As arguably the most shafted cohorts in the care sector, a bunch of us have gotten together to dump the receipts on NDIS.
Have a browse. Receipts are at the bottom.
And feel free to explore, message, drop info and let us know if you’ve also had enough. https://enoughaustralia.com/the-cuts/
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Exclusive: NDIS changes secretly brought forward
The federal government has secretly implemented changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme more than a year before they were scheduled to take effect and in advance of consultation promised by Minister for the NDIS Mark Butler.
While these headline changes were to be “co-designed”, at least in rhetoric, a parallel set of arbitrary, swingeing cuts to the scheme, including a blanket 50 per cent reduction to social and community participation budgets within NDIS plans, was released as final policy on Wednesday. The cuts are predicted to save $13.5 billion but will force some participants into group homes or back into the degraded situations that existed before the scheme was established.
As the pace of the largest reforms to the NDIS accelerate, disabled people, their families and advocates are warning of “catastrophic” consequences. Sources have told The Saturday Paper the government is either not listening to, or not understanding the nature of, their concerns and instead is pursuing raw budget savings.
“I think [the government] are just winging it,” the chief executive of a large service provider says. “They are so exposed on so many different areas and there are going to be consequences. Someone in Treasury or wherever has just got a budget spreadsheet and they are working off [it].
“Families are not far off breaking point. Before the NDIS, there used to be a lot of families who relinquished care of their loved ones. We are coming back to that again.”
The government’s communication strategy is to offer reassurances that often do not match reality and then admonish advocates for stirring “fear and misinformation”.
Recent changes to how people access the NDIS provide a useful case study.
In August, the Albanese government passed another tranche of sweeping NDIS reform amendments that, in part, included new definitions of “functional capacity” and what it means for a participant to have a “substantially reduced” capacity. The changes deferred rules, assessment methodologies and evidence requirements to be designed later.
“There will be no immediate impact of the new definition of functional capacity,” the bill’s explanatory memorandum says.
“It is clarifying the current intended application of functional capacity in relation to access decisions. New category A NDIS rules to prescribe methods and criteria to set thresholds relevant to the assessment of functional capacity are expected to commence from 1 January 2028.”
In practice, however, that has not been the case.
On September 25, less than a month after the new NDIS amendments came into force, the Administrative Review Tribunal decided the case of 54-year-old Tavete Riordan, who applied for access to the scheme after a stroke and was refused in early 2025.
Its decision to confirm that refusal relied on the new legislative amendments, even though he had applied for access to the scheme some 18 months earlier.
“Further amendments to the NDIS were made in August 2026, with those amendments coming into force in a staggered process with the first amendments commencing on 27 August 2026,” the tribunal’s general member, John McAteer, said in his decision.
“Those 27 August amendments apply to all matters not finalised before the NDIA [National Disability Insurance Agency] or the Tribunal prior to that date, and therefore to the extent relevant will apply to this matter.”
The Saturday Paper sent a series of questions about the NDIS reforms to Butler but his office declined to respond, citing a statement from the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.
A spokesperson for the department told The Saturday Paper the new definitions were explicitly designed to mimic a precedent set in the Federal Court in 2023 and that this has been longstanding practice.
“Those amendments do not change the operation of law or practice in force prior to commencement,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“Changes to the operation of the access framework do not commence until 1 January 2028, when relevant NDIS rules are in place.”
This is at odds with a change made the day before the amendments came into force, however, when the NDIA updated its operational guidelines to refer to the legislative amendments, embedding them in access policy across the organisation. This affects all cases, many of which will never make it to a tribunal to become public, like the matter of Riordan.
Taken together, the amendments significantly raise the bar for access to the NDIS, even though the assessment methodologies have not been finalised and despite repeated public guarantees of no change.
“The new section 9B further provides for the making of rules to prescribe methods and criteria setting thresholds relevant to the assessment of functional capacity,” McAteer said in his decision.
“Pursuant to the Explanatory Memorandum to the amending Act, it is understood that the Minister intends to make rules, however, these rules are not expected to commence until 1 January 2028.”
“We don’t qualify right now for the new carve-out because the plan has to be more than $215,030, but the irony is Adam would have a plan bigger than that if we put him in a home.”
Despite the machinery governing access to the NDIS changing immediately, ministers and bureaucrats maintain, in the bill and elsewhere, that the new system would be designed in “deep consultation” with the disability community and other experts. To prop up this claim, the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing launched a five-week public consultation round that closed yesterday.
“Access changes will be informed by expert advice from the Technical Advisory Group and consultation with the disability community,” the consultation paper says.
“The department has developed a set of draft guiding principles to help shape the future access decision-making process.
“The guiding principles set the overarching values and objectives that could underpin and guide the design, implementation and ongoing refinement of a new access decision-making process. These principles are provided for consultation and community feedback and do not represent final government policy.”
Announced in July, the Technical Advisory Group will “provide expert, independent, evidence-based advice to the Disability Reform Ministerial Council (DRMC) to support access reforms”.
The department’s consultation paper says the advisory group “will help develop robust and consistent NDIS access decision-making processes and standardised evidence requirements for assessing substantially reduced functional capacity”.
On August 28, the department executed a $663,000 contract with Sententia Consulting to “support” the group in its work.
While future participants in the NDIS will be subject to whatever arrangements result from that work, existing participants who are reassessed or those who apply for the first time before January 1, 2028, will apparently be captured by this interim access regime.
“This creates considerable uncertainty for people seeking access to the NDIS or undergoing eligibility reassessment, their families and representatives, and the professionals who provide functional evidence to support applications,” one advocate tells The Saturday Paper.
“It is particularly concerning where applicants are currently being assessed against amended statutory concepts, while the detailed rules and assessment framework intended to operationalise the future access arrangements are not yet in place.”
Any one of the suite of NDIS reforms currently being rolled out or designed would be significant on their own, but collectively they represent a near total and overwhelming overhaul of the scheme’s original blueprint, its definitions, its laws, rules, practices and integration with other systems of support.
Particularly frightening for disabled people is a wholesale cut of 50 per cent to every NDIS plan’s social and community budget, a portion of funding that is critical to supporting people who need help to leave their homes for day programs, community visits and to be part of society.
On Wednesday, ministerial determinations were released that outline how the government intends these cuts to work in practice, including some last-minute “safeguards” won by the Greens that are supposed to protect high-support-needs participants in Supported Independent Living with a requirement for 24-hour care.
In reality, the instrument will still apply the 50 per cent cut to funding for these participants, but they are among the only ones who have been given a special carve-out to apply for a review of this decision. Such a review might – but might not – result in the NDIA putting back some or all of the money it took out of the plan.
The NDIA is using plan values as a proxy to find out who these people are. If a person has high-support-plan items worth “at least” $215,030 a year, they might be able to query whether the government has gone too far on cutting their plans. The methodology is breathtakingly complex.
“The high-support-needs mechanism is an important safeguard, but it is tightly defined,” says Intrepidus Law principal lawyer Belinda Kochanowska.
“Eligibility depends significantly on what the agency’s records show about the way the participant’s existing supports were funded, including continuous 24-hour care and the specified funding threshold.
“That makes the accuracy of agency records potentially very significant for participants seeking to rely on this pathway. The more complex and data-dependent the decision-making process becomes, the greater the potential for errors – whether those errors arise from human decision-making, incorrect agency records, or the way an automated process applies the methodology.
“That is particularly concerning where an error could directly affect the funding available to a participant who requires continuous 24-hour disability support.”
Elsewhere, the 50 per cent cut to social, economic and community support will apply across the board with few exceptions – notably for those with “high intensity” support and supports to gain or hold employment. Similarly, the government will cut a flat 10 per cent from Improved Daily Living Skills line items in plans, with few exceptions.
The Saturday Paper has spoken with families and providers who are not covered by any of these exemptions but whose children or family members require 24-hour care while still living at home, not in a so-called group home run by a service.
One mother, who asked to be called Margaret, says her 24-year-old autistic son Adam requires round-the-clock care because of his almost total lack of impulse control.
If he loses access to his five-day-a-week program, Margaret says she will have no choice but to “relinquish” the son she loves to a supported living home, away from his family.
“We don’t qualify right now for the new carve-out because the plan has to be more than $215,030, but the irony is Adam would have a plan bigger than that if we put him in a home,” she says.
“Unfortunately, his plan is up for renewal in February, so we will be one of the first this happens to. There is no consideration for the individual’s needs. They don’t seem to have a duty of care.”
Margaret is 64 and her husband is unwell. Younger parents, who she is also speaking with about these changes, have to work. None of them know if they will be able to continue to support their children under the changes.
The Commonwealth is so wedded to its 50 per cent cuts that even where a person has 24-hour support needs in a group home, ministers have rebuffed private lobbying to have a pre-emptive process to prove a person shouldn’t have their plan cut.
Instead, the cuts will go through and then a variation can be lodged. NDIA will have 21 days to decide whether to vary the plan and then yet more time to decide by how much.
“They are making things even more complicated,” the chief executive of the large service provider says. “What they are putting on participants and providers with all of this is criminal.”
Hi, has anyone done the $200 NDIS 2 hour call?
Has anyone being paid the $200?
They say it takes 4 weeks to process the payment and it’s being 5 weeks and they’re just saying the same script over and over.