22/04/2026
A Statement on Today's NDIS Announcement
Today, Minister Mark Butler outlined changes that will reshape how the scheme operates for hundreds of thousands of Australians. As a small collective of Support Coordinators working closely with participants navigating complex support needs, we want to respond thoughtfully.
This announcement is not simply good or bad news, it is both.
The disability sector is home to many unregistered providers who bring tremendous passion and genuine care to the people they support. Registration status does not determine heart, and it does not determine quality. What we do welcome, is a serious crackdown on fraudulent providers, those who have exploited the scheme at the expense of participants and loss of public trust.
Quality and safety matter. But so does consistency, the kind of consistency that comes from stable, ongoing relationships between participants and the people who support them. That cannot be regulated into existence, it has to be modelled and valued.
The announcement that approximately 160,000 participants, many of them autistic people and those with developmental disabilities, may lose access to the NDIS is not something we can receive lightly.
As the mother of an autistic child, I know from the inside how difficult it is to access support for someone who, on the surface, appears to be 'high functioning'. The barriers are real, the assessments are exhausting, and the fight to be seen, to have your child's needs genuinely understood, is one that many families wage for years. To imply that those needs are lesser, that they fall below a threshold worthy of support, is dismissive.
The removal or reduction of supports will not show up as a line item in a budget. It will show up in classrooms, in family homes, and in the health system. For my son, reduction in supports means reduced capacity for education, social inclusion, and the slow, careful work of building independence across his lifespan. It means that the supports that allow me to understand how to mother him well, how to help him grow, not just cope, are placed at risk. I fought hard to get those supports. The idea that they could be reclassified away is one that keeps a lot of participants awake at night.
Losing access to the NDIS does not mean losing the need for support. It means that need shifts onto families, carers, schools, GPs, community services, and the healthcare system. Systems that are already stretched.
We are also concerned about the reduction in spending on Support Coordination. Managing a complex, multidisciplinary support team is an administrative load that can genuinely overwhelm a participant already navigating significant challenges. Support Coordination, done well, is not overhead, it is what makes the rest of the system work well for the people it was designed to support.
What today's announcement reflects is the temptation to measure and manage disability support using frameworks borrowed from other government systems. But disability is not broadly similar. Psychosocial disability fluctuates. Autism presents entirely differently across gender, age, culture, and co-occurring conditions. A participant who appears to have 'lower support needs' may be in a period of stability that their entire support network has worked hard to create and maintain.
The NDIS was built on a principle that made it genuinely innovative. That support should be built around the individual, not the individual reshaped to fit the support. When we begin applying population-level thresholds to lived experiences that are, by nature, individual, we risk losing the things that made this scheme worth fighting for.
The danger of mimicking mainstream systems across the lifespan is that it ignores what disability actually looks like across a life. The early intervention a child needs, the independence-building a young person needs, the connection and capacity maintenance an older person living with a disability needs.
We will continue to support our participants through whatever changes emerge. That is our first commitment. We will keep doing our part, remaining reliable, consistent, transparent, and connected to the people and communities we work alongside.
The team at Lumen Collective
