NDIS Bill hits the disabled harder than the fraudsters
· Michael West
What the Bill actually does
Three sections of the Bill tell a different story from the one the government has been telling.
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- The removal of Section 31 from the Act entirely (the legal foundation of choice and control).
Section 31 currently requires NDIS plans to be built around a participant’s individual circumstances, goals and support needs. Once removed, that legal obligation disappears. What replaces it is a ministerial power to determine what funding will be available for groups of people — not for individuals.
- Section 34A (The Ministerial Override)
It gives the Minister power to cut funding for any group of supports by any amount, up to 99.9% — the maximum the Bill legally permits — without parliamentary scrutiny and without any individual right of appeal. The government has already announced its first use of this power: a 50% cut to Social and Community Participation funding from 1 October 2026.
- Section 50A (The Automatic Cutover)
Section 50A introduces successor plans with hard end dates, automatically generated under the new rules without any individual review. Combined with new automation powers that allow the NDIA to reset plan end-dates across the entire participant base simultaneously, this is how the cuts get switched on —
overnight, at scale, with no warning and no appeal.
The number that doesn’t add up
On 22 April 2026, Minister Mark Butler told the National Press Club that Social and Community Participation budgets would be reduced by 30%. The government’s own Department of Health website states the reduction will be 50%. The legislation, through Section 34A, permits reductions of up to 99.9%.
The difference between what the Minister said publicly and what Parliament is being asked to vote on is not a rounding error. It is the
difference between a promise and a law in the making.
The government announced a $200 million Inclusive Communities Fund to partially offset the cuts. What it did not announce is that the fund remains in contingency reserve — consultation on how it will work does not begin until July 2026, after the cuts have already started. The safety net is being removed before the replacement exists.
The cuts begin in October 2026. The new eligibility framework that determines who qualifies under the new rules does not commence until January 2028. The supports meant to catch people who lose NDIS access are not yet designed, funded or operational anywhere in Australia.
The cuts come first. Everything else comes later — if it comes at all.
Who actually bears this
The government’s concern about scheme sustainability is legitimate. The NDIS cost trajectory — from $54 billion today toward a projected $83 billion without intervention — is real, and the pressure to act is legitimate.
The question is whether this Bill addresses the right problem.
Social and Community Participation funding covers the support a person with serious, permanent disability needs to exist in the world — to leave their home, attend medical appointments, build the daily living skills that enable independence.
For people with severe physical disability, severe autism or complex communication needs, these are not optional extras. They are the difference between a life lived in the community and a life lived in isolation.
Cutting this funding by 50% does not reduce those needs by 50%.
It shifts them — onto families, onto unpaid carers who may have to reduce or leave employment to provide the care the scheme no longer funds, onto hospitals, onto state systems not currently resourced to absorb them.
The structural problems driving the scheme toward $83 billion — pricing failures, uncontrolled Capital Supports costs, the shadow network of unregistered providers — are documented and fixable.
Whether they are measurable depends on data the government has not yet made public. This Bill does not fix them. What it cuts instead is the participation budget of the person who needs a support worker to leave their home.
The fraud framing doesn’t hold
The public case for this Bill has been built on fraud — unregistered providers, integrity leakage, and rorts. According to Advocacy for Inclusion’s submission to the Senate inquiry, the projected savings come overwhelmingly from cutting supports for existing participants and tightening eligibility. The fraud task-force, the digital payments system, the mandatory registration expansion are all present in the Bill. They are just not where the money comes from.
As Mitchell Skipsey, senior solicitor at the Justice and Equity Centre, told the Senate inquiry: “Instead of fixing the implementation problems, this Bill says we are just going to change the game altogether. We didn’t do our homework, so we’re going to pass a law saying we no longer need to do our homework.”
The clock is ticking
The Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee report was due on 16 June 2026. The government’s stated intention is for the Bill to pass before Parliament rises for its five-week winter break — giving the disability community, 4,500 submitters and every human rights organisation that appeared before the inquiry approximately two weeks between the committee report and a vote.
It still has not yet been released.
Nor has the granular expenditure data that would allow independent analysis of where the scheme’s costs actually originate.
The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, whose assessment the Australian Human Rights Commission had called for before the Bill’s passage, published its findings in Report 7 of 2026. Its conclusion: it was difficult to properly assess whether the measures were compatible with human rights law because the Bill itself was not sufficiently clear.
The government’s own Budget papers confirm the intended outcome: 160,000 fewer NDIS participants by 2030, from a current base of 760,000.
The three provisions above govern how existing participants are funded. A fourth mechanism — the new functional capacity assessment framework commencing January 2028 — will determine future eligibility. Together they account for this projected reduction.
The question this Bill cannot answer is which 160,000 — and whether its mechanisms are precise enough to tell the difference between someone who shouldn’t be there and someone who cannot survive without it.
As Naomi Anderson, Legal Practice Manager at Villamanta Disability Rights Legal Service, told the inquiry: “The community is exhausted and overwhelmed. Please do this carefully, cautiously, and with full knowledge of what the repercussions are going to be — because they are large.”
The $54B question. NDIS compliance looms – 247,000 providers yet to be registered