supports that make participation possible have been overlooked by a system that has become more and more automated. The first amendment deals with plan reassessment. As the bill stands, there are limited circumstances in which a participant can seek a reassessment of their plan. My amendment would make clear that reassessment should also be available where supports are no longer available, the plan is insufficient to meet the participant's reasonable and necessary support needs or new evidence about the participant's support needs has emerged. The second amendment goes to reasonable and necessary supports, including those required for paid employment, volunteering and study. The NDIS should not only be about keeping people alive or keeping people at home; it should be about giving people with disability the support they need to contribute, learn, work, volunteer and engage in their communities. We all benefit from that. For many participants, support to work or study is not optional; it is core to their wellbeing. When people are supported to work, study and participate, it is not a cost to be begrudged. It is an investment in independence, dignity and contribution. Again we all benefit from that. Participants should not have their funding significantly reduced through a mechanism that avoids proper accountability. That is all these amendments are seeking to do: ensure there is proper scrutiny where assessments have clear faults. If a decision has a practical effect of cutting a participant's support, then it should be treated as it is: a decision that affects that participant. Put simply, if your funding is significantly cut, you should have review rights. The third amendment deals with the review rights where funding is significantly reduced. It removes proposed subsection 34A(5), which risks allowing funding reductions to occur without a clear individual review pathway. It replaces that with a safeguard that, if a determination significantly reduces the funding available under a participant's plan, the participant is taken to be affected by a reviewable decision. This is just logic. If there is going to be a significant cut to a plan, it can be properly assessed as to what the real impact will be and whether everything has in fact been taken into account. These amendments don't prevent the government from reforming the NDIS. They don't prevent the government from managing costs and they don't prevent the government from improving sustainability, but they do ensure that participants can seek reassessment when their plan no longer meets their needs. They ensure that reasonable and necessary supports continue to recognise the importance of work, volunteering and study, and they ensure that, if a participant's funding is significantly reduced, the participant has a clear right to review. As we reform the scheme, we must be careful not to strip away the very principles that made it so important in the first place. So I urge the government—rather than the campaign that, at the moment, is demonising this scheme—to actually come to the table with rational, practical support for these amendments.