Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The NDIS, National Disability Insurance Scheme, is one of Australia's most significant social reforms. While the significance of the NDIS means that we have to protect its ongoing financial sustainability, it's important that we in this place always remember that reforms must not come at the expense of participants rights, fairness, dignity or access and that all changes to the NDIS have to strengthen the scheme for the long term whilst keeping those who access it and whose lives depend upon it firmly at the centre of any changes to its design.

This bill, the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Integrity and Safeguarding) Bill 2026, contains measures that respond to real and serious problems which confront the NDIS. Strengthening the powers of the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission to detect abuse, to prevent exploitation and to enforce accountability is important, and they're overdue measures. This bill also strengthens the framework to ensure fit-for-purpose penalties for offences, which should deter providers from doing the wrong thing and which should also ensure that unsuitable people can be excluded from providing services under the auspices of the NDIS.

NDIS participants have to be kept safe by our system, and providers who do the wrong thing must face consequences. This bill will help install some of those guardrails, but it's concerning that this bill also gives the chief executive officer of the NDIA the ability to vary a participant's plan, including increasing or decreasing the total funding amount available under both the old and new framework plans. This power can be exercised unless the act or the NDIS rules expressly provide otherwise, and it can be exercised without the need for a reassessment.

The explanatory memorandum for this bill states that this amendment codifies, for the absence of doubt, an existing practice within the agency. It is described as a clarification rather than a change in the substance of how the NDIA operates. The explanatory memorandum further claims that these changes do not 'impact on or change the circumstances in which the CEO can vary a participant's plan', but I have to note that for participants, for advocates and for Australians in the broader disability community this change feels consequential. Their very justifiable concern is not that plans can occasionally be adjusted since there are clearly circumstances in which increases to total funding amounts are essential.

The concern is that this amendment codifies the power to single-handedly reduce supports without a fresh assessment of participants and without the sorts of procedural safeguards that participants should reasonably be able to expect when their support funding is at stake. Advocates who participated in the Senate inquiry into this bill also expressed the reasonable concern that this provision could be used in ways which are actively harmful or could have unintended consequences, in particular, if and when participants are not involved or consulted on variations to their plan.

We have to remember that, for people whose independence and wellbeing rely on stability of support, a NDIS plan is not an abstract budget. It can be the difference between being able to live at home and not being able to live at home. It can be the difference between experiencing consistency and security of care and experiencing a personal crisis. Any power that allows support to vulnerable individuals to be altered in what appears to be a non-transparent fashion has to be accompanied by clear limits. I would argue that it has to actually be rendered transparent, and I would argue that it has to include an opportunity for participants to request review and appeal of those changes. Reforms that rely on discretion rather than explicit safeguards risk shifting the balance of power in any situation away from participants and towards administrative control. This is fundamentally inconsistent with the intent of the NDIS as a participant centred insurance scheme.

These concerns come into sharper focus when they're placed alongside the new I-CAN assessment tool. In the coming months, NDIS participants will begin to be assessed using a structured interview process conducted by NDIA appointed assessors using the instrument for the classification and assessment of support. The objectives of this reform are understandable. The current system places an unfair burden on participants to gather medical evidence for assessment that's time consuming and can be costly. It can really slow the process down. Both the independent review into the National Disability Insurance Scheme and my own personal professional experience of having worked within it for many years as a paediatric neurologist testify to the fact that the existing system evolves inefficient, duplicative and inconsistent evidence gathering which can, on some occasions, very much undermine the participant experience and can create an unusual and unreasonable workload for healthcare professionals who are trying to assist individuals in securing appropriate supports under the NDIS.

But, as University of New South Wales researchers have pointed out, the move to I-CAN raises some pretty important questions. For example, how will assessment results translate into budget decisions for participants? What additional evidence will be considered when medical reports are no longer required to inform the planning process? What will inform the planning process? How will consistent, transparent and fair decisions be applied by differing assessors over time? We've seen in the past that inconsistency has been a consistent bugbear for many individuals operating within the NDIS and that individuals with very similar support needs have on innumerable occasions received very different support packages.

The I-CAN should measure support needs across 12 areas of daily life, including mobility, self-care, communication, relationships and physical and mental health. Each of those areas is scored on two scales—how often support is needed and how intensive the level of support that is required is. However, reducing individual participants with sometimes extremely complex care needs, which can sometimes be multifactorial, to a single binomial score can present some significant complexities. The reality is that a score does not reflect a lived experience and that an assessment tool is only as fair as the system that we put in place to interpret it. If we put garbage in, we will get garbage out. We can't necessarily equitably and effectively reduce people with very complex medical and physical needs to binomial scores. We're already seeing this play out with the integrated assessment tool in the aged-care system. I know that I and many of my colleagues in this place are hearing from affected individuals within the aged-care system every day that that tool is not working for them. I think that we have reasonable grounds for concern that this similar tool may not work well within the disability space. I hope to be wrong on that, but I have some concerns regarding it.

When we combine this new tool with new statutory powers to reduce support without a new assessment, there has to be a risk, whether that is intentional or not, of a new system in which reassessment outcomes and administrative discretion interact in a way that could well disadvantage NDIS participants. And so I support the calls of People with Disability Australia for stronger protections, specifically their recommendations for plain language reasons for decision-making, that Administrative Review Tribunal review rights be required where plan variations reduce the total funding that recipients are receiving and that all recipients should be able to access independent advocacy when they need to contest such decisions. It's only fair. It's only reasonable. I urge the minister and the National Disability Insurance Agency to approach the implementation of these changes with the sort of care that, wherever practicable, will err on the side of participant protection.

NDIS reform which focuses support on functional needs, which builds strong foundational supports and which addresses waste and exploitation to preserve resources for those who rely on them is critically important. All of us in this place recognise that. As a former participant within the system and now someone who has from this place sought to improve it, I have been supportive of changes in that respect and of this nature in the past, but I've always been clear in my previous professional life and in this one that those reforms can't erode the rights of participants.

The independent NDIS review and the disability royal commission have both found and emphasised that trust in the scheme depends on its transparency, its fairness and its accountability. That means participants need and should and deserve to know when decisions can be changed, on what basis and how they can challenge such decisions. The NDIS only exists because Australia has made a collective commitment, a significant collective commitment, that people who are living with a disability will not be left to navigate fragmented or inadequate systems alone. That commitment will not end, should not end and cannot end simply because it's become too complicated or too costly to deliver on it.

The bill before the house contains measures which do strengthen the NDIS, but it also contains others that place significant weight, perhaps too much weight, on administrative discretion without sufficiently explicit safeguards. As these changes are implemented, the government has to continue to engage closely with all parts of the sector to ensure that these reforms do not affect participant dignity, fairness or access. Above all else, the people who access the NDIS have to remain at the centre of it. While we no doubt need stronger action against bad providers, that always has to come with stronger safeguards for participants.

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