Community Mental Health Australia (CMHA) has lodged its submission to the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs inquiry into the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026. You can read it in full here.
Our position is straightforward, and it has not changed. We understand why the Government wants to secure the NDIS for future generations. The scheme has to remain sustainable, and that has never been in dispute. What is in dispute is the sequence. No one should leave the NDIS without a funded, accessible alternative already in place.
The Bill tightens access to the NDIS from 1 January 2028. The supports meant to catch the people affected – Foundational Supports and the $200 million Inclusive Communities Fund are still being designed, negotiated with states and territories, and rolled out in stages. The timing does not line up, and when it does not line up, people fall through. Transition without an established alternative is not a transition. It is a gap, and gaps of this kind cost lives.
This is not opposition to reform. It is the opposite. CMHA has argued for years that the NDIS, important as it is, was never built to carry the full weight of psychosocial support in Australia. Around 500,000 Australians live with serious mental health challenges, do not qualify for the NDIS, cannot afford private care, and have had nowhere to go. The shift toward supports outside the scheme is, in principle, the reform our sector has been asking for – if the conditions are right. They are not yet.
The submission sets out where the Bill creates specific risk for people with psychosocial disability: a permanence test that demands ‘all appropriate treatment’ regardless of whether a person can afford or even reach it; snapshot assessments that misread an episodic, fluctuating disability; category-wide cuts to the community participation supports that keep people out of crisis; plan suspension when a person is uncontactable, even though being uncontactable is often a symptom of acute mental ill health; and automated decision-making applied to judgements that should never be left to an algorithm. We are equally concerned about the cumulative effect of these measures on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants, who are exposed to several of them at once.
What we are asking the Committee for is simple: get the sequencing right.
Make sure Foundational Supports and the Inclusive Communities Fund are co-designed with people with lived experience and operating at scale before any eligibility tightening takes effect. Write protections for people with psychosocial disability into the primary legislation. Recognise and resource the community mental health sector as the natural home of these supports. Keep automated decision-making out of decisions about people’s lives. And publish a cumulative impact assessment before the Bill proceeds.
Our sector is ready to do this work. We have been doing it for decades, often without adequate funding. The people who need these supports have waited long enough. They cannot afford to wait in a gap while the system catches up to the legislation.
