National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026
Senator STEELE-JOHN (Western Australia) (18:59): You nearly made me a minister then, which would've been a hell of a thing! The TEMPORARY CHAIR ( Senator Ciccone ): I'd better be careful! Senator STEELE-JOHN: It is really important, I think, to acknowledge that, when we talk about this legislation, we need to consider the entirety of the communities impacted by this bill.
One of the communities that I'm really worried about are Australians who play a caring role for, alongside and with disabled people, whether that is a paid or an unpaid role. During the course of the community's opportunity to feed back on this legislation, we have heard that this bill is going to be bad for carers. It's going to make life harder for carers.
We've got to really engage with that reality because so many people who play caring roles in Australia are close to burnout or are struggling through burnout right now. Government makes decisions often without thinking about the flow-through impacts on carers. This government, in this bill, will be cutting the supports currently available and currently funded to enable a disabled person to go outside maybe once or twice a week, to get their groceries, to see their family members who might live in another town and to go to the chemist and pick up their medication.
If you're a disabled person that needs a support worker to go into the community, without that you can't go out. And what then? Often what then is that somebody who is a family member or a friend takes on the role of trying to support you.
We heard from many carers organisations during the course of the inquiry into this legislation. They drove it home to us clearly. They said carers are already stressed and struggling.
They said unpaid care work is disproportionately done by women in Australia. They said that parents are struggling and that many parents who are older have felt the return of the fear that used to haunt the lives of so many. What will happen to my kid, my child, when I'm no longer here?
What will that care and support look like? That is a stress that had eased for some Australians because of the establishment of the NDIS, and that stress and strain is now returning. Right towards the end of the inquiry, we got a piece of tangible research from the Australia Institute examining what the flow-through impact of this bill will be for those who play unpaid caring roles alongside disabled people.
They found clearly that this bill will transfer 94 million hours of currently funded support work onto the shoulders of the carers of Australia—94 million hours. Just let that sink in. And the impact doesn't stop at those who play unpaid caring roles; 56,000 people whose paid employment is to be a support worker will lose their jobs because of these cuts.
The ripple effects of this will be terrible. The stress that it will create is beyond imagining. It's not beyond description, because it was described in painful detail for the government to absorb and to read.
What wasn't talked about in any of the statements from the government that I've seen or in their impact analysis is the way that that stress and strain often tears at the fabric of the relationship between disabled people and our families. This is a very personal thing, but what often happens because the system lets you down, because there isn't the support that you need, is that people in caring roles do become stressed and do begin to burn out.
We as disabled people feel and see that. Again, that plays into that internalised idea that we are ourselves a burden to our families, to the people that we love. That is not true.
What happens in those moments is that a weight is borne by the family member—not the weight of disability but the weight of a government system that doesn't fund the support for the family of the disabled person or for the disabled person themselves. The government drops the ball, the disabled person and their family picks it up, and the weight of doing that often leaves the disabled person feeling like they are a burden on their family.
That is an awful dynamic to exacerbate. It takes entire lives to unpack the mental health impact of that. It's just so cruel to put people in a situation where they can't be alongside each other.
It's just family members. Family is work. Family is work and effort, at times, for all of us.
People fall out. There are different views. There are different life stages.
That's the human experience—the human experience of disabled people and the broader society, and that's okay. That's living. But we should never allow that to be added to by family members and carers having to play those caring roles beyond what they can sustain because the system is broken and the system doesn't recognise the work.
And that's what this bill does. It fails to recognise the work. It makes the stress and strain worse.
So, Minister, what would your government say to a carer or a support worker who tonight just can't figure out where they are going to find additional hours to care for their loved one once your government's cuts have come into effect?