Monique Ryan
Kooyong · Independent · Australia
“I second this motion and commend the member for Curtin's motion to refer the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 to the House Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs. This should not be a controversial request.”
“What about the clinicians, the researchers, the public health experts and the community organisations who have spent years documenting the devastating impact of gambling addiction? Some of them have been given days to review this complex legislation and provide feedback on it to a very limited extent.”
“After this sort of delay, the government has no excuses for not getting this legislation right. But it's rushing to introduce legislation that has been denied input from the public.”
“They're special relationships, the glue that holds us together. For Emily, Matt and Lucy, Noah and Maia, Millie and Rory—I know you share those special relationships and I know that they'll continue. I know that Rich knew that too. Parkrun is something we all do together. It's really symbolic of Rich.”
“We were fortunate to have people in our lives who gave us a sense of what was possible—doctors, engineers, teachers and scientists. We learnt the importance and the wonder of learning and science. There was always plenty of sport. We participated in everything, but particularly footy.”
“The government has not responded to that recommendation appropriately. Its proposals fall well short of that. There are ongoing and serious questions about the extent to which this legislation will provide any support or any protections for children and for vulnerable Australians.”
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“British American Tobacco Australia would receive about $900 million, Imperial Brands $550 million and Philip Morris a sweet $540 million. No wonder the tobacco industry is lobbying for a cut in tobacco excises! This House should be clear-eyed about that strategy from this industry. It doesn't mean that every concern raised about enforcement or about settings around the excise is wrong—some of those concerns are legitimate—but it does mean that when we hear these confident claims about what's driving the illicit market and what will fix it, we should be asking, 'Who is making those claims and in whose best interest?' There is no simple fix to the question of the tobacco excise. There's little correlation between tax levels and illegal tobacco trade.”
“I have consistently pushed for a stronger lobbying code of conduct and for proper cooling-off periods, but we don't have them and we won't get them in the ineffectual legislation that the government is about to put before this House. The ongoing and active influence of the tobacco industry in our politics demonstrates why those things are actively necessary. The current drive for a major cut in tobacco importer customs duties is an industry influenced campaign. The recent budget reported that tobacco excise and Customs duty collection will amount to more than $4 billion in 2025-26. A 50 per cent cut in the Customs duty rate would deliver a tax windfall to the multinational tobacco companies of about $2.1 billion every year.”
“It channels money to business think tanks and to lobby groups like the Australasian Association of Convenience Stores, which purport to speak on behalf of small business owners but which are funded by the tobacco industry. Research published this year found that 48 per cent of internal tobacco company lobbyists and 55 per cent of third-party lobbyists working on behalf of tobacco companies previously held positions in the Australian government. Many of those have moved into lobbying positions for the tobacco industry within 12 months of having left public office. This is despite the cooling-off periods prescribed in the government's milquetoast lobbying code of conduct.”
“Tobacco companies have used 'denial of harm' tropes for more than 50 years, but they're now trying to reframe this debate around the issues of crime and law enforcement, not health. They are deceitfully presenting industry aligned voices, funded voices and lobbyist voices advancing policies that serve commercial interests, but they're presenting them as neutral crime experts. This pattern of behaviour has been called out repeatedly by organisations like the Public Health Association of Australia. The tobacco industry funds economic reports based on flawed surveys and flawed analysis, and then it feeds them into public debate.”
“Let's face it: the tobacco industry is not a neutral stakeholder. It is a commercial actor, and its profits depend on the continued sale of a product that kills 66 Australians every day and whose interests are directly affected by the outcome of that ongoing Senate inquiry and of this legislation. We've also recently learnt from work done by journalists at the Guardian Australia that individuals with undisclosed links to tobacco industry bodies have been positioning themselves as independent law enforcement experts in Australian and international policy forums, opposing excise increases, lobbying for cuts to customs duties, advocating for the legalisation of nicotine pouches and adopting other positions that align directly with the commercial interests of the tobacco industry.”
“Interactions with tobacco executives should occur only when they are strictly necessary and they should respect the Australian government's commitments on tobacco control. Those guidelines expressly state that such consultation should be public. A secret session in front of a Senate committee is not public. Philip Morris was also permitted to give evidence behind closed doors in February to a New South Wales parliamentary inquiry into the illegal tobacco trade. Closed sessions allow the company to lobby privately for the sorts of policies that would directly benefit it, such as cuts to tobacco excises. They allow the company to do that beyond the scope of what it said publicly and without the media or the public being able to gauge the expertise of the witnesses or to scrutinise the advice that's been given to committee members.”
“In addition, the Victorian licensing scheme does not currently extend to e-cigarettes, vaping products or nicotine pouches. We need a national licensing and regulatory framework to bring all states into alignment. I also want to address the active and ongoing contribution to this policy mess from the tobacco industry. Representatives from Philip Morris recently appeared before a Senate committee examining the illicit tobacco trade in a closed in-camera session not listed on the inquiry's published program. This was permitted despite Australia's obligations under article 5.3 of the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control, which requires governments to protect health policy from interference by the tobacco industry. The Department of Health's own guidelines are very clear.”
“That is a legislative and a policing failure. While the total cost to our country of tobacco and nicotine addiction was estimated at almost $36 billion in 2021, collection rates for tobacco fines are lower than those for speeding infringements. Those operators treat fines as a routine cost of doing business. Greater penalties without the resourcing and coordination necessary to collect them will not break this business model. The city of Stonnington comprises part of the electorate of Kooyong that I have the honour to represent. In its submission to the Senate inquiry into this bill, the city of Stonnington noted that Victoria has only 14 inspectors to supervise the eight to 10,000 retailers statewide and that those 14 inspectors have to undertake visits in pairs for their safety.”
“The most recent child health poll from the Royal Children's Hospital Melbourne found that 26 per cent of young people aged 12 to 17 have used a nicotine product, mostly vapes, with 12 per cent currently using them and three quarters showing dependence. That means that one in 10 teenagers in this country are dependent on vapes. As a paediatrician I find those numbers deeply alarming. Addiction can happen quickly. Nicotine rewires the developing brain in ways that can create lifelong dependence. Young Australians who vape are three times more likely to take up tobacco smoking. And let's face it, the vaping prohibition has not protected young people. It's handed the youth nicotine market to criminal networks, which are selling unregulated products without ID checks in flavours deliberately designed to attract children.”
“These are sensible reforms. But I fear that the horse has bolted on the illicit tobacco market. More than half of all tobacco, cigarettes and most vapes in Australia are now purchased from an illicit market which exceeds the combined size of those for cannabis, cocaine, heroin and ecstasy. Through poor policy settings and public health measures, we have created one of the largest black markets the country has ever seen. Tobacco excise collection peaked at $16.3 billion in financial year 2020. The government is going to collect only $7.8 billion this financial year, even though close to two million Australians still smoke daily. We have turned a regulated and effectively taxed market into an unregulated criminal one. This predatory and illegal industry is specifically targeting young Australians.”
“Australia's illicit tobacco trade has exploded into one of the country's fastest growing criminal markets, costing $4 billion in the 2023-24 financial year. The Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission has linked criminal syndicates to more than 200 firebombings and at least three homicides since 2023. That violence is affecting suburban shopping strips, neighbourhoods and communities across the country. This issue is raised with me every week in the electorate that I have the honour to represent. The Combatting Illicit Tobacco Bill 2026 creates new offences for large-scale illicit tobacco activity linked to organised crime. It increases penalties across importing, possessing, buying, selling, producing and manufacturing. It expands proceeds of crime tools, and it enables enhanced law enforcement powers for serious tobacco offences.”
“If the government genuinely believes that this legislation is sound, then public consultation should strengthen its case. It should solidify its social licence, not weaken it. That's why I'm seeking to suspend standing orders to debate this motion.”
“Relationships break down. People lose their homes, lose their jobs and, in some tragic cases, lose their lives. The government has recognised these harms. The Peta Murphy led inquiry recognised those harms. The parliament again and again recognises these harms, and that's why process matters. The government can't tell Australians that gambling reform is too important to ignore and that we have to rush it through but it's not important enough to consult on. This motion asks for something very modest. It simply asks that, before this bill is put to the parliament, all Australians are given the same opportunity that stakeholders have been given behind closed doors, and that is the chance to read the legislation, the chance to consider it and the chance to provide feedback.”
“What about those people who are still receiving inducements under this legislation? Will they get their say? The answer is no. The people who live with gambling harm every day were not given a genuine opportunity to engage with this legislation. There are the parents who come to electorate offices like ours who tell us that their children are addicted to gambling, that gambling is an acute mental health concern for their kids. They don't get a chance to contribute. The health experts who've come out this morning—Mike Daube from Curtin University, Sam Thomas from Deakin—were given three days notice and a 45-minute Zoom briefing to scrutinise the detail of this legislation. They've called it what it is: a charade. Australia has one of the highest rates of gambling harm in the developed world. Australian families lose their savings.”
“That's 100 days for every page of the government's inadequate response. I was glad to see an exposure draft of this legislation released before it came to parliament. Exposure drafts are important. They allow scrutiny. They allow experts and affected communities to identify problems with legislation before a bill gets locked in. But the government didn't open up that exposure draft to public consultation. The government conducted targeted consultations only with affected stakeholders, including broadcasters and sports codes. What about the over three million Australians who experience gambling related harm every year? Was this process open to the parents whose children can still see three gambling ads every hour on a single TV channel under this legislation?”
“After years of campaigning from the crossbench and the opposition, the Prime Minister decided to take out the trash on the government's gambling reform right before the Easter long weekend as journalists were heading out the door and as the public headed out on a well-earned break. That was a strategic play from the Prime Minister. He wanted to minimise media coverage and he wanted to avoid public scrutiny and accountability. Then, weeks later, while all the journalists and every MP in Canberra were cordoned off in the budget lock up, the Prime Minister tabled his government's formal response to the Murphy review. He did that after question time, buried in 18 other government responses to overdue reports. That government response is nine pages long—nine pages in response to a 197-page review.”
“More than three years ago, something very rare happened in this place. There was multipartisan, cross-party, unequivocal consensus. That happened when a federal parliamentary inquiry into online gambling harm reached consensus on all 31 of the recommendations in the You win some, you lose more Murphy report. They were 31 recommendations agreed to by all members of the committee, across party lines. I don't have to remind the House—but I will—that that inquiry was led by the late Peta Murphy, a Labor MP who devoted enormous energy and some of her final months to this important cause. With one voice, the committee told this parliament that the harms caused by gambling were real, that the evidence was clear and that the time to act was now. That was more than a thousand days ago—a thousand days of harm, a thousand days of inaction.”
“If this legislation strikes the right balance and will generally protect Australians from gambling harm while providing industry certainty for the gambling industry, for broadcasters and for sporting codes, the government should be making that case publicly and transparently, but, if there are flaws, unintended consequences or missed opportunities, we should work to identify them before the bill is introduced, not after it's passed this parliament. This motion seeks to improve much-needed reform to gambling advertising. It seeks to ensure that Australians who live with gambling harm; families who have lost loved ones; community organisations who are working on the front line; and researchers, advocates and ordinary citizens have the same opportunity to engage with this legislation as the broadcasters and the sporting codes have had.”
“We urgently need to suspend standing orders to debate this motion. We need to do that because, while the Australian public has been forced to accept harmful and inexcusable delays to gambling reform, it should not also be expected to accept opaque law making and inadequate public and expert consultation. Consultation is not an obstacle to good lawmaking; it's how good lawmaking happens. If the government is confident in its policy choices on gambling advertising, it should have nothing to fear from consultation with the experts and with the public.”
“Leave not granted. I move: That so much of standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the member for Kooyong from moving the following motion: That this House: (1) notes that: (a) gambling advertising causes significant health and financial harm to more than 3 million Australians every year; (b) the Government's exposure draft of the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 was released for limited consultation only, including broadcasters and sporting codes with no public consultation process open to the millions of Australians who are directly affected by gambling harm and with the consultation period too brief to allow meaningful scrutiny; and (c) open letters from the crossbench as well as the Liberal Party, including from former Prime Minister the Hon John Howard OM AC and former Premier of Victoria the Hon Jeff Kennett AC, have recognised that the Government's proposed reforms to regulation of gambling do not go far enough; (2) recognises the importance of transparent consultation on significant legislative reforms; and (3) calls on the Government to undertake public consultation so that Australians affected by the legislation can engage with genuine co-design on the bill before its introduction.”
“I seek leave to move the following motion: That this House: (1) notes that: (a) gambling advertising causes significant health and financial harm to more than 3 million Australians every year; (b) the Government's exposure draft of the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026 was released for limited consultation only, including broadcasters and sporting codes with no public consultation process open to the millions of Australians who are directly affected by gambling harm and with the consultation period too brief to allow meaningful scrutiny; and (c) open letters from the crossbench as well as the Liberal Party, including from former Prime Minister the Hon John Howard OM AC and former Premier of Victoria the Hon Jeff Kennett AC, have recognised that the Government's proposed reforms to regulation of gambling do not go far enough; (2) recognises the importance of transparent consultation on significant legislative reforms; and (3) calls on the Government to undertake public consultation so that Australians affected by the legislation can engage with genuine co-design on the bill before its introduction.”
“So, what I'm proposing here with these amendments in the consideration in detail of the legislation is that the net asset value test for this concessional tax regime be indexed in line with the consumer price index, as was suggested in Treasury's 2005 tax review, in order to modernise and optimise the treatment of small businesses under our capital gains tax regime.”
“I spoke to this when I moved my second reading amendment to this legislation last night. For CGT purposes, a small business is currently considered to have a turnover of up to $2 million and net assets of $6 million, while in other tax matters the thresholds are $10 million and $12 million, respectively. I previously suggested that that definition should be made uniform and consistent across tax matters. This suggestion is supported by the Council of Small Business Organisations of Australia, the Victorian Farmers Federation and the Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman. Concessional tax regimes usually have indexed thresholds. That was acknowledged and respected most recently in the changes to taxation of superannuation.”
“The maximum net asset value test was first introduced in 1999, with the Howard government's discount. At that time, the threshold was $5 million for small businesses. That was lifted to $6 million in 2007. The $2 million annual turnover level has also been static since 2007. Were the government to adjust these thresholds to take into account consumer price index changes since 2007, today a small business would be one with a net asset value of about $10 million or an annual turnover of about $3.3 million. There's a clear need to increase these thresholds to account for inflation and for a different business environment to the one we see today rather than 20 years ago. The existing tax thresholds no longer reflect the realities or the operating scale of many modern small businesses.”
“While we're making generational changes to Australia's capital gains tax system, we need to ensure that wholesale reforms don't come at the expense of clear modernisations. The thresholds for small businesses claiming capital gains tax exemptions is such an area of clear modernisation. The existing CGT small-business concession regime, the SBC regime, provides a sliding scale of concessional tax treatment to business owners when they sell their businesses. That regime is preserved by this budget. Under the current Income Tax Act 1997, in order to qualify for the regime, small businesses must have either an aggregated turnover of less than $2 million or combined net assets of less than $6 million. Those thresholds have been unchanged for almost 20 years.”
“Some sources suggest that more than one in three Australians aged under 35 invest, and they're more likely to take on risk by investing in cryptocurrency and exchange traded funds. For them, those investments are an easier pathway to health than to housing. I'm pleased that small businesses will remain eligible for substantial discounts on capital gains, despite the new minimum 30 per cent rate on real gains. But I've heard from small businesses in Kooyong that thresholds for small-business CGT concessions have not kept pace with business growth and inflation. COSBOA is advocating that eligibility thresholds should increase. Debate interrupted.”
“They're most concerned about the proposed 30 per cent minimum tax on capital gains, with 48 per cent of respondents in Kooyong opposing the measure and 38 per cent supporting it. It makes sense to reduce incentives to defer capital gains realisations to low marginal tax rate years. It's fair to exempt income support recipients, but this measure disproportionately affects other groups with limited means. A young parent said to me, 'Non-property investment is one of the few remaining ways that a family can build towards a home deposit.' A renter told me, 'This feels like a blunt measure which will hurt the wrong people.' Young investors feel that they're being denied the opportunity to build their first foothold of wealth or to secure a home deposit.”
“Support for capital gains tax reform was also clear, with 43 per cent supporting the proposed changes across all asset classes and a further 24 per cent supporting reform where it applied to property alone. It's clear that many in Kooyong are prepared to support reforms that might not be in their immediate financial interest, because they understand and recognise the need to improve the fairness and the sustainability of Australia's tax system. But that support for reform does not translate to every aspect of this package, and the dominant sentiment from my community is that immediate tax reform should focus on property. Business owners, professionals, retirees and individuals in complex or vulnerable circumstances don't want these changes to extend to investment assets, business structures and family arrangements.”
“ACOSS has reported that Kooyong, the electorate that I have the honour to represent, is the electorate in this country with the second-highest total benefit from CGT discounts. It's a community that's worked hard, that has invested carefully and that has a sophisticated understanding of our economy. Yet in March this year I conducted a community survey of 931 constituents in which 73 per cent of respondents supported changes to capital gains tax arrangements and 85 per cent supported changes to negative gearing. After the budget, I conducted a second survey, which attracted 927 responses from every postcode in Kooyong. Most respondents, at 64 per cent, supported the government's changes to negative gearing.”
“So I support the reforms to CGT and negative gearing around housing that the government is proposing in this legislation, but the government did not flag its intention to extend CGT changes beyond housing before this year's budget. The case for reforming negative gearing and the CGT discount was made and largely accepted in the context of housing affordability, but, when the government announced on budget night that these changes would extend to all asset classes, including shares, start-up equity, venture capital and early-stage business, that caught many by surprise, not because the principle of increasing taxation across all asset classes, to approximate that of Labor, is inherently wrong—because it's not—but because there had been no consultation, no forewarning and no proper policy development process around those broader changes.”
“Negative gearing has allowed property investors to deduct losses against wage income, pricing out first home buyers across the country. Homeownership among 25- to 35-year-olds has fallen sharply. In 2022, it was reported that it took 11 years to save a 20 per cent deposit on an average wage. In 2023, investors aged over 60 accounted for 28 per cent of property investors, up from just 12 per cent in the year 2000. Economists have raised concerns about this market distortion for years, and it's been my position since I was elected in 2022 that we need to reform our tax system to address increasing intergenerational inequity and the housing crisis.”
“The government's Economic Reform Roundtable in August 2025 was a truncated version of consultation. The youngest attendee was 43 years old. The exclusion of younger Australians from a reform agenda explicitly framed around intergenerational equity was striking. Though the reforms which emerged from that roundtable should have been taken to the 2025 federal election, they were not. For decades, Australia's tax system has been skewed towards those who already hold wealth. The 50 per cent capital gains tax discount turbocharged investment in established residential property. It drove house prices from roughly four times the median income when it was introduced to more than eight times the median income today.”
“I commend the government for using its electoral mandate to pursue ambitious change, but generational reform requires serious scrutiny, broad consultation and careful design. When Bob Hawke set out to reform the Australian tax system, he took that to an election and he undertook broad based community consultation. The Hawke-Keating reforms—capital gains tax, fringe benefits tax and lower income tax—all endured because they were sense tested before they were locked in. John Howard spent over a year on reviews before introducing the CGT changes that this legislation will undo, and they lasted a quarter of a century. In contrast, Howard's Work Choices had no electoral mandate, it underwent only eight days of parliamentary debate, it killed his government and it was repealed within three years.”
“The Treasury Laws Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026 and the Income Tax Rates Amendment (Tax Reform No. 1) Bill 2026 form the first legislative tranche of what will likely be several to implement the government's 2026-27 budget tax reforms. This represents the most substantial attempt at tax reform in a generation. The package does four things. First, it replaces the 50 per cent capital gains tax discount for individuals, trusts and partnerships with cost based indexation and a 30 per cent minimum tax on capital gains from 1 July 2027. Second, it limits negative gearing for residential property to new builds from the same date. Third, it introduces a working Australians tax offset of up to $250 a year for workers earning labour income. Finally, it introduces a $1,000 standard deduction for work related expenses.”
“Parliamentary Budget Office analysis shows that moving the indexation date for HECS from 1 June to 1 November would save Australian graduates more than $3.2 billion over the next 10 years. That is $3.2 billion in stealth tax that the government should not be charging you. That's why, later this month, I will introduce a private member's bill to correct unfair HECS debt indexation. If you, like me, want to fix HECS, go to my website and sign the petition.”
“If you're one of the three million Australians with a HECS debt, the amount that you owe the government went up this week. Log into myGov and check. Every year, HECS debts increase with indexation on 1 June. Here's the problem. Over the last 12 months, your employer withheld money from your salary to repay your HECS, but those repayments weren't deducted from your HECS balance before this year's indexation was applied. Actually, they won't be credited against your HECS balance until much later in the year. When you pay off your mortgage or your credit card, the bank cannot charge you interest on repayments that you have already made; that would be illegal. But when the government does it, it's fine and normal.”
“I'm glad to see that former Labor minister Peter Garrett is now independently undertaking one, but it's a national embarrassment that a former Labor minister is crowdfunding for an independent inquiry into AUKUS. It feels like it's only a matter of time before we find ourselves crowdfunding for the submarines themselves! The biggest defence procurement in our history, spanning three decades and up to, or more than, $368 billion requires transparency from this government about timelines and risk and an honest accounting of what is being delivered and what is not. This government should commit to a full parliamentary review of pillar 1 of AUKUS—its delivery timeline, its costs, its risks and its strategic rationale—such is the basic obligation of oversight that this parliament owes to the Australian public on a commitment of this scale.”
“This is a program whose delivery is far from guaranteed and whose legal preconditions for delivery rest entirely on another government. If AUKUS were the NDIS, this government would by now have announced fundamental cuts in order to 'secure its future' so that it could grow in a more sustainable way. I support the principle of AUKUS. The partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States is vitally important for our national security. Our strategic circumstances in the Indo-Pacific require significant investment in our defence capacity. But supporting the principle of AUKUS is not the same as unconditional acceptance. The change announced on Saturday represents a meaningful reduction in the capability and longevity of Australia's submarine fleet. Last April, I called for a parliamentary review of AUKUS.”
“Under the United States federal law, the President of the United States must certify before any submarine transfer that its sale will not degrade American capacity and national security interests and that the US is making sufficient investments to meet both its own military requirements and its AUKUS commitments. If that certification cannot be made, no transfer can be made. There is no mechanism to compel the US to make that transfer, and there is no fallback. In 2025, the United States undertook a review of the AUKUS arrangement. Elbridge Colby, who led that review, had previously raised concerns that the United States lacks the capacity to spare us warships. We don't know what that review concluded. It's reported that by June 2027 we will have spent $11 billion on AUKUS.”
“Meanwhile, the US is not building submarines fast enough for its own navy, let alone ours. The US Navy has admitted that it will not reach a production rate of two Virginia class boats per year until 2032. Even that rate would be insufficient for it to supply Australia. The US Congressional Research Service has openly considered scenarios in which no Virginia class submarines are ever transferred to Australian command. The US Navy's own 30-year shipbuilding plan, released weeks ago, does not account for submarines built for AUKUS. In fact, the entire document mentions AUKUS only once, in a footnote. What the government has not said and what it consistently declines to acknowledge is that there are not just practical problems with the delivery of these submarines but legal ones too.”
“This week, Defence Minister Marles announced a significant change to the AUKUS plan. Australia will now receive three second-hand Virginia class submarines—not the two used vessels and one new and more capable unit that we had previously agreed on. The defence minister is claiming this as a win, saying that it reduces complexity. He has claimed it won't materially change the overall cost of AUKUS. He's happy that we're paying just as much for less. We're being asked to accept that the most expensive defence procurement in Australian history will give us second-hand submarines. The new Virginia class subs are more capable and they are easier to maintain. They have a 33-year lifespan. We have no idea how much service life the third vessel that Australia is getting will have left.”
“My question is to the Minister for Education. Three million Australians are in for a horrible shock next week. On 1 June, their total HECS debt will increase by over $1 billion. Compulsory repayments that they have made in the last 12 months will not be counted towards their debt before their HECS debts go up yet again. Minister, will you fix HECS by changing the timing of indexation so that repayments can be counted before graduates are hit with indexation?”
“The scheme's founding slogan was 'nothing about us without us'. It was a principle that many disabled Australians fought for. This bill does not honour that principle. In recognition of the negligible consultation timeframe that the government has afforded participants for this legislation, a timeframe that is inherently inaccessible for disabled people, I move: That all words after "the bill" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "is being examined by the Senate Standing Committee on Community Affairs, with a submission closing date of .29 May 2026, giving just two weeks for contributions; (b) action 25.2 of the NDIS Independent Review called on the Department to undertake 'deep public consultation on proposed legislative reforms' including with people with disability, families, carers, Disability Representative Organisations, providers and workers; (c) the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability found that 'people with disability are not sufficiently involved in government decision-making processes and developing laws and policies that may impact their human rights'; (d) Article 4(3) of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities require the Government to 'closely consult with and actively involve persons with disabilities, through their representative organisations' when developing legislation that affects them; (e) guidance from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet states that consultation on legislation 'should not generally be less than a month', and that where substantial feedback is expected, consultation should be even longer; and (f) short timeframes are inherently inaccessible and people with disability may require additional time to participate meaningfully in consultation processes; and (2) calls on the Government to extend the submission deadline for the Senate inquiry so that participants, families, carers, and disability representative organisations have at least four weeks to respond".”
“We would also need to fix the auditing and compliance system that currently profits from the scheme rather than safeguarding it, which is not the primary aim of the changes made in this legislation. The government's margin for error in implementing these reforms is vanishingly small—cutting supports before alternatives exist, changing eligibility before the assessment tool is even designed, granting the minister sweeping powers over support categories without adequate safeguards, restricting plan reviews within a week of royal assent. This is not reform done well. This is reform done fast and badly. People with disability in Kooyong and across this country deserve a scheme that is sustainable but gives them dignity. They deserve to have their voices heard in this place in the fundamental design of the system on which their lives depend.”
“It would mean establishing functional foundational supports that would enable skills development, self-advocacy, employment training, social and community participation, and carer programs. It would mean reforming the planning system not by layering more rules onto a failing framework but by replacing subjective decision-making with consistent, needs based budgets paired with genuine flexibility in how they're going to be used. It would mean addressing the fact that nearly a third of NDIS funding goes to just five per cent of participants but many of their group home arrangements are expensive, are poorly overseen and deliver poor outcomes for those individuals. Individualised living arrangements can deliver much better quality of life at lower cost.”
“This was a recommendation designed to protect the choice and control of participants who rely on flexible, individualised arrangements with unregistered providers. It's yet another decision that is at odds with the founding principles of the NDIS. We could take an alternative pathway with the NDIS, a path that would moderate growth to five to six per cent while improving outcomes for participants, but that would require the government to confront the structural drivers of cost blowouts rather than resorting to swingeing and ill-directed cuts. It would mean generally carving out early childhood intervention services. It would mean properly funding Thriving Kids for all school-age kids.”
“Let's remember that we're talking about the supports that help people with disability leave their homes to work, to manage their relationships, to participate in community life and to avoid social isolation. The $200 million Inclusive Communities Fund announced as a substitute is welcome in principle, but it is not equivalent, it is not adequate and it does not yet exist. We are removing supports before the likely inadequate replacement infrastructure is in place. The government proposes to expand mandatory registration to cover providers delivering personal care, daily living supports and support in closed settings, and I don't oppose that in principle. But the government has not included the self-directed registration category explicitly recommended by the NDIS Provider and Worker Registration Taskforce.”
“And it's been claimed in Crikey that the auditing system itself is corrupted by structural conflicts of interest. Fraud in Medicare amounts to $3 billion every year, which is as much as three per cent of Commonwealth health expenditure. But it is the NDIS which is being demonised as a national embarrassment, the blame for which falls disproportionately on participants, not the providers who are actually profiting from system failure. The government has chosen to tighten the screws on people with a disability while leaving the pathways to system abuse almost entirely intact. One of the most immediately harmful elements of this package is the scaling back of social and community participation budgets, with allocations to be cut by 50 per cent and capacity building daily activity budgets to be cut by 10 per cent from October of this year.”
“In that system, we've already seen algorithms that override experienced clinicians, fail to capture genuine need and leave people without access to essential care. If algorithms are going to determine who receives support and who goes without, their apparatus must be completely open to public scrutiny. The government has not made credible commitments to that sort of transparency. The minister has leaned heavily on narratives about rorting and fraud, in building a political case for these reforms, but that framing is incomplete. The Australian National Audit Office has confirmed that the quality and safeguards commission is only 'partly effective in exercising its regulatory functions' and that it does not have full visibility of the market that it purports to regulate.”
“Appeal rights are curtailed. The Administrative Review Tribunal will no longer be able to directly alter plan funds. It's worth noting that, currently, 73 per cent of the sorts of appeals that we see at the ART are successful. Assessment using the I-CAN involves a one- to three-hour structured interview, which will be conducted by public servants for whom an allied health background is not mandatory. Independent medical evidence no longer has to be considered. The model assumes that participants can reliably describe their own needs in a formal, structured setting—that they won't be masking, that they won't be exhausted, that they won't be overwhelmed. That assumption will fail for many people with a disability, especially those with autism and complex psychosocial needs. We have a cautionary precedent in the aged-care sector.”