Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In recent months, my office has had an influx of emails, phone calls and visits from constituents who are deeply worried about the future of the NDIS—parents asking if their children will lose therapy, carers asking if supports they rely on will disappear, providers asking how they can keep delivering services when the rules keep changing and the details remain unclear. That is why I held an urgent NDIS forum in Fowler with registered providers first so they—not the government, not the bureaucracy—could tell me what these proposed changes really mean on the ground. What I heard was not comfort; it was concern and, in many cases, fear. Providers and workers told me they worry the reforms will make the system more distant, more automated and harder for culturally and linguistically diverse communities to navigate.

One community advocate shared a story that stays with me. She described physically driving a mother to multiple childcare centres across our community. At each centre the answer was the same: 'We don't have the resources. We can't support a child with additional needs.' That mother did everything right. She turned up, she asked for help and she was turned away with no place for her child, no support and no clear pathway forward. This is just one of the many examples that tell the story of what happens when systems are under strain and children with disability become someone else's problem.

Now, I want to be fair about what the government is trying to do. The NDIS has grown significantly, with around 750,000 participants today, which is projected to fall to around 600,000 by 2030 under the new functional capacity framework. I understand why that conversation needs to happen. A scheme of this scale must be sustainable and must reach those it was designed for—people living with permanent and significant disabilities. I support crackdowns on fraud. I support stronger protection for participants. Expanding mandatory registration for providers and establishing a robust payment integrity system are important and overdue steps. But sustainable reform and compassionate design are not mutually exclusive, and right now the community is not seeing both. When I asked people at the forum what worried them most, it was not the payments or paperwork. The providers shared that parents were concerned about their children's future—whether they would still have the support to go to school, to make friends, to learn and grow and to one day stand on their own two feet and contribute to this country we all call home.

The NDIS at its best is a bridge that gives children with disability the chance to be fully part of our community. When families cannot see what is on the other side of that bridge, that is when fear takes hold. The providers at my forum told me that they have no clear explanation of how the new functional capacity framework will work, how it will account for language and cultural barriers or how it will treat people who cannot articulate their needs in polished, clinical English. For a community like Fowler, where the majority of people do not speak English at home, that is not a small oversight. It is a structural risk built into the design. During the budget handed down just weeks ago, most of the rhetoric around the NDIS centred on savings—this measure, that cut. But behind every number is a family trying to work out whether their child will still have support next year. So when I hear that this reform is about securing the NDIS for future generations, I want to be persuaded. I want to support changes that protect the scheme, stamp out exploitation and ensure every dollar reaches people who genuinely need it. But I will not support changes that risk pushing my community back into the shadows, especially when they have already taken time to come to see me, to email me and to tell me they are afraid. I urge the government to go on the ground, sit in the same room that I sat in, listen to the same voices and then design reform that those voices can actually trust.

See this speech in context