National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Senator LIDDLE (South Australia—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (11:05): The coalition affirms strong bipartisan support for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, as Australians with significant and permanent disability deserve to live with dignity and independence and have greater choice in their own lives. This is an idea worth defending, and it is worth protecting for those who depend on it.
In saying that, it is also worth protecting the scheme itself. That is exactly why the National Disability Insurance Scheme (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 deserves close scrutiny, as NDIS participants and the taxpayers funding the scheme deserve much better. The NDIS in front of us today is Labor's mess.
It was Labor that designed the scheme with weak controls and no real handbrake on growth, and it is on Labor's watch that the cost has blown out to the point where it now threatens the very sustainability of the scheme itself. When the coalition was in government, we worked to put the scheme on a sustainable footing. Labor in opposition shamefully blocked those reforms.
Having spent years blocking sensible changes, Labor now comes to this parliament asking to be trusted with sweeping new powers to fix a problem it had every opportunity to help prevent. That is exactly why this bill requires scrutiny. The NDIS currently supports close to a million Australians with disability, including tens of thousands of participants in my home state of South Australia.
It was estimated to cost $13.6 billion a year. Under Labor, it is now costing more than $50 billion every single year and is projected to reach $70 billion by the end of the decade and $100 billion by the mid-2030s. A scheme growing at that rate needs careful, considered reform.
The coalition wants the NDIS to succeed and be sustainable not just for this budget cycle but for the participant being diagnosed today who will rely on it in 30 years time. This is now the government's third attempt to slow the scheme's growth. In April 2023, it committed to reducing annual growth to eight per cent.
We know it's big on announcements. That one wasn't met. In January 2026, the minister for health and disability set a new target of five to six per cent.
Guess what? That wasn't met either. Are you noticing a theme here?
Growth right now sits at around 10.3 per cent, and this bill asks us to believe that a two per cent target is suddenly achievable and safe. What concerns the coalition most is not the goal; it's actually the method. The single largest savings measure in this bill resets social, community and civic participation and capacity-building supports from October, stripping more than $13 billion over the forward estimates.
We know that economic and social inclusion is so important to people living with disabilities. It helps them to live the best life they can. The minister says that this category has tripled in five years, but neither he nor the department has produced evidence explaining that growth or justifying the cut of this size.
It is not just the process that I'm worried about; it's the people. This bill gives the minister sweeping new powers to reduce funding for entire groups of supports by legislative instrument, not through this parliament, not with the scrutiny of this parliament, not with the opportunity to dig deeper like we do through our parliamentary processes that Labor constantly tries to undermine.
That's what helps us: the process to make a bad bill that comes from Labor, perhaps, a little bit better. Or perhaps it's drawing out the issues that haven't been identified and consulting people in an appropriate way. The bill requires the minister to have regard to participant safety, but not to explain how, on what criteria or on what evidence.
There is limited scope to review these decisions and limited public accountability. For a scheme touching close to a million Australians, that's an extraordinary concentration of unchecked power. We heard directly from people that will be affected.
Women with Disabilities Australia told the committee that when funded supports are cut the need for care does not disappear, it just shifts to someone else, and it will shift to unpaid carers, who will disproportionately be women. From the other side we hear constantly about how they're always on the lookout for the interests of women. There is no evidence of this in this legislation.
The chief executive spoke of a woman in regional Australia with multiple sclerosis locked out of support for an incurable condition because she cannot afford the pathway to prove it. Down Syndrome Australia said that a blanket percentage cut applied without regard to individual circumstances undermines the entire purpose of the scheme. Hannah Diviney, in testimony nobody in that room will forget—I saw it; I heard it—warned this government that, if people die as a result of this bill, that responsibility sits with the decision-makers, not with the people left without support.
Beyond that headline savings measure, several other schedule items will directly touch South Australian participants in my home state. The bill moves eligibility away from diagnosis alone towards a new test based on reduced functional capacity, but the government has not yet said what that assessment will look like. We're supposed to trust them.
Existing participants will be progressively reassessed between January 2028 and December 2030. Labor has proven time and time again that it can't be trusted to fix it later. It should have fixed it in this bill, not later.
The bill tightens who can request an unscheduled plan reassessment, limits funding to the impairment a person is actually accessing the scheme for, changes how plans are renewed, allows plans to be suspended where a participant cannot be contacted, and clarifies the definition of permanent impairment with sensible carve-outs, so a person with a hearing impairment is not forced to get a cochlear implant to remain eligible.
I acknowledge the coalition secured changes in the House to protect daily living supports and employment supports specifically, and that was the right call. But on eligibility, reassessment and permanence, the detail that will decide a participant's fate still sits in instruments nobody in this chamber has actually seen. State and territory disability ministers, who share funding responsibility for this scheme, say they were not meaningfully consulted, describing a shift away from shared governance inconsistent with commitments made at National Cabinet in January and the National Agreement on Foundational Supports signed only months later.
The broader NDIS issue is particularly acute for South Australia. Our state has thin markets at the best of times. A participant in Port Augusta or Ceduna who loses NDIS support does not have the fallback options of someone in metropolitan Adelaide.
There is no queue of alternative providers in the south-east or on the Eyre Peninsula. Disability ministers warned that, without a coordinated approach, people risk ending up in hospitals or other settings that cannot meet their needs, or with no services at all, because states and territories have no agreement to deliver like-for-like services to people exited from the scheme.
They've warned what is possible. Again, Labor is not listening. I turn now to the issues that actually should sit at the centre of this bill: fraud, corruption and maladministration.
Time and time again, this Labor government turns away from that, choosing instead not to tackle it. They don't like the tough stuff. They don't like to talk about or tackle fraud, corruption or administration.
It's well and truly on record not just in this place but in the media. That's Labor's way. The minister himself has said that seven in 10 Australians think the NDIS has grown too large and struggles with dodgy providers.
Six in 10 say that it's probably broken. Yet, by the government's own modelling, the fraud measures in this bill will reduce an estimated $5 billion in fraudulent and incorrect claims each year by just $300 million, and those savings will not begin until 2027-28. By any measure, that's a fail in addressing fraud and corruption—not participant fraud but provider fraud.
This is a program administered by government and managed in this place by a minister. It's their program; they should be able to manage it. The Australian National Audit Office estimates that between six and 10 per cent of NDIS claim outlays could be noncompliant, fraudulent or incorrect—a figure that John Dardo, co-chair of the Fraud Fusion Taskforce within the NDIA, confirmed as recently as February.
The NDIA's own general manager of the Fraud Fusion Taskforce told a Senate inquiry that her team identifies around 50,000 risky claims every single day, and law enforcement has warned that organised crime groups are now deliberately targeting this scheme. The evidence was clear. It's not reflected in the response in this bill.
Evidence of fraud, corruption and maladministration was provided over and over again, but it's Labor's way to turn its back on that evidence. It's too hard. It shouldn't be.
South Australians see the sharp end of this. My office regularly hears from participants who were quoted one price for cleaning or gardening, only to watch it quadruple the moment they mention it will be paid through their NDIS plan. The coalition does welcome parts of this bill.
Expanding mandatory registration is overdue. Around 94 per cent of providers are currently unregistered, operating with, essentially, no oversight. New civil penalties, stronger record keeping and cutting the claim period from up to two years down to 90 days will help.
But, against a scheme spending $50 billion a year, $300 million in recovered fraud is not a serious answer to a $5 billion problem, nor is it an answer to the evidence that was clearly represented in the inquiry. Valuing taxpayers' money, tackling fraud properly and prioritising vulnerable Australians is not in contention. Every dollar recovered from a dodgy provider is a dollar that stays with a genuine participant and supports not only that participant but also their families and communities.
We are all better off when people with disabilities live amongst us, work amongst us and play amongst us. This bill doesn't seek to tackle the most important things. A scheme with real integrity does not need to punish honest participants to balance its books.
With national debt racing towards $1 trillion, it is not hard to see what is really driving this bill. It's a grab, again. Improving Labor's bill has been the focus of this process, and that work continues this week.
Slowing NDIS growth and eliminating fraud and waste are the whole point, not optional extras. Bring forward the evidence for these growth targets. Consult properly with the states.
Set out transparent criteria for ministerial determinations and put the same urgency into recovering fraudulently claimed taxpayers' money that the government reserves for cutting support to vulnerable Australians. This is bigger than the NDIS alone. The coalition is committed to protecting Australians' way of life, and that means spending has to be brought under control right across the budget not just in this scheme.
I want to finish by acknowledging everyone who made a submission to this inquiry and every witness who shared their story, often at real personal cost. Their evidence should shape this bill. What I say today is this: the NDIS must be made sustainable, and spending and fraud are the biggest issues standing in the way of that.
Labor has not been prepared to do that in the interests of the very people—people with disabilities—that the scheme was set up for and should operate for and protect.