Five attempts over three months, and homelessness does not count. What the NDIS bill’s 30 amendments actually say

We have followed this bill through the positions the sector took, the hearing evidence and the committee report. That last piece found the committee making one move over and over: acknowledge a concern, then credit the amendments agreed in the House on 1 July with having answered it. It also said, in as many words, that the amendments themselves were unread, so everything in it was the committee describing them rather than the text speaking for itself. This closes that gap.

How we read them, because the method matters

There is no single document called “the 30 amendments”. The bill page records 12 Crossbench and 18 Government agreed to at the consideration in detail stage on 1 July 2026, and the amendment sheets published beside it include ones that were moved and not agreed, which makes them a poor guide to what actually changed. So we did it the other way: downloaded the bill as first presented and the bill as read a third time, converted both to text, and compared them. What survives that comparison is the law as the House passed it, whoever moved it. The trade-off is that a comparison shows what changed and not who changed it, so nothing below is attributed to an individual member.

Plan suspension: the contact test, spelled out

This was the concern that drew the most alarm in submissions, and the original bill simply required the chief executive to be satisfied that reasonable attempts to contact the participant had been made. The passed bill defines what that means, twice, once for suspending a plan and once for the parallel provision. The attempts must be made to the participant, or to their nominee, or to another authorised contact or representative if there is no nominee. Then:

• at least 5 attempts have been made to contact the person, using that person’s preferred form of contact;
• the last of those attempts made at least three months, and not more than four months, after the first; and
• if the preferred form of contact is not in writing, at least one additional written attempt in between.

Then the safeguard that is easy to miss and is the most consequential sentence in the whole set. An attempt does not count at all if, before suspending the plan, the chief executive becomes aware that at the time it was made the participant was in the care of a hospital or other institution, or experiencing homelessness. A person who goes uncontactable because they are in hospital, or because they have lost their housing, is exactly the person a lost-contact suspension would have hit hardest. The bill now says those months do not run against them.

The government’s own supplementary explanatory memorandum says where this came from: submissions to the committee identified risks arising from the absence of a clear definition of reasonable attempts, including inconsistent practices and inadequate safeguards.

Support determinations: the power is now fenced

The support determination power is the one the sector fought hardest, because it lets the Minister cut a percentage off a funding component in existing plans. As introduced it was open: a percentage, applied to a specified group of supports, across all old framework plans commencing after the determination. Four things changed.

First, the groups it can touch are now listed in the Act. A specified group of supports must be supports for assistance with social, economic and community participation or improved daily living skills, one or both, and the determination may set a different percentage for each. Anything outside those two is out of reach of this power entirely.

Second, the bill introduces an excluded subgroup: the determination may carve out one or more kinds of support within a specified group, and a note in the Act says Excluded subgroups will include supports in employment and disability related health supports. This is the specific thing the provider and representative consortium asked for on 16 July. The committee described it at 2.84 as an intent the government had signalled. The bill text is a step firmer than that: the mechanism is in the Act and the expectation is in a note. It is still an expectation rather than a command, because the operative words say the determination may specify an excluded subgroup, so what is actually excluded will be decided when a determination is made.

Third, the arithmetic changed with it. The reduction is no longer a percentage of the stated amount. It is worked out as the funding component amount minus the specified percentage of a net figure, and the net figure strips out whatever is attributable to the excluded subgroup. In plain terms, the cut applies only to the part that was not carved out, and the determination has to say how the carve-out is calculated.

Fourth, the reach narrowed. Instead of applying to every old framework plan commencing after the determination, it can now be aimed at a specified class of plans, described by features of the plans, features of the participants, or both. That cuts both ways: it allows a narrower application, and it allows a targeted one.

The review clause nobody has mentioned

The passed bill carries an entirely new section 4, headed Review of amendments, that does not exist in the bill as introduced. It requires the Minister to cause a review of how these amendments operate, timed to run alongside the review of the 2024 Getting the NDIS Back on Track amendments. Two features make it more than boilerplate. The people doing it must be independent of the Agency and of the Department, and the report has to be tabled in both Houses within 15 sitting days of the Minister receiving it, so it cannot quietly not appear.

Its terms of reference are set in the Act rather than left to the Minister, and they read like a list of the sector’s fears written down: access to the NDIS, participant outcomes including continuity and quality of supports, review and appeal rights, the viability and sustainability of the provider market, service delivery in thin markets, and the interaction between the amendments made by this Act and any foundational supports or related systems of support. That last one is the Every Australian Counts concern about foundational supports not being ready, converted from an objection into something that must be examined and reported to Parliament.

Three smaller changes that will matter to providers

The pricing change is the one to watch. A ministerial pricing power was the single most significant thing in this bill for providers, and the House added a requirement that the Agency’s advice, or a summary of it, reaches Parliament within five sitting days of a determination being made. It does not stop a determination. It makes the reasoning visible after the fact.

On automated decisions the House made one textual change, the seven-day publication requirement above. The rest of the response to that concern went into an addendum to the explanatory memorandum, which sets out how human oversight is meant to work but changes no operative words. That distinction is worth holding onto, because it is precisely the gap Senator Pocock’s dissenting report points at when it asks for automated decisions involving evaluative judgment to wait for a government-wide framework.

Plan management providers: the conflict rules were rebuilt, not relaxed

The plan management provisions were reworked in a way that reads technical and is not. As introduced, a registered plan management provider and any related party of it were barred from providing any NDIS support other than plan management, and no member of its key personnel could be key personnel of another NDIS provider. As passed, the flat bar applies to the provider itself, the definition of related party moves out of the Act’s general definitions and into the plan management provision where it does its work, and the conflict-of-interest requirements now expressly extend to the provider’s key personnel. The supplementary memorandum describes this as retaining the prohibition on plan management providers delivering other NDIS supports while enabling conflicts involving related entities and key personnel to be managed through deeds or arrangements with the Agency. Existing providers also gained a six month grace period before the relevant condition applies to them.

Whether that is a loosening or a tightening depends on how the Agency writes those deeds, and nothing in the bill answers that. It is a genuine open question rather than a rhetorical one, and it is the sort of thing that gets settled in administrative practice long after the reporting has moved on.

The loop this closes, and the one it does not

Our report story left an open question: four of the five sector positions we track were stated before these amendments existed, and nobody has gone back to ask whether the amended bill meets those concerns. Reading the amendments answers half of it, and the answer comes from the government’s own document. The supplementary explanatory memorandum begins: These amendments make targeted refinements to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 in response to submissions provided to the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee. The addendum is blunter still, opening with the words This addendum responds to concerns raised by the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee in its interim report, dated 23 June 2026.

So the loop is real and documented. The sector put submissions to the committee, the committee reported in June, the government amended in response, the House passed the amended bill, and the committee then pointed at those amendments as its reason for recommending passage. That is not a committee waving something through. It is a committee crediting a process the submissions themselves drove.

What it does not settle is whether the peak bodies think the changes go far enough. On the strongest test available, the one consortium position stated after the amendments has its two specific asks answered in the text. The four stated before have not been restated by anyone. That remains a question for those organisations rather than an inference for us, and the bill is still live: it was introduced into the Senate on 12 August, two days before the committee reported, and the second reading has been moved. Its status is Before Senate.

Sources

1. Parliament of Australia, National Disability Insurance Scheme Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026, as presented and read a first time (113 pages, downloaded 16 August 2026): the baseline text for every comparison in this story.
2. Parliament of Australia, the same bill as read a third time (114 pages, downloaded 16 August 2026): every quoted provision, including new section 4, the contact requirements, the support determination limits and formula, the pricing advice tabling requirement, the seven-day publication requirement and the transitional rule sunsets.
3. Parliament of Australia, Supplementary Explanatory Memorandum, amendments to be moved on behalf of the government (read 16 August 2026): the general outline quoted above, the account of what prompted the contact-attempt amendment, and the plan management description. Addendum to the Explanatory Memorandum (read 16 August 2026): the opening sentence quoted above and the human oversight material on automated administrative action.
4. Parliament of Australia, bill homepage (read 16 August 2026): the consideration in detail record of 12 crossbench and 18 government amendments agreed to on 1 July 2026, third reading agreed 2 July, Senate first reading and second reading moved 12 August 2026, and the status.

Methodology. The two prints of the bill were downloaded from ParlInfo, converted to text with a layout-preserving extractor and compared line by line after normalising whitespace and stripping the running headers, footers and margin line numbers that differ between recto and verso pages. That process leaves 16 substantive changes to the operative text; the remainder of the differences are pagination and page furniture. Every provision quoted was then read in the third-reading text in full rather than in the comparison output. Two limits are worth stating. A comparison of the two prints shows what changed and not which amendment made each change, so no change here is attributed to a named member or to the government rather than the crossbench, and we have not counted the changes against the recorded total of 30 because a single amendment can alter several provisions. Second, this is the bill as the House passed it. The Senate has not dealt with it, and anything it does will change the text again.

Spotted an error in this story? Request a correction and we will check it against the sources above and log the outcome here.