It was meant to defend Labor’s NDIS Bill. Instead, the combined Health and NDIA submission reads like the workshop notes behind a far larger reform: tighter access, medicalised permanence tests, funding caps and automated decisions.

Someone has been working very hard.

That much is obvious from Submission 247, a joint submission by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and the National Disability Insurance Agency to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee examining Labor’s Securing the NDIS for Future Generations Bill.

But it does much more than just provide the rationale to the legislation.

It almost reads like an off-cuts from the workshop as the team were working on the new laws. This is the material that did not quite make it into the sales brochure. The bits that might have been better left inside government until a spin doctor had softened the edges.

Because this submission does not simply defend the Bill: it exposes the thinking behind it.

It says the laws address two key vulnerabilities: “scheme sustainability and fraud”. It then lists the exact recurring themes that particularly concern the disability community: functional capacity, permanence, support determinations, fraud powers and automation.

And this list is the point. It’s not a reform targeted simply on eliminating fraud; it’s a system rebuild.

The NDIS gateway will be tightened. Permanence will be tested against “all appropriate treatment”. Functional capacity will be measured in a controlled setting, stripped away from environmental and personal circumstances. How this might work in regional and remote areas is not at all clear.

Current plans will be reassessed with social and community participation budgets marked for a 50 percent cut. Capacity building daily activity budgets are marked for a 10 percent cut. Automation will expand into administrative decision-making.

The Government calls this sustainability. Participants may hear something very different.

[Continued from the abilityNEWS newsletter]

__________________________________________

The new permanence test was meant to protect the NDIS from fraud, but the department’s submission reveals something sharper: a medicalised gateway that could deny access where geography, cost or waiting lists make it unreachable in real life.

The submission begins calmly enough. But then the machinery appears.

First comes functional capacity.

The Bill introduces a definition designed to support a “more consistent and robust approach” to deciding whether a person has substantially reduced functional capacity. The submission says this will allow the Minister to make Category A NDIS Rules and define thresholds for NDIS access, which sounds technical.

It isn’t. Access to the Scheme depends on it.

This proposed definition looks at a person’s ability to undertake an activity without assistance from other people, assistive technology or modifications, and in a setting that excludes, as far as possible, environmental and personal circumstances. It confines assessment to a person’s “intrinsic ability”, and that’s the philosophical shift.

The NDIS was built around disability as lived reality. The new test starts with a controlled environment.

The submission says this aligns with the World Health Organisation’s distinction between “capacity” and “performance”. Capacity is what a person can do in a standardised environment. Performance is what they can do in the real world, with supports, technology, barriers and context.

Government wants capacity first. The social model of disability begins with people in a real world.

The promise is that environmental factors will be considered later, in needs assessment and budget-setting.

The second reveal is permanence.

The Bill clarifies impairment is not permanent unless the person has undertaken “all appropriate treatment”. It also says an impairment cannot be found permanent if another treatment is likely to materially improve, reverse or alleviate its impact. And that’s where the language hardens.

Permanent no longer simply means lifelong in practical effect. It becomes a test of treatment history. Has the person done enough? Has every appropriate option been tried?Could something else work?

The Government says this clarifies uncertainty.

The submission confirms a person’s financial and geographical circumstances are not considerations. Treatments funded through Medicare and public health systems count.

This is presented as equity but may operate as fiction.

A person in regional Australia, or without the money, transport, health literacy or service access to obtain it, can still be told treatment exists even though they can’t access it.

Then come support determinations.

These are legislative instruments that can reduce funding for specified groups of supports in old framework plans. The submission says they can only be used for financial sustainability and are intended to keep plans aligned with what’s “reasonable”.

That matters. Reasonable and necessary has always been a participant test. Now the definition of reasonableness is being re-drawn into ministerial control.

A planning delegate may identify reasonable and necessary supports and apply a maximum. This submission says this may mean a reduction in amount, intensity or ratio of supports.

Individual assessment remains but government sets the targets; and that’s how social, civic and community participation support gets cut by 50 percent.

It’s not theoretical but a Budget measure with names attached.

For many participants it is the difference between a life in the community and a life managed indoors. The submission says these supports are “important to many participants” but “not essential to participant health and safety”. That’s the sentence that gives the game away.

The fraud section is easier. It’s real. Some providers have treated participant plans as cash machines.

The submission moves the NDIA beyond voluntary compliance into an enforceable fraud and integrity framework. It invokes the Fraud Fusion Taskforce and adopts the language of “identity is not optional” and “verify by default; trust by exception”.

This is also revealing. The new scheme will run on verification.

More monitoring. More investigation. More compulsion to produce documents. More civil penalties. More infringement notices. More compliance notices. More enforceable undertakings. Getting the scheme ‘back on track’.

Finally, automation.

The submission says the NDIA makes decisions each day supporting hundreds of thousands of Australians with disability, including processing claims and developing plans. Automation, it says, is necessary for efficiency.

Again, the administrative case is obvious. The Scheme is vast. Manual systems are slow, inconsistent and expensive. But this will decide things that affect people’s homes, therapies, transport, community access and daily support.

The Bill allows computer programs to undertake administrative action under designated provisions. Four are identified in the Bill, and more may be added later by legislative instrument. The submission says automation may eventually expand to other parts of the Act where it supports effective and efficient operation.

Submission 247 matters.

It may not be the loudest submission to the Senate inquiry; not be the angriest; and certainly not a peak-body protest note.

What makes it important is that it’s government talking to Parliament in its own language.

That language is revealing. Underneath, the direction is unmistakable.

Functional capacity will be standardised. Permanence will be medicalised. Treatment availability will be judged without financial or geographic context; and funding can be cut by ministerial instrument.

Social participation will be halved. Automation can expand. Fraud powers will deepen.

The Government says this protects the NDIS for future generations, but it also changes what the NDIS is.

It is the legal spine of a narrower NDIS.