Two in five NDIS banning orders never expire, and most are against people rather than companies
We parsed every one of the 789 banning orders on the Commission’s register. 316 carry no end date at all; of the rest the median runs three years and the longest twenty. And 570 of the 789 have no ABN attached, which makes the scheme’s sharpest instrument overwhelmingly one exercised over individual workers rather than businesses.
28 July 2026
3,671 enforcement actions, three sharp spikes. How the NDIS Commission actually polices providers
We downloaded the Commission’s full enforcement register, every action since 2019, and counted it whole. The three biggest months in its history are not scandal clusters; they are audit deadlines run through the entire provider book in bulk, including 85 registration refusals issued on a single day. If your organisation holds registration, your dates are in that machine.
19 July 2026
We said we would read the first report on the new action plans. It reports commencement, not progress
Progress updates were optional, the promised indicators are absent, and the Advisory Council had asked for exactly the delayed-action tracking still missing.
30 August 2026
Australia’s disability strategy is halfway through. Its own advisers are sceptical of the scoreboard
The second implementation report mostly lists achievements across 167 pages. It also records the Advisory Council doubting that marginal improvements mean anything, and the newest action plans dropping targets on purpose.
29 August 2026
Your NDIS decision is wrong. You have three months, you can ask by phone, and the person who decided cannot review it
Section 100 is shorter than people expect and three of its provisions are routinely news to the person affected. The one that matters most: a review can be requested orally, and the duty to record and date it sits with the agency.
26 August 2026
From 1 October the minister can cut part of your NDIS plan. What the Act limits, and what it leaves to a determination nobody has written
Section 34A closes the list of supports a cut can touch, which is the assurance that held. The employment and health carve-out is a note on a power the minister may or may not use, and the 24/7 promise turns out to be a capped request in a different budget.
26 August 2026
We read all 56 supported employment submissions. The words subminimum, segregated and 2034 appear in none of the Department's eight themes
291,496 words. Of the 53 a machine can read, 36 discuss subminimum wages, 36 say segregated and 18 name 2034. One provider has committed in writing to ending the Supported Wage System by 1 July 2028.
25 August 2026
Securing the NDIS for Future Generations is law. The Senate changed the functional capacity test first
Assent on 20 August as Act No. 66 of 2026, after the Senate agreed 32 government amendments in a single day. An assessment must now count the assistive technology you ordinarily use. The whistleblower protections the Senate added start in July 2027.
25 August 2026
Sixty submissions, eight themes and a timetable that ran out in February. Where supported employment reform actually is
The Department received 60 submissions on the future of supported employment and published 55. It set out eight emerging themes, then extended the process into 2026 on a published schedule that ended on 27 February. The page still says stage two is currently underway.
25 August 2026
The NDIS Practice Standards: which ones apply to you, and what an auditor actually checks
They are named in nearly every enforcement action and explained almost nowhere. We read the instrument: 39 classes of support, two very different audits, and a verification module of four standards that contains none of the participant-rights ones.
23 August 2026
Which NDIS providers must be registered, and which can choose not to be
Compulsory for six kinds of support, optional for everything else. Where it is optional the choice is not the provider’s to make: only participants who self-manage or plan-manage may use an unregistered provider, so an unregistered provider’s market is bounded by someone else’s funding arrangement.
23 August 2026
Half of every NDIS infringement notice ever issued was issued in 2023
We parsed the whole register: 112 entries, 230 notices, June 2020 to 31 July 2026, and 115 of them fall in one year. Reportable incidents are the most common subject, and the register quietly changed how it records dates.
23 August 2026
Nine in ten NDIS complaints are about the agency, not providers. The biggest single subject is how long things take
284,794 of 315,771 participant complaints are about the NDIA itself, against 19,375 about service providers. The largest subject is timeliness. And the agency’s own handling collapsed to 35.8 per cent closed within 21 days in mid-2024 before recovering to 96.4.
18 August 2026
Of 29,991 closed NDIS tribunal cases, 892 reached a decision. The rest ended before a hearing
37,027 cases involving 33,134 participants. Ninety-seven per cent of closed cases end without a ruling and 68.6 per cent are resolved by consent. New cases are at 1.30 per cent of active participants, the highest rate published and close to double two years earlier. The most disputed support is capacity building, which is also the least used.
18 August 2026
Queensland has not signed the foundational supports agreement. We checked the document
Seven of eight states and territories signed. Queensland appears once in the agreement, in the parties list, and there is no Queensland bilateral.
21 August 2026
The Foundational Supports agreement is signed. It commits to one cohort, inside a $10 billion cap
The signed national agreement commits every government to children aged 8 and under with autism or developmental delay and low to moderate needs. Every other group is a future negotiation from the same capped envelope.
19 August 2026
Every NSW council had to remake its disability plan by 1 July. There is no public register to check who did
The Act requires councils to give their plans to Disability Council NSW for publication on its registry of DIAPs. The guidelines still point to a reporting portal with the placeholder text “[add link once online]”, and have since November 2022. We could not find the registry through four routes.
18 August 2026
Only one number in this monthly report keeps changing after it is published
Four editions of the Inclusive Employment Australia workbook, held side by side. The caseload has never been revised and neither have commencements. Exits have been cut every time, April’s by 9 per cent, and the change log that records lesser things says nothing about it.
18 August 2026
Two NDIS deadlines are both 21 days. The agency meets one 96 per cent of the time and the other 32
All seventeen Participant Service Guarantee measures, scored from the NDIA’s own Q4 2025-26 data. Access decisions have gone from 9.4 per cent on time to 95.7 in five quarters. Deciding a participant-requested reassessment, the same 21-day standard, has never topped 32.1 per cent. Three of the four worst measures involve changing an existing plan.
17 August 2026
Five attempts over three months, and homelessness does not count. What the 30 amendments actually say
The committee credited the House amendments with answering everything, and nobody had read them. Two prints of the bill, compared line by line: a hard contact test, a fenced-in cut power, and a new independent review clause nobody has mentioned.
16 August 2026
The committee said pass it, because the amendments already answered the objections
Four of the five sector positions we track were stated before the 1 July amendments the committee relies on. Three senators appended separate views, and they pull in opposite directions.
16 August 2026
The NDIS enforcement register grew by 63 entries in six weeks. The actions actually in force fell by 583
639 compliance notices from the January and March sweeps closed out, 478 on two days in August. Banning orders and revocations in force both rose.
28 August 2026
Published NDIS enforcement actions quadrupled in 2025. That is not the same as enforcement rising
Ninety per cent of the increase is one instrument, revocations of registration halved, and the policy governing what gets published was rewritten the same year.
10 August 2026
We asked whether this bill carries the Thriving Kids change. It does not, and it does not need to
The Securing the NDIS Bill passed the House on 2 July with 12 crossbench and 18 government amendments. It has no age-limited access clause, but it defines “functional capacity” and makes other service systems relevant to access.
31 July 2026
Thriving Kids starts on 1 October. The part that moves children off the NDIS needs a law that has not passed
State services begin 1 October 2026, but NDIS access does not change until 1 January 2028, that change needs an amendment to the NDIS Act, and children already enrolled are to be reassessed under the older criteria.
31 July 2026
Eight months of data on the program that replaced Disability Employment Services
A caseload of 253,370, a quarter of it suspended, and job search up eightfold. All eight monthly profiles read, including the category that merges part-time work with major personal crisis.
4 August 2026
From compliance notice to a $1.1 million Federal Court penalty: the Oak Tasmania case, end to end
Six admitted contraventions of the Practice Standards and Code of Conduct, 474 of the Reportable Incidents Rules, and a register trail that starts in 2020.
19 July 2026
5.5 million Australians, and an employment gap that has not closed: the AIHW’s 2026 snapshot
One in five Australians has disability; the working-age employment rate is 56 per cent against 82. The flagship report, decoded.
19 July 2026
The Scheme Brief reads the sector’s primary sources end to end and links every factual claim to the document we actually read. Quiet weeks are honest weeks: we publish when the record moves, not to fill space. New here? Start with how this site works.