Where the bill actually is

The Parliament’s progress record for the bill is unambiguous, and it is further along than the sector conversation suggests:

  • Introduced and read a first time, 14 May 2026
  • Second reading debate on 26 and 27 May, agreed to 28 May 2026
  • Consideration in detail, 1 July 2026, at which 12 crossbench and 18 government amendments were agreed to
  • Third reading agreed to, 2 July 2026

So it has cleared the House and sits with the Senate, where the Community Affairs Legislation Committee reports on 14 August 2026. Thirty amendments were made along the way, and twelve of them came from the crossbench. We have not read the amendments and make no claim about what they changed, but a government accepting a dozen crossbench amendments to its own bill is not the picture of a bill being waved through.

What the bill does, in the Parliament’s own words

The official summary lists the amendments to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013. Among them: define ‘functional capacity’; limit unscheduled plan reassessments; clarify that support needs must be directly related to a participant’s eligible impairments; enable the Minister to reduce funding for specified groups of supports; introduce plan end dates and renewal processes; refine the framework for assessing ‘reasonable and necessary’ supports; clarify the definition of permanence by introducing the concept of ‘all appropriate treatment’; and require consideration of a participant’s eligibility for other service systems when determining access to the NDIS. It also expands the Agency’s fraud and compliance powers and changes governance around pricing decisions.

Read that list against what we published on the morning of 31 July. There is no clause limited to children aged 8 and under. There is no date of 1 January 2028. There is no mention of Thriving Kids.

The two levers that matter anyway

Our reading, labelled as such, and built on the two documents below.

The department says the access change for the 8-and-under cohort “will require amendments to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013”. It does not say it requires a bill that names that cohort. Two items in this bill are exactly the kind of amendment such a change would be built on.

The first is defining ‘functional capacity’. That is not an abstract tidy-up. The department’s own carve-out for who stays on the NDIS is written in that vocabulary: children with “substantially reduced functional capacity” remain eligible. Put a statutory definition of functional capacity into the Act and you have defined the boundary that carve-out sits on.

The second is requiring consideration of a participant’s eligibility for other service systems when determining access. Thriving Kids is, precisely, another service system. A requirement to consider whether a child could be served elsewhere is the general mechanism through which a specific diversion becomes possible.

Neither of those is proof of intent, and we are not asserting that either provision was drafted for Thriving Kids. The honest statement is narrower and more useful: the 2028 change does not need a bill with its name on it, and anyone waiting for one as the signal that it is real is watching the wrong thing.

What to watch instead

If the levers are general and the detail lives underneath them, then the documents that decide what actually happens to a five-year-old are the ones made under the Act: the rules, the criteria and the definitions that give ‘functional capacity’ and ‘other service systems’ their operative content. Those are typically made after a bill passes, and they attract a fraction of the attention.

The near date remains 14 August 2026, when the Senate committee reports. After that, the thing worth reading is not the next bill. It is the first instrument made under this one.

A note on how this piece exists

We published a story on the morning of 31 July that left a question open and said so in its own methodology. This is the answer to that question, and it partly corrects the impression the first piece could have left: we described the required amendments as legislation that “does not yet exist”. That was true of a Thriving Kids-specific amendment, and it remains true. It was not true of the broader bill, which had already passed the House four weeks before we wrote it. We should have checked the progress record first.

How we sourced this

Every date in the progress list, the count of 12 crossbench and 18 government amendments agreed to in consideration in detail, and the full list of what the bill amends in the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 including the definition of ‘functional capacity’, the ‘all appropriate treatment’ concept and the requirement to consider eligibility for other service systems, are from the Parliament of Australia’s bill homepage for the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, read on 31 July 2026.

The department’s statements about the 1 January 2028 access change, the “substantially reduced functional capacity” carve-out and the requirement for amendments to the Act are from the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing’s Thriving Kids page, which we read in full on 31 July and reported separately.

We have read the Parliament’s official summary and progress record. We have not read the bill text, the explanatory memorandum, the addendum to the explanatory memorandum, or any of the 30 amendments, so this is an account of what the Parliament says the bill does and not a reading of its provisions. No claim is made that any provision was drafted for Thriving Kids, and none is made about the conduct of any member, party or department. The sections headed “The two levers that matter anyway” and “What to watch instead” are our interpretation, built on the sourced facts above.

Sources

  1. Parliament of Australia, National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 (bill homepage, read 31 July 2026): the summary of what the bill amends, and the progress record including the 28 May second reading, the 1 July consideration in detail with 12 crossbench and 18 government amendments agreed to, and the third reading on 2 July 2026.
  2. Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Thriving Kids (read 31 July 2026): the 1 January 2028 access change, the "substantially reduced functional capacity" carve-out, and the statement that the change will require amendments to the NDIS Act 2013.
  3. The Scheme Brief, Thriving Kids starts in nine weeks: the earlier story this one answers and partly corrects.

Spotted an error, or read the amendments yourself? Tell us and we will check it against the sources and log the outcome here.