Helen Haines (Indi, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. The NDIS is a vital program that people in Indi and across the nation value deeply. Before entering this place, I spent most of my career as a nurse, midwife and rural health researcher in a pre-NDIS healthcare system. From that perspective, I know how far we've come in improving care, support and opportunity for people with a disability.

I regularly hear from constituents in Indi about the independence, the dignified care and the opportunities that the NDIS has given them and their loved ones. Patricia from Benalla wrote to me recently about her adult son, Pete, who has cerebral palsy. Thanks to the NDIS, Pete has been able to access additional therapies that have significantly increased his function, including support from an occupational therapist who helped Pete learn how to feed himself. Patricia said, 'I don't know how we would have learnt this without NDIS support.' The NDIS, as we know right across the chamber, is literally a life-changing program. Stories like this show what is at stake and why we must protect the NDIS for the long term.

I think we can all acknowledge that, for the long-term viability of the NDIS, it does require structural reform. It's simply not sustainable for the scheme to continue to grow at its current rate. It's already supporting close to double the number of participants it was designed for. That's not to say people don't need and deserve support; they absolutely do. But what kind of support? The NDIS was never meant to be everything to everyone, but it's now so large that it's crowded out a lot of other services and programs. For too many people and their families, it doesn't matter if a NDIS plan is really the best option, because, frankly, it's the only option there is. I know of a 23-year-old man who's currently supported by Mansfield Autism Statewide Services. He receives a small amount of funding for help with things like job applications, grocery shopping and attending community events. A small amount of support is all that's needed to make sure this young man doesn't become isolated, underemployed and, indeed, hungry. At the moment, there is really nowhere else to get this kind of support outside of the NDIS, especially in regional towns.

Of course, there are concerns about fraud and rorting. We've all heard about services that go from $30 to $200 as soon as those four letters are mentioned. Dodgy providers are ripping off not just the taxpayer but also Australians with disabilities. Something has to change.

The question is whether the bill before us makes the right kinds of changes and strikes the right kind of balance, and I'm not entirely confident that it does. This bill proposes significant changes to the way the NDIS operates. Schedule 2 of the bill contains measures for fraud and integrity. These include improvements to the NDIS regulatory and information-gathering powers and the minimum record-keeping requirements in relation to payments and receipts. There'll be new civil penalties for things like providing false information to the NDIA. The timeframe to submit a claim will be reduced from two years to 90 days from the date of service.

Schedule 2 also expands mandatory registration requirements for providers delivering personal care. There are more than 275,000 active NDIS providers in Australia, and just six per cent of them are registered. It's staggering. Not only do NDIS providers receive public funding; they regularly interact with some of the most vulnerable people in our community, often in deeply personal settings. It's not unreasonable for there to be an accreditation process. Now, I understand some providers are concerned about the impact of these changes, particularly the financial burden that registration may place on small operators. The registration requirements won't come into effect until 1 July 2027, and I urge the government to engage with providers during this period to minimise these costs where possible.

For the most part, these are sensible, welcome changes that seek to improve quality and accountability under the scheme. Providers in Indi have told me that the streamlined payment system in particular could be game changing, making it easier to upload invoices and be paid promptly for services they deliver. But, as with so much of this bill, the devil may not be in this legislation but in how it is operationalised in reality, especially in thinner regional markets.

Schedule 1 makes radical changes to NDIS access and plans. As I've said, the NDIS is worth radical change if that's what's required, but I have concerns with many of these changes. The bill creates a new power for the minister to reduce funding for certain support types as a whole, not in response to individual circumstances but for every single participant. The government have said this power will only be used in relation to two categories: social and community participation, and certain capacity-building supports. But the power is not limited to those areas. There are no guardrails to prevent it being used in the future to reduce funding for essential personal care, allied health services or equipment. People with disability deserve certainty that funding approved for daily living will not be reduced below what they need, and I intend to move an amendment that prevents this ministerial power from being used to reduce funding for support to complete activities of daily living.

The legislation tightens the meaning of permanence by reducing access where an impairment is otherwise considered treatable. The NDIS was established to support people with permanent and ongoing disability, and, in principle, that's what Australians expect it to do. But the practical effect of this change matters. As drafted, the bill creates an extra barrier for people in rural and regional Australia, because it requires them to have undertaken 'all appropriate treatment'. Aside from the question of who determines whether a treatment is appropriate and on what clinical basis—which we're told will be considered in the future by an expert group that doesn't yet exist—this completely fails to account for whether treatments are genuinely accessible and available. In fact, new subsection 25A(2) explicitly states that a treatment might still be appropriate for someone whose geographical or financial circumstances actually prevent them from accessing it. So, of course, I'll be moving an amendment to reverse this provision and provide clarity that supports may not be appropriate if there are none nearby or if they're completely unaffordable.

The bill clarifies that a person won't be eligible for the NDIS in relation to an impairment for which they have access to an alternative scheme. These include work cover and state and territory motor vehicle compensation schemes, and I've no objection to that. But the bill goes on to enable the minister to prescribe any other alternative. It's not clear what the government has in mind or whether something prescribed would be a genuine alternative to the NDIS. I'll be moving an amendment to require the minister to consider whether an alternative is reasonably available and accessible.

The bill introduces new considerations when assessing reasonable and necessary supports, largely to do with cost comparisons and value for money. However, in relation to whether a support is likely to be effective and beneficial for a participant, the bill establishes a hierarchy of evidence that makes it a statutory requirement to give greater weight to general evidence than to evidence of the participant's own outcomes using that support in the past. In fact, it goes on to enable certain kinds of evidence to be ignored completely. I'll move an amendment to remove these provisions. Where evidence is available, it should be considered and weighed up on its merits.

The bill includes a definition of 'functional capacity', a new concept that will be central to the operation of new eligibility requirements. However, the definition is just a shell. It's subject to rules that may set out any matter whatsoever. There's almost no point in discussing it, because it will mean whatever the government says it means in the rules.

Schedule 3 includes amendments in relation to scheme governance, pricing and automated decision-making. The bill would allow the minister to set the prices that providers charge for NDIS supports, and the bill explicitly provides for pricing to be differentiated based on location and remoteness. While the NDIA must provide pricing advice, there is no requirement for that advice to be made public. The minister may act reasonably on that advice, but without transparency it'll be difficult to build trust in the use of this power. I'll therefore move an amendment to require the NDIA's advice to be tabled in the parliament. I'll also support others' reasonable amendments that expand on what the minister must consider in making a pricing determination, including its impact on thin markets and regional areas.

Schedule 3 also deals with automated decision-making. I'm not opposed to harnessing technology to improve efficiency. There are hundreds of thousands of NDIS claims every single day, and we should be looking for every opportunity to streamline, operationalise and optimise how they're processed. But I'm worried about automated decision-making—not data-matching or calculations but substituting a computer program for a human being making a judgement, exercising a discretion or forming a state of mind. These are described in the bill as 'evaluative actions' and they are categorically allowed to be automated.

To its credit, the bill establishes very clear requirements for the development of standard operating procedures, setting out exactly how this will occur. Decisions can only be automated where the CEO is satisfied the circumstances are sufficiently objective that their existence or non-existence can be ascertained by a computer program. But we don't have an opportunity to see these operating procedures. It's not clear how the CEO might satisfy themselves as to the objectivity of a decision or what safeguards will be in place if the computer gets it wrong. At first, automated decision-making will apply to a limited set of provisions in the act, but that list can be expanded at any time in the legislative instrument.

A striking feature of this bill is how much it doesn't say. There is so much crucial detail that is left to be addressed in rules determined by the minister or considered by the technical advisory group that the government has said it will establish but about which little else is known. The NDIS is incredibly complex, and I accept there is a lot of detail that may not be appropriate to capture in primary legislation. But we are being asked to vote on this bill with only the barest of road maps for how all the blanks will be filled in, and by whom and when.

What's most apparent to me in reading this bill is that it does not address the reality of life with disability in an electorate like mine. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the new definition of 'appropriate supports', which explicitly says that it does not matter if you can't access a support because of where you live or how much money you earn. I'll move an amendment to rectify that particular subsection, but its inclusion speaks volumes about how little thought has been given to regional Australia.

A sustainable NDIS should not be built on the inaccessibility of services. Real sustainability means investing in workforce and service delivery so that participants can access the supports they need. The reality on the ground is already difficult. In Indi, around 5,600 people are on the NDIS. Plan utilisation across most of Indi is below the state average. In Strathbogie, package utilisation is 63 per cent. In Murrindindi, it's 65 per cent. And that's not because demand is low; it's because the workforce is not there to meet people's needs.

I'm not convinced the bill will address these problems for my constituents. While it's clear that the NDIS is too important to fail, it's also so important to get these reforms right. The NDIS has transformed lives in Indi and across the country, and it deserves and needs reforms that strengthen its foundations—and I'd like to the parliament to work collaboratively to achieve that. I encourage the government to consider my amendments to ensure the scheme remains responsive to the needs and dignity of people with disability. I expect there will be a number of reasonable, constructive amendments to the bill, and I very much hope the government will give them serious thought.

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