National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Senator WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens) (11:35): The NDIS has transformed the lives of hundreds of thousands of disabled Australians by providing access to the essential supports, services and equipment that enable people to participate more fully in their communities, education, employment and family life. That was its purpose and it was created by the Gillard government with the support of the Greens in the Senate.
What a difference a decade makes. This Labor government would now prefer to work with the Liberals to ram through cuts that will see 241,000 people kicked off the NDIS to save money off the backs of disabled people and their carers rather than raising revenue by making the big corporations pay their fair share of tax, like making the greedy gas corporations pay tax on their gas exports instead of letting them continue to rip Australians off.
This government doesn't have the guts to take on the greedy gas corporations, so they're punching down on disabled people instead. It is appalling, and the Liberals and One Nation are lining up to back them because they're all in hock to the same big corporations and the one per cent—for shame. Months of inquiry and evidence have made it abundantly clear that the changes proposed by Labor risk causing significant harm to disabled people.
These cuts are being made too far, too fast, without adequate workforce planning, without proper economic modelling and without genuine consultation with the disability community. These changes will restrict access to the NDIS, will reduce or remove supports and will leave many people with no adequate alternative program or supports. There are no substitute programs in place, not all of the states have committed to even having them in place, and, in particular, 145,000 autistic people will suffer the most.
The replacement program for them is only for kids under eight years old, and a mum was telling me on the weekend she is petrified what removing support for her autistic daughter, who's aged nine, will do for her daughter, for her daughter's ability to keep participating at school and for their whole family. The government has repeatedly insisted that there'll be alternative supports for participants who lose access, but the evidence before the Senate from its inquiry tells a very different story.
State and territory disability ministers have made clear that they cannot provide like-for-like services for everyone who may lose NDIS supports. This leaves disabled people in hospitals, in aged care or in other inappropriate settings that cannot meet their needs. The Greens have been crystal clear on the NDIS since budget night that these cruel cuts should not pass parliament.
We will always fight for the rights, dignity and autonomy of disabled people. We think that disabled people deserve support, that they are worth it and that they matter. They should not be sacrificed for budget savings; their needs should be met.
We strongly oppose the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, and we urge the crossbench and the opposition to do the same. We hear some strong words pointing out all the problems with the bill, but you're going to bloody vote for it. Have some guts, and do the right thing.
I want to talk now about the impact on women, both on disabled women and on the care provided to disabled people, which is often unpaid and generally done by women. This government has made commitments to end violence against women and children within a generation, yet this bill will put women with a disability at greater risk. The Our Watch and Women with Disabilities Victoria report Changing the landscape identified a range of factors that make women with a disability particularly vulnerable to domestic, family and sexual violence.
First Nations women with a disability and women from culturally diverse backgrounds are even more vulnerable. The First Nations disability network has found that 26 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have a disability—that's roughly twice the non-Indigenous rate—and that one in five of them report experiencing abuse or neglect. The disability royal commission found that key factors preventing violence and neglect included reducing isolation, strengthening safeguards and supporting women with a disability to participate in their communities.
This bill goes directly against those recommendations. Cutting support for social and community participation will further isolate women with a disability. For many victims-survivors with disability, participating in community programs is visibility.
It can create an opportunity for other people to notice their situation and to take action to stop the abuse, the neglect and the exploitation. Capacity building and community connection also help women with a disability to better understand their options, to connect with frontline support services, to report abuse and to plan a safe escape from violent situations.
This bill undermines those protections. Cutting women with disability off from social activities will increase the risk that they will experience violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation and that the abuse will go unchecked. That's why I foreshadow a second reading amendment addressing this and calling on the government to withdraw this cruel and unnecessary bill.
On gender-responsive budgeting, this government has often spoken about its progress on applying a gender lens to decisions and requiring significant policy proposals to be subject to detailed gender impact analysis. This year's Women's Budget Statement talked up the evolving maturity of gender impact assessment and the importance of intersectional approaches to gender analysis.
It included snapshots of gender analysis in practice, including on tax transparency, changes to non-compete clauses, urgent care clinics and Australia's space program. But, for a document at pains to point out the government's intersectional gender analysis, the Women's Budget Statement was strangely silent on the gendered impact of a cornerstone of the budget: these appalling changes to the NDIS.
It didn't want to talk about the impact of funding cuts on women, particularly women with a disability, young women, First Nations women or women in aged care. But it's not surprising that the government chose not to highlight those impacts, because they actively undermine the government's stated priorities on gender equality. These changes will have a huge impact on women's economic equality and security.
These changes will exacerbate the risk of family, domestic and sexual violence against already vulnerable women, and these changes will make it harder for young women and older women with disability to live with dignity. The government might not want to talk about these impacts, but it's important that we lay them out. I particularly want to thank Women With Disabilities Australia for their sustained attention to these important issues that the government is ignoring.
On economic equality, today is Equal Pay Day, marking the additional number of days since 1 July that women have to work to take home the same yearly earning as men. It's 48 days. The gender pay gap currently sits at 11.3 per cent.
That is still far too high. It is better than historic levels, but it's still too high. But today is also the day that the government and the coalition and One Nation are supporting legislation that could undo this progress.
The bill will do this in three key ways. It will increase the demand on families to provide unpaid care when NDIS participants' plans are cut. The NDIS already relies on a huge network of unpaid care work to supplement funded supports, and the value of that unpaid care has been estimated at $78 billion each and every year.
Cutting funding for support doesn't reduce the amount of support that people living with a disability need. All it does is shift the responsibility onto already burnt-out families to drastically increase the amount of unpaid care that they already provide. We know that the vast majority of that extra unpaid care work will be done by women, and it will be unvalued and unpaid.
The increasing unpaid care load created by this bill will mean that more women are unable to participate in the workforce as much as they'd like or possibly at all. That has a direct impact on women's long-term economic security. Cuts in this bill to community participation funding will directly impact women with a disability who rely on community programs to develop the skills and the confidence to join the workforce.
Again, this has direct consequences for these women's economic security, autonomy and dignity. The government cannot say that it's working to close the gender pay gap on one hand while actively creating the conditions for more women to be forced into unpaid care roles. It cannot and should not ignore the human toll.
Mum Kim Berry talked to the Saturday Paper about her fear that cuts to her adult son Oscar's NDIS plan would mean that he could no longer afford the supports that allow him to live independently. Kim said that Oscar having to move home and her taking the primary care role on again would be fraught for both of them. Kim said: For me, the idea of it is so oppressive, stripping me of recently found independence and scope to be spontaneous.
I'll be back to organising all his programs and transport pick-ups. The result for Oscar, Kim said, will be 'death through boredom', as the activities that have helped him engage with society will be taken away. With these cuts to the NDIS, Labor is making the largest cut to a government services program this century.
This is a political choice, and it marks the tipping point for the Albanese Labor government. In the UK and the US, we've seen what happens when people are fed up because the politicians back the one per cent. This government is not concerned with inequality.
It's concerned with appearances. It pays lip service, and people are fed up. They're fed up because Labor can do something about the problems that they face, but they waste every single opportunity.
They're fed up with the tinkering, the cowardice, the weakness and the wasted time. They're fed up with the gas industry getting the gas they're selling for free and not paying their fair share. Instead of cutting billions of dollars from the NDIS and the 240,000 people who will now be bereft, the government could and should have required gas exporters to pay their fair share.
A 25 per cent gas tax would raise an estimated $17 billion a year. That's about $31.8 billion more over the next four years than the total value of these NDIS cuts. Labor have made a choice, and they're choosing to make disabled people bear the cost of their failure to make big corporations and billionaires pay their fair share.
They're choosing greedy gas corporations over disabled people—donors over disabled people. They're choosing to kick 241,000 people off the NDIS while handing billions to Donald Trump for nuclear submarines that we'll probably never get anyway. They're choosing, at every turn, to protect the profits of their corporate donors, while the people that they're supposed to represent are left behind.
Quite often when I say that Labor, the Liberals and One Nation are all working for the same vested interests and making the same decisions that benefit big corporations and the one per cent, the people who support Labor get quite upset, but, when a political party shows you, repeatedly, who they are and who they serve, you should believe them. Labor has made its choice, and it seems that the Liberals and One Nation are backing it in.
The Greens will always back disabled people in Australia because we think that's what being Australian is about. We're meant to look after each other, and the Greens will always do that. We will oppose this bill with every fibre of our being, and we condemn the parties that vote for it.
You don't fix the NDIS by cutting it.