The Senate committee has recommended the NDIS Amendment Bill 2026 be passed. Here is what it actually changes for providers on the ground.
The Senate committee report on the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 landed this week. The committee has recommended it be passed.
Before anything else: this bill has not passed yet. It has been through the House. The Senate committee has recommended it be passed. And it still needs a Senate vote and Royal Assent before any of this becomes law. So everything below is proposed. Some of it is close to certain. Some of it could still shift. I’ll tell you which is which as we go.
This isn’t about the politics. What matters is what changes on the ground, for you, for your team, and for the participants you support.
## What changes for participants, and why that affects you
There is a new definition in this bill for what counts as a reasonable attempt to contact a participant before their plan can be suspended or revoked.
Before this amendment, that phrase wasn’t defined anywhere. It was open to interpretation. Now, based on what the department told the committee, it looks like five contact attempts spread across three to four months, through the person’s preferred method, plus contact with a nominee or support network.
That’s a real improvement. A vague standard is dangerous for participants and dangerous for you as a provider trying to advocate for someone. A defined standard, even an imperfect one, gives you something to point to.
Where it falls short: the exclusions, the situations where a contact attempt doesn’t count against the participant, only cover three things. Being in hospital. Being in an institution. Experiencing homelessness.
Family violence isn’t in there. Coercive control isn’t in there. A participant going through a psychosocial crisis isn’t in there. Someone with a cognitive disability who can’t respond to a phone call the way the system expects isn’t in there. Someone in a remote community with patchy internet and no reliable phone signal isn’t in there.
That gap was raised directly with the committee. It wasn’t fixed.
If you support participants in any of those situations, this is something you need to know. Document your contact attempts and your participant’s circumstances properly, so if this ever becomes relevant, you have a paper trail that tells the real story. Good practice meeting a real gap in the legislation.
## The permanence test
To be assessed as having a permanent impairment, a person now has to show they’ve undertaken all appropriate treatment.
The amendment cleaned up some of the worst parts of this. It stops the agency requiring speculative future treatment. It excludes restrictive practices, so nobody can be pushed toward forced medication. And it limits appropriate treatment to what’s actually publicly funded, through Medicare, the PBS, or the public health system.
Those are real safeguards.
And treatment being available on paper in a capital city doesn’t mean it’s available to someone who’d need to fly out, wait eighteen months for an appointment, or navigate a system that was never built with their community in mind. First Nations disability organisations raised this specifically with the committee. The word available carries weight this bill doesn’t yet address.
If you run a service in a regional area, or if your participants include anyone with an episodic condition, a psychosocial disability that presents differently depending on the day, this is worth watching closely. A person can look functional in a single assessment and still have a very real, very permanent underlying condition. The bill doesn’t have a strong answer for that yet.
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## The change that affects your funding directly
The bill gives the minister power to make what’s called a support determination. In plain language, that’s the power to reduce or cap funding for a whole category of support, across the board, without an individual plan review for every participant it touches.
The amendments narrowed this. Daily living, transport, consumables, assistive technology, and home modifications can no longer be touched by a support determination. Employment supports and disability related health supports can be excluded by the minister. Around the clock supports are protected for the people who need them. And it’s now confirmed that support determinations only apply to Social, Community and Civic Participation funding, and Capacity Building Daily Activities.
That is a narrower version of what was originally proposed.
And the truth underneath it: the mechanism itself hasn’t changed. It’s still a ministerial power to cut an entire category of funding, for everyone in it, without looking at any individual participant’s actual circumstances. The peak bodies who otherwise support this bill, the ones who want a sustainable Scheme just as much as the government does, said this plainly to the committee. The amendments don’t fix the implementation risk. They narrow where that risk can land.
## What this means for you right now
The reset to Social, Community and Civic Participation and Capacity Building supports is already underway. That’s not future tense. Support determinations under this bill would add a formal legislative mechanism to a process that’s already happening.
Here’s where your attention goes.
**Know your participant mix.** Know exactly which of your participants rely on Social, Community and Civic Participation funding. Not as a general sense, specifically. Names, funding amounts, what those supports are doing in their lives.
**Know your contact documentation.** The new standard for contact attempts is an improvement, and it’s also a standard. If the NDIA ever needs to rely on it, you want your records to show every attempt, through every method, over the right timeframe.
**Know your regional and complex caseload risks.** If you run services in areas where treatment access is limited, or if you support participants with episodic conditions, flag those cases now. Build your documentation to tell the real story before anyone asks.
This bill is close. It’s not law yet. And the fundamentals of running a strong, well documented, participant first service are what carry you through any legislative change, this one or the next one.