The choice before parliament is simple: take the time to get this right, or rush reforms that may deepen harm for women with disability.
Women will be significantly worse off and at much higher risk of isolation, abuse and poverty under proposed changes to the NDIS, the Senate inquiry into the legislation heard this week.
The Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee hearing into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 heard that the new bill would cause “significant harm” to women and gender diverse people and entrench reliance on unpaid labour.
Women with Disabilities Australia CEO Sophie Cusworth told the inquiry that reform of the NDIS was needed, but said “this bill, in its current form and at this speed, will harm women with disability and their families”.
“This bill should not proceed before a comprehensive public gender impact analysis, stronger scrutiny, and genuine consultation with the disability community.”
Ms Cusworth said there were still no details available around the design of foundational supports for adults or how the government would address the gaps between the health system and disability supports.
“This bill proceeds as though an alternative system is ready. It is not,” she said.
“Women with disability will pay the price of this gap in systems through increased isolation, unpaid care, poverty and exclusion, and exposure to harm.
“Mothers, daughters, partners, and sisters will carry it. Crisis systems and state health systems will carry it later at greater human and public cost.”
Ms Cusworth said the bill’s passage through Parliament should be delayed until three things had happened:
- foundational supports are available, fully funded, accessible, and safe;
- government publishes a comprehensive gender impact analysis;
- and there is independent public testing that these measures will not increase exclusion, unpaid gendered care responsibilities, violence risk, or preventable deterioration or crisis.
“The choice before parliament is simple: take the time to get this right, or rush reforms that may deepen harm for women with disability,” she said.
Ms Cusworth said there were three immediate risks:
- that people may lose essential supports when there is currently nowhere else to go;
- costs, care, and risk will be shifted onto people with disability and their families, particularly women; and
- the future rules, tools, and evidence settings enabled by this bill may reproduce gender bias, further locking women with disability out of support.
Ms Cusworth said the bill risked shifting greater responsibility onto families, and particularly mothers, with the expansion of “parental responsibility”.
A comprehensive gender impact analysis was needed to understand the extent and scope of the changes, she said.
“Many families and mothers, including mothers with disability, are already at breaking point due to inadequacy of support, and a parent should not be expected to fulfill the role of qualified, skilled support workers or therapists.
“They should be able to be a parent.”
Women with Disabilities Australia senior manager of policy and advocacy Diana Piantedosi said the Disability Royal Commission included moving testimony from a friend of NDIS participant Anne-Marie Smith, who died as a result of gross neglect.
Ms Piantedosi said some of the most important safeguards were “the everyday relationships and friendships that come from taking part in ordinary community life”.
“These are the connections that allow women with disability to build trust and to be known beyond segregated settings,” she said.
“Social and community participation is an essential safeguard to prevent violence.
“These supports are investments in the conditions that make violence easier to recognise and escape, and to be meaningfully included out in community life.
“The proposal currently intends to cut those by at least 50% and that is a significant risk that we feel is not going to be borne equally. It’s going to be women and gender diverse people who are put at significant risk.”
Ms Piantedosi agreed with West Australian Senator Jordon Steele-John that the draft legislation did not take into account financial affordability, availability or cultural context.
“It will cause significant harm, and I think it also overrides the recognition in previous administrative tribunal decisions of the reality that we exist in,” Ms Piantedosi said.
“If supports are not available, affordable, if they don’t exist, you can’t allow a person’s disease trajectory to accelerate or for them to live in conditions that could be significantly remediated with access to disability supports. It’s a significant wind back.”
Disability Discrimination Commissioner of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Rosemary Kayess, said in her submission to the inquiry that the bill would impact families and carers and there were risks that it would reinforce existing gender inequalities and entrench structural reliance on unpaid labour.
“Women have overwhelmingly borne the burden of the care role and the care
of people, children with disabilities especially, but also aging members of families with disabilities,” she told the inquiry.
Related
The NDIS “unlocked” the productivity ability of women, Ms Kayess said, enabling women to go back into the workforce rather than being kept out of the labour market by the burden of caring roles.
Independent ACT Senator David Pocock saidestimates last week heard that the minister intended to immediately cut participants’ social and community participation budgets by 50% and capacity building budgets by 10%.
Senator Pocock asked Ms Kayess whether the power to cut budgets indiscriminately without considering individual circumstances was in line with the design of the NDIS and whether it will leave people in unsafe situations.
“We know it will leave people in unsafe situations,” Ms Kayess said.
“We had four and a half years of evidence given to the Disability Royal Commission.
“People with disability in 2009, 2010, after the first round for a disability strategy identified the way that the vulnerability that is created when people are isolated and that’s how they become vulnerable.
“They end up in either closed environments or isolated environments and they are at risk of violence, abuse, and exploitation.
“The Shut Out report demonstrated that, the Disability Royal Commission demonstrated that, we’ve had reports going back to 1985 with the new directions report that clearly said that we had to do things differently.”
Ms Kayess said the new bill was a “complete turnaround” on the original design of the NDIS.
“It was trying to get not just people with disability back out in the community, but to also open those opportunities for lots of the women and informal carers that had taken themselves out of the labour market to be able to support members … within their family that have a disability.”
When asked whether the bill should proceed, Ms Kayess said “it needs to stop and slow down, so there can be far more analysis”.
“I feel the analysis we’ve been able to do over the last couple of weeks is still inadequate.”
Ms Kayess said the question of whether individuals would be forced to take medication as part of the requirement to undertake all appropriate treatment to meet the definition of permanence was a “legal violence”.
“So many people have many adverse reactions to psychotropic drugs. Are people going to be forced?
“There’s going to be people with psychosocial disability that won’t want to try and get the necessary supports that they need because of the fear of forced treatment.
“It’s one of the great legal violences that happens within that community – forced community treatment orders and forced medication.”
Ms Kayess said there needed to be genuine engagement with women with disability.
“There hasn’t been an adequate gender analysis, though I think there needs to be a stronger understanding of the impact on women.
“Once again it comes down to how fast this all seems to be moving, and what on paper looks like sweeping ministerial discretion and a dramatic shift from the original human rights intent.”
Earlier, in her opening statement, Ms Kayess said the NDIS was one of the most significant civil rights reforms in Australia.
“It was designed to give practical effect to Australia’s obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities by funding individualised supports to enable independence and participation, and to give people with disability genuine choice and control over their lives.
“These two aims, autonomy and participation in the community, sit at the heart of the CRPD [Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities].”
But those core foundations of the scheme were most at risk in the changes proposed by the bill, Ms Kayess said.
“Reform of the NDIS is both necessary and expected over time.
“However, the issue this bill raises is whether the reforms maintain the NDIS as a rights-based scheme or regress from human rights principles and standards.
“Our central concern is that taken as a whole, the bill represents a structural shift in how disability is understood and how support needs are assessed and funded.”
Ms Kayess said the bill sat within a broader context in which questions of sustainability were being considered.
“However, sustainability must be understood alongside Australia’s obligation to use the maximum available resources to progressively realise rights,” she said.
“The question is not simply how to constrain expenditure within the scheme, but whether the overall policy settings advance the rights of people with disability.”
Ms Kayess said supports that only related to an individual’s functional impairment “doesn’t address the myriad of supports people require because of their personal circumstances and their social and environmental context”.
“Disability is a social phenomena. Our societies, our environments create our disabilities. Impairments are static and are real, but impairments are only one aspect of it. Disability is about the outcome that happens when people with impairments interact with the environment around them.”
Ms Kayess said the CRPD required government to actively involve people with disability in the development of laws and policies that affect them.
“This is not a procedural step. It is fundamental to ensuring that systems are designed in a way that reflects personal lived experience and embeds choice and control not only at the individual level, but within the design of the system itself.
“Given the scale and significance of these reforms, the level of consultation undertaken to date does not reflect participatory design.”
