The three-day inquiry in June into Labor’s devastating National Disability Insurance Scheme bill has been extended, after disability advocacy and human rights organisations outlined the significant risks to NDIS participants if it were to become law.
The Orwellian-named National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 was tabled on May 14. The Senate referred it to an inquiry, which then received more than 4000 submissions.
Every Australian Counts, which was central in the fight to introduce NDIS, called on the Senate not to support the bill in its current form. It said it had significant concerns that participants’ funding would be set below assessed need, that the cuts would lead to an increased reliance on unpaid carers, the introduction of automated decision-making and expanded ministerial powers, among other matters.
Rosemary Kayess, Disability Discrimination Commissioner with the Australian Human Rights Commission also opposed the bill.
“The NDIS was built on the principle that people disability can live independently and participate in the community with access to supports that enable choice, control and inclusion,” Kayess said. “This Bill has potential to be regressive in the protection and realisation of the rights of people with disability.”
The bill was even opposed by state and Territory disability ministers, five of whom are in Labor-led administrations.
“There is a significant risk that people with disability will end up in hospitals or other settings that are inappropriate and unable to meet their needs, or have no access to services at all,” their joint statement said. “While the scheme’s sustainability is an important objective, reforms must not prioritise expenditure reduction over participant safety, wellbeing, and life outcomes.”
Labor’s budget priorities
Labor’s May federal budget detailed a cut of $38 billion from the NDIS. It said it would remove, or block, 300,000 people from the scheme. It will reduce all participants’ funding by 50% for Social and Community Participation and a further 10% for Capacity Building (which funds supports including occupational therapy, physiotherapy and the like).
These cuts make up the biggest part of Labor’s budget savings. At the same time, Labor is raising spending on the military, with an immediate $14 billion, rising to $53 billion across the next 10 years.
These are Labor’s priorities — cuts to support provided to some of its most vulnerable citizens to fund the military budget’s bottomless pit, including more than $360 billion for second hand nuclear submarines. It also wants to both have its cake and eat it. While in lock step with the Coalition, it also wants to be seen as compassionate.
“Labor will stand by people when they fall on hard times,” Labor’s July Consultation Draft Platform proclaims, followed by a name check of social reforms — Medicare, worker’s compensation and NDIS — which state and federal Labor governments have not yet managed to extinguish.
“Labor recognises the NDIS is a vital reform which supports people with a disability to participate in social, economic and democratic life,” the draft platform states, apparently without irony. However, it also said: “Labor will ensure an effective and sustainable NDIS so current and future generations receive the benefits of the scheme.”
Here lies the truth: Labor will ensure that the NDIS is “sustainable” by excluding the vast majority of those living with disability and significantly reducing support for those who remain.
Labor agreed on June 23 to the Greens push to delay the NDIS bill until August, at least, when federal parliament next sits. The agreement includes an eight-week extension to the inquiry.
The Greens also secured some amendments, including limiting ministerial powers to cut NDIS participants’ support budgets, provide greater transparency on automated decision-making and introduce protections to any requirements to undergo treatments prior to a disability being considered permanent.
“The Greens will not support the NDIS Bill. We will vote against it, and we will do everything we can to delay it and stop it entirely,” Greens leader Larissa Waters said.
“The inquiry hearings have only confirmed what we knew — this is an appalling and dangerously irresponsible Bill. These cuts were friendless in the short inquiry we’ve just had, and Parliament should listen to the strong voice of the disability community and cancel these cuts.”
NDIS Inquiry interim report
The Labor-dominated committee’s interim report makes for grim reading, as it records well-articulated concerns of many.
Under “Social and community participation”, the report references Young People In Nursing Homes National Alliance, which “emphasised that community participation provide critical respite for families and care partners, and that discounting funding ‘will accelerate the decline of participants with progressive conditions and intensify the impact on families who are already providing substantial informal care’.”
The report also references Down Syndrome Australia, that “highlighted how some people with Down syndrome ‘cannot “choose” to safely shift away from 1:1 (or more intensive) supports”.
But, in the end, all that concern is not worth much. The report concludes that: “The Agencies explained that in the absence of any action, spending on social, civic and community participation is forecast to grow around $20 billion per year by the end of the decade.”
A lay-down misère. Cutting the cost of NDIS cost is necessary, regardless of the impact its cuts will have on the lives of people with disability who will become more isolated, vulnerable and reliant on informal carers.
Labor’s only consideration is how much funding it can claw back from the NDIS to allow it to continue subsidising fossil fuel exports, spending big on militarism and sheltering the wealthy from reasonable taxation.
Extending the NDIS inquiry will not defeat the bill, however. While the Greens’ principled opposition has secured a longer inquiry, which brings the possibility of persuading more people to take a stand against these devastating cuts, the Coalition supports the need to eviscerate NDIS. After all many of Labor’s proposed cuts echo those of the former Coalition government, which Labor then opposed.
Labor is committed to trashing the NDIS and believes that it has sufficient passive support to do so. Only by being visible, including demonstrations on the streets and by building alliances will people with disability build sufficient social weight to force Labor to back down.
[Graham Matthews is the spokesperson on disability for the Socialist Alliance.]