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

For hundreds of thousands of Australians, the NDIS has been transformative. It has not just provided services. It has also provided dignity, autonomy and participation in this country. I do support a sustainable NDIS, and the scheme has grown excessively. It will cost more than $56 billion next financial year, while covering only 760,000 Australians. It's clear that its unchecked growth has already begun to undermine the social licence of the scheme and that reform is necessary. The question before the House is whether this reform is necessary, and it's my position that it is not. It is not fair and it is not reasonable. The people who will bear the cost of this unfair reform are not the government; they're the vulnerable Australians who rely on this scheme to live.

It's my view that the cost trajectory of the NDIS has been driven, overall, by the structural design flaws that were visible from the outset and which have been ignored by successive governments. They are design flaws that are real and that were foreseeable. The scheme has always been uncapped. It's been left to a quasi-market in which the consumer has no incentive to economise. Without transparent information and sufficient competition, the self-correcting forces of market theory have never materialised. The budget-setting processes have compounded this. Plans have inflated year on year through a system that is subjective, that is inconsistent and that is poorly connected to individual need. The government is now resorting to the most blunt cost-containment instrument available. It is constraining eligibility and participant budgets to force the economies that the market failed to generate and that governments have failed to legislate.

This scheme should never have absorbed early childhood intervention. It was never designed to deliver that well. About 170,000 children received early intervention supports from the NDIS in 2025. Those supports are often delivered poorly, at costs that are higher than they need to be and in a way that has driven an avalanche of diagnoses without improving outcomes for children. The number of adults on the NDIS is only marginally higher than was expected when the scheme was planned. The number of children is more than double, and this is the central driver of the scheme's growth.

The solution is clear: the NDIS should be reserved, as was always intended, for children with permanent and significant disability. We should carve early childhood interventions out of the NDIS. We should deliver them as properly funded, separately commissioned programs. The government's Thriving Kids program will move in that direction, but it doesn't cover school aged children aged nine and above and not all states have even come on board with it. A safety net, which some states will decline to deliver, is a gap through which vulnerable children and families will fall.

The centrepiece of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 is a shift from diagnosis based eligibility to functional capacity assessment. The scheme was always meant to be limited to those with substantially reduced functional capacity, but, over time, eligibility shifted to a diagnosis gateway because defining permanence and capacity is hard in the absence of a specific diagnosis. A move to mandatory independent assessments of a person's functional capacity was trialled and failed horribly in 2021. The government is now proposing to revisit that horrible failure. It's asking parliament to legislate a fundamental change to eligibility in one of our most important social schemes and to authorise the removal of 160,000 people from the scheme before it has decided what the threshold for functional capacity will be, how it will be measured and who will be affected, on the basis of undetermined criteria and a non-existent assessment tool. It is an extraordinary thing to ask of this House, and it violates the recommendations of the independent review in 2023.

Among the most concerning provisions in this bill is the new definition of permanent disability, for eligibility purposes. Under this bill, an impairment will only be considered permanent if 'all appropriate treatment' options have been exhausted, no further treatment is likely to 'materially improve, reverse or alleviate' the impairment and the impairment is likely to be lifelong. So applicants have to have tried all treatments commonly available, regardless of whether or not they can afford them or whether they're accessible where they live. A person in rural or regional Australia might be unable to access the specialist treatment that is, theoretically, available in a capital city. A person with limited income might be unable to afford treatments that aren't funded by Medicare. Treatments available elsewhere in the world may not yet be affordable in Australia. There is a profound and unresolved circularity here. The bill proposes to deny access to support until treatment has been exhausted without acknowledging that the capacity to access treatment may itself depend on having NDIS support.

The permanence threshold also uses the word 'alleviate', which sets a very low bar. Even a modest improvement in function—a small gain in mobility or a slight reduction in pain—could be used to argue that an impairment is not permanent, which could render an individual ineligible for supports. Many conditions, including many forms of psychosocial disability, are permanent but fluctuating or episodic. Demanding permanence as a condition of support sets a threshold which might, at times, be difficult to meet.

The bill also limits support to those whose impairments independently meet the eligibility threshold. The combined or overlapping impact of concurrent conditions, or comorbidities, on daily functioning will no longer be considered. That's not how disability works. It's not how human beings work. It is, however, how a cost containment approach to disability works.

The bill grants the minister a significant new power to set percentage reductions in funding for entire categories of support, across all participants in those categories, without appropriate parliamentary oversight. The law requires that participant safety be considered, but it's hard to see how broad cuts across entire support categories could be implemented without serious risk to individuals. The original NDIS guaranteed funding for supports which are assessed as reasonable and necessary for that person, but this bill replaces individual rights with ministerial discretion across entire support categories. It is a profound shift in the philosophy of the scheme.

The bill also significantly tightens the conditions under which participants can request unscheduled plan assessments—reviews outside the normal cycle. Currently, one in five NDIS plans undergoes an unscheduled reassessment every year. The government has argued that this has driven plan inflation, noting that plans grow by an average of 20 per cent following those reassessments—which suggests that the plans were inadequate in the first instance. Restricting access to reassessment where a person's needs have actually changed, genuinely changed—where they've had a medical deterioration or a breakdown in their current supports—won't reduce their need. It will just reduce the opportunity to have that need recognised and supported. The consequences of that will, again, be borne by the participants.

While the eligibility assessment tool that the government is planning to develop does not yet exist, the support needs assessment tool, the I-CAN, is scheduled to roll out from April 2027. It's planned that the I-CAN will generate plan budgets automatically. Appeal rights are curtailed. The Administrative Review Tribunal will no longer be able to directly alter plan funds. It's worth noting that, currently, 73 per cent of the sorts of appeals that we see at the ART are successful. Assessment using the I-CAN involves a one- to three-hour structured interview, which will be conducted by public servants for whom an allied health background is not mandatory. Independent medical evidence no longer has to be considered. The model assumes that participants can reliably describe their own needs in a formal, structured setting—that they won't be masking, that they won't be exhausted, that they won't be overwhelmed. That assumption will fail for many people with a disability, especially those with autism and complex psychosocial needs. We have a cautionary precedent in the aged-care sector. In that system, we've already seen algorithms that override experienced clinicians, fail to capture genuine need and leave people without access to essential care. If algorithms are going to determine who receives support and who goes without, their apparatus must be completely open to public scrutiny. The government has not made credible commitments to that sort of transparency.

The minister has leaned heavily on narratives about rorting and fraud, in building a political case for these reforms, but that framing is incomplete. The Australian National Audit Office has confirmed that the quality and safeguards commission is only 'partly effective in exercising its regulatory functions' and that it does not have full visibility of the market that it purports to regulate. And it's been claimed in Crikey that the auditing system itself is corrupted by structural conflicts of interest. Fraud in Medicare amounts to $3 billion every year, which is as much as three per cent of Commonwealth health expenditure. But it is the NDIS which is being demonised as a national embarrassment, the blame for which falls disproportionately on participants, not the providers who are actually profiting from system failure. The government has chosen to tighten the screws on people with a disability while leaving the pathways to system abuse almost entirely intact.

One of the most immediately harmful elements of this package is the scaling back of social and community participation budgets, with allocations to be cut by 50 per cent and capacity building daily activity budgets to be cut by 10 per cent from October of this year. Let's remember that we're talking about the supports that help people with disability leave their homes to work, to manage their relationships, to participate in community life and to avoid social isolation. The $200 million Inclusive Communities Fund announced as a substitute is welcome in principle, but it is not equivalent, it is not adequate and it does not yet exist. We are removing supports before the likely inadequate replacement infrastructure is in place.

The government proposes to expand mandatory registration to cover providers delivering personal care, daily living supports and support in closed settings, and I don't oppose that in principle. But the government has not included the self-directed registration category explicitly recommended by the NDIS Provider and Worker Registration Taskforce. This was a recommendation designed to protect the choice and control of participants who rely on flexible, individualised arrangements with unregistered providers. It's yet another decision that is at odds with the founding principles of the NDIS.

We could take an alternative pathway with the NDIS, a path that would moderate growth to five to six per cent while improving outcomes for participants, but that would require the government to confront the structural drivers of cost blowouts rather than resorting to swingeing and ill-directed cuts. It would mean generally carving out early childhood intervention services. It would mean properly funding Thriving Kids for all school-age kids. It would mean establishing functional foundational supports that would enable skills development, self-advocacy, employment training, social and community participation, and carer programs.

It would mean reforming the planning system not by layering more rules onto a failing framework but by replacing subjective decision-making with consistent, needs based budgets paired with genuine flexibility in how they're going to be used. It would mean addressing the fact that nearly a third of NDIS funding goes to just five per cent of participants but many of their group home arrangements are expensive, are poorly overseen and deliver poor outcomes for those individuals. Individualised living arrangements can deliver much better quality of life at lower cost.

We would also need to fix the auditing and compliance system that currently profits from the scheme rather than safeguarding it, which is not the primary aim of the changes made in this legislation. The government's margin for error in implementing these reforms is vanishingly small—cutting supports before alternatives exist, changing eligibility before the assessment tool is even designed, granting the minister sweeping powers over support categories without adequate safeguards, restricting plan reviews within a week of royal assent. This is not reform done well. This is reform done fast and badly.

People with disability in Kooyong and across this country deserve a scheme that is sustainable but gives them dignity. They deserve to have their voices heard in this place in the fundamental design of the system on which their lives depend. The scheme's founding slogan was 'nothing about us without us'. It was a principle that many disabled Australians fought for. This bill does not honour that principle. In recognition of the negligible consultation timeframe that the government has afforded participants for this legislation, a timeframe that is inherently inaccessible for disabled people, I move:

That all words after "the bill" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"is being examined by the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs, with a submission closing date of   .29 May 2026, giving just two weeks for contributions;

(b) action 25.2 of the NDIS Independent Review called on the Department to undertake 'deep public consultation on proposed legislative reforms' including with people with disability, families, carers, Disability Representative Organisations, providers and workers;

(c) the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability found that 'people with disability are not sufficiently involved in government decision-making processes and developing laws and policies that may impact their human rights';

(d) Article 4(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities require the Government to 'closely consult with and actively involve persons with disabilities, through their representative organisations' when developing legislation that affects them;

(e) guidance from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet states that consultation on legislation 'should not generally be less than a month', and that where substantial feedback is expected, consultation should be even longer; and

(f) short timeframes are inherently inaccessible and people with disability may require additional time to participate meaningfully in consultation processes; and

(2) calls on the Government to extend the submission deadline for the Senate inquiry so that participants, families, carers, and disability representative organisations have at least four weeks to respond".

See this speech in context