The NDIS reform advisory committee warned in a parliamentary submission that the Australian government's proposed NDIS overhaul bill will cause 'material harm' to Australians with disabilities. The committee stated the bill in its current form 'misrepresents the founding intentions of the NDIS' and is 'retrogressive against the rights framework the NDIS Act exists to give effect to'.

The advisory committee, established in 2025 to advise federal and state disability ministers on real-world impacts of scheme changes, said the legislation 'demolishes the federated joint venture and concentrates unprecedented power in the Commonwealth minister'. It also said the bill has been progressed under a timetable that breaches Australia’s binding obligation to consult with the disability community.

The committee urged the government to redraft the bill in 'genuine partnership with the disability community'. It suggested that savings could be achieved through focusing on provider integrity, fraud enforcement, and pricing reform rather than cutting support services.

Rosemary Kayess, the disability discrimination commissioner, wrote that the NDIS was set up as a 'human rights-based scheme, ensuring that people with disability have access to individualised supports that enable dignity, autonomy, independence and participation in the community'. She concluded that the proposed reforms raise concerns about the preservation of the human rights framework.

The Commonwealth Ombudsman said improving the efficiency of the NDIS was a 'worthwhile goal' but needed to be balanced with integrity. 'As the robodebt scheme illustrated, efficiency gains are fundamentally flawed if they come at the cost of integrity – resulting in negative impacts on the people the system is supposed to assist and a significant waste of taxpayer resources spent unravelling a system found to be unfair or unlawful,' the Ombudsman warned.

Under the proposed changes, the NDIS minister would gain authority to reduce social participation budgets by 50% and adjust the meaning of permanence to require participants to exhaust 'all appropriate' treatment options before qualifying. The overhaul also introduces a standardised tool to assess 'substantially reduced functional capacity' and allows automation of certain administrative decisions. The Albanese government aims to reduce NDIS participants from about 770,000 to 600,000 by 2030.