The Silence
As at 25 June 2026, the Bill is not yet law and remains before the Parliament. The Senate committee’s report, first due in June, has been extended to 14 August 2026.
I submitted my Senate submission by email on the first of June. Since then, nothing. No automated reply. No line confirming it arrived. Nothing to say it had been received, accepted, rejected, processed, or read. Just the quiet of an inbox that doesn’t answer back.
I sent it deidentified, my name withheld, because court undertakings required it. Anonymity didn’t make it cost any less to write.
Nine Days, Twenty-Four Pages
I spent nine days writing it. Twenty-four pages. Five years of my family’s life set down in order, dated and documented, while I was managing my own disability, my son’s disability, and my husband’s chronic illness. I wrote it the way the rest of the disability community wrote theirs. Sick. Exhausted. Frightened. Pushing well past the point where the body says stop, because the risk of staying silent was worse than the cost of speaking.
Why We Wrote Anyway
That is the part people outside this don’t always understand. We didn’t write these submissions because we had the time or the capacity for them. Most of us had neither. We wrote them because the alternative was letting it happen without a word on the record. So we found the hours we didn’t have, in the gaps between appointments and therapies and our own pain, and we wrote. We aren’t fearmongering, and we aren’t exaggerating. These are real, legitimate fears. The behaviours and outcomes we’re naming are ones we have already witnessed, already lived, already lost friends to. The result of bad decisions and support that either never came or came too late.
Not Predictions. Already Lived.
Twenty-four pages showing what this Bill will do if it isn’t rejected. Not predictions. Not worstcase scenarios. Documented, dated evidence of harm that is already happening under the way the system is being run right now. Everything Schedule 1 wants to put into law, my family has already lived. The only thing the Bill changes is that it makes that harm legal.
I knew when I hit send that I might not get a reply that meant anything. I didn’t expect anyone to understand what those twenty-four pages cost. You can’t see it on the page. It sits in the surgeries deferred and the therapy hours given up, in five years of being calm and organised and articulate in rooms that read my composure as proof I was coping, when it was the opposite. I was screaming for help.
The Bare Minimum
But I did think a government department could manage the most basic courtesy there is. An acknowledgement. One automated line. We have received your submission. Not understanding. Not gratitude. Just receipt. Confirmation that the thing I nearly made myself sick to produce had landed in front of someone, and wasn’t sitting unread in a void.
That is the very least. I didn’t even get that.
I keep thinking about everyone else who did this. People sicker than me, more tired than me, with less in the tank and less support around them, who still found a way to put their lives on a page and send it in. I think about them refreshing their inboxes, too. Wondering if it landed. Wondering if it mattered. Wondering if they made themselves this ill for nothing.
It Wasn’t for Nothing
It wasn’t for nothing. Not because the silence says so. The silence says the opposite. It wasn’t for nothing because the record holds what we wrote now, and it will keep holding it long after this Bill is decided, whichever way it goes. They can leave it unacknowledged. They cannot make it not have happened.
I am still glad I wrote mine. Glad even now, in the quiet, with an empty inbox to show for nine days and five years. I was sick of staying silent and calling it survival. I would rather be exhausted and on the record than composed and invisible.
Silence Is a Choice
So I will say the plain thing, because someone should. A fair process acknowledges the people in it. Silence is not neutral. It is a choice. And it tells you, more honestly than any reply could, exactly how much they think your evidence and your effort and your life are worth to them.
I disagree with their maths. So would you, if you could see past the careful wording the government reaches for. I’ll leave you with these numbers:
Numbers on a Page
4,500
Submissions people made to this inquiry in a matter of weeks. Most of us wrote them while sick, unpaid, and frightened.
More than $50 billion
What the NDIS is projected to cost this year. The number the government calls unsustainable.
160,000 people
How many participants the Minister says will be cut from the scheme, from 760,000 down to 600,000 by 2030.
Hundreds of thousands
How many the government’s own modelling shows will be removed from or refused access to the scheme by 2031.
$31,000, down to $26,000
The cut to the average participant’s plan.
2026, then 2028
The cuts begin in 2026. The assessment that decides who is allowed to stay does not start until January 2028. The supports meant to catch the people who fall through are not yet designed, not yet funded, not yet running.
Zero
The number of agreements from states and territories to give the same support to anyone forced off the scheme.
Their own advisory body has already named what this Bill will do. Material harm. I spent nine days putting dates to it.
We Built Our Own Ramps
There is one more thing, and it is the quiet one. For a Bill that decides who gets into the scheme, the people most affected were handed a 109-page legal text, about a fortnight to respond, and an invitation to contact the secretariat if they had accessibility requirements. Access on request. The onus on the disabled person to work out what they needed, ask for it, and hope it came in time.
I went looking on the committee’s own submissions page. Submissions closed. More than fifteen hundred of them published so far. The accessibility section was a single paragraph, telling me that if I had accessibility requirements I should contact the secretariat. I could not find an Easy Read version. That does not mean one does not exist. It means that I, a literate disabled woman who has spent five years deep in this system, found the process overwhelming and could not locate one. If I struggled, think about who is being left out entirely.
The committee supplied the legal text. The community supplied the access. The plain-language explainers and guides most of us relied on, to understand what was being done to us, were made by disability organisations, not by the Parliament. We built our own ramps into our own inquiry.
I am not the only one who noticed. The Law Council and national peak bodies asked for the timeframe to be extended so there could be genuinely accessible hearings and consultation. The disability representative organisations’ first ask was an extension to allow genuine, accessible engagement. The Australian Human Rights Commission flagged the limited consultation and the absence of any clear framework for measuring how the reforms would affect our rights. A separate parliamentary committee on human rights found the changes appeared retrogressive under international human rights law.
A process about disabled people that disabled people had to fight their way into. That is not a scheduling accident. It is the same logic as the Bill.
I am one submission out of about four and a half thousand. None of us should have had to write them. All of us did anyway.
You have the numbers now. They are the government’s own, not mine. The least any of us can do is refuse to call them sustainable
Sources: Children and Young People with Disability Australia (submission numbers; participant ages); The Conversation (scheme cost; average plan reduction); the Minister’s April 2026 announcement (760,000 to 600,000 by 2030); Advocacy for Inclusion (government modelling to 2031; reform sequencing); Every Australian Counts (states and territories submission); Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee (inquiry and reporting dates).
