Submission to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee
National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
This submission is provided by the Australian Psychosocial Disability Collective (APDC) in response to the Bill introduced on 14 May 2026 and referred to the Committee for report by 16 June 2026. The submission highlights serious impacts of the legislation on people with psychosocial disability.
APDC is a grassroots lived-experience advocacy collective committed to protecting the rights of people with psychosocial disability. We share the widespread concern across the disability sector that this Bill narrows the NDIS in ways inconsistent with its original rights-based foundation as aligned with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
We urge that the bill not be rammed through the parliament by the winter break, but that a respectful process should take place to allow for genuine co-design with the disability community.
At its core, the Bill represents a structural shift: from an entitlement grounded in disability rights toward a constrained, actuarial model prioritising cost control, eligibility restriction, and administrative discretion. The legislation would erode the principle of “reasonable and necessary supports” and would limit participant “choice and control,” which were hallmarks of the original design of the scheme.
The Government frames it as clarifying eligibility, supports, fraud controls and governance. We would argue that, in practice, the Bill creates multiple legal pathways for exclusion, funding reduction and administrative removal, especially for psychosocial disability.
Alongside earlier legislative amendments and rule changes, the Bill carries serious risks of harm to people.
Heavy cuts to plans and removals from the NDIS for people with psychosocial disability would have profound human consequences. They would increase crisis, hospitalisation, homelessness, and suicide risk. They would shift costs to emergency systems and families. Most importantly, they would harm people whose lives are already impacted by trauma, poverty, stigma, and systemic barriers.
With psychosocial disability there are particular and urgent concerns.
Psychosocial disability arises from the interaction between mental health challenges and social, economic, cultural, and environmental barriers. It is long-term, complex, and associated with co-occurring physical health conditions, higher mortality, and elevated suicide risk.
The Bill’s combined emphasis on functional capacity, direct impairment, treatment, permanence, alternative supports, funding caps and suspension creates a cumulative pathway by which people with psychosocial disability may lose access, lose supports, or be diverted into underfunded systems that cannot provide equivalent individualised assistance.
The legislation should not treat supposed “recovery” as a reason to exit people from the Scheme. Recovery in the consumer movement means self-determination, hope, safety and social inclusion. It does not mean that psychosocial disability is temporary, simple, clinically correctable, or suitable for withdrawal of support.
While the term “recovery,” often used in research and debates regarding psychosocial disability, does not explicitly appear in the Bill, its underlying logic is woven throughout the legislative framework in ways that strongly reflect a recovery-type model aligned with clinical improvement, treatment compliance, and potential exit from the Scheme.
This is evident in provisions that tighten the definition of permanence through requirements to exhaust “appropriate treatment,” redefine functional capacity by stripping away environmental and personal context, prioritise value-for-money and evidence hierarchies in support decisions, and introduce alternative support pathways that enable diversion to mainstream or state systems. Together with restrictions on reassessment, automatic plan renewals, stronger links between impairment and supports, and expanded powers for plan suspension or revocation, these measures construct an implicit trajectory in which participants are expected to stabilise, improve, and ultimately require less support. In this way, the legislation embeds recovery by another name—not as a consumer-led, non-linear process of living well with ongoing support, but as an administrative and clinical expectation of reduced need, compliance with treatment, and eventual transition out of the NDIS.
Across multiple provisions, the legislation:
● Narrows eligibility (functional capacity, permanence, alternative supports)
● Constrains supports (caps, value-for-money, evidence hierarchy)
● Reduces participant control (automatic renewals, limited reassessments)
● Expands administrative power (automation, suspension, revocation)
● Shifts risk onto participants (proof burdens, compliance, treatment expectations)
For psychosocial disability specifically, the cumulative effect is profound: The scheme becomes significantly harder to enter, harder to stay in, and less responsive once inside.
A number of provisions in the Bill are contributing to a range of unfair barriers:
● Functional capacity is being narrowed dangerously. Psychosocial disability cannot be assessed properly if personal and environmental context is stripped away. Trauma, housing insecurity, poverty, isolation and complex mental states are not side issues; they are often part of the disability impact.
● Permanence is being tightened in a way that harms psychosocial participants.
The Bill’s “appropriate treatment” needing to have been exhausted provision risks creating a treatment-compliance test. APDC argues that people must not be excluded because treatment theoretically exists, particularly where treatment is inaccessible, harmful, ineffective, unaffordable, culturally unsafe, or not chosen for valid lived-experience reasons.
● The strengthened link between impairment and supports narrows the scope of assistance. Requiring supports to arise directly from impairment excludes social, relational and community-based supports.
● “Alternative supports” are a major exit ramp.
APDC warns that psychosocial participants may be redirected to state mental health, foundational supports or community systems that are not equivalent to individualised NDIS support.
● Plan renewal and reassessment changes reduce participant voice.
Automatic renewals and tighter reassessment tests may lock people into inadequate plans while making it harder to respond to deterioration, relapse, crisis, homelessness, or other contingencies.
● Ministerial powers to cap and reduce funding weaken the integrity of participant plans. The ability to impose funding limits and reduce support levels across categories of supports introduces systemic rationing. Minister Butler has indicated there will be a 50 per cent cut to funding of community access supports across the board. This will have serious impacts on participants because they are critical for preventing social isolation and increased disability challenges.
● Automated decision-making raises concerns about fairness and transparency. The use of automated systems for evaluative decisions risks errors, bias and reduced procedural safeguards.
● Avenues of appeal on decisions are also to be restricted.
● Plan suspension and revocation provisions create risks of administrative exclusion. The use of “not contactable” criteria fails to account for crisis, hospitalisation, homelessness and trauma-related disengagement.
Recommendations for legislative amendment
APDC recommends that the Bill be amended to:
● Restore contextual assessment of disability, includingenvironmentalandsocialfactors.
● Remove treatment-based eligibility barriers,ensuringparticipationisnotcontingentoncompliance.
● Protect access to psychosocial supports, including social and community-based assistance and capacity building activities and therapies.
● Limit diversion to alternative supports unless equivalence is demonstrably guaranteed.
● Strengthen participant voice and review rights, particularly in plan renewal and reassessment processes.
● Constrain administrative and automated decision-making powers, ensuring procedural fairness.
● Protect participants from suspension or revocation linked to crisis- disengagement.
● Provide ongoing monitoring and 6 monthly public reporting on the deaths of NDIS participants and others forced into alternative programs
Conclusion
Without significant amendment, the Bill risks fundamentally altering the nature of the NDIS.
For people with psychosocial disability, it introduces a system that assumes improvement, prioritises compliance, and enables exit—rather than recognising ongoing need, complexity, and the right to support.This represents a rollback of hard-won rights and a departure from the Scheme’s foundational promise.
People with Psychosocial Disability must have their human right to Choice and Control over their lives and supports respected, anything less eviscerates their personal agency and amounts to policy segregation.
The APDC strongly recommends that the NDIS Scheme Amendment Bill is not passed by the Senate, in its current form. It requires further consultation, scrutiny, and amendment to ensure that people with psychosocial disability are not harmed by poorly designed policy changes that will have profound and lasting consequences for their lives.
The Australian Psychosocial Disability Collective May 29, 2026