NDIS report due as agency's own data shows growth already easing

Miko Santos and Mencari Team

Aug 14, 2026

NDIS report lands today, and the government’s own numbers are quietly moving in its favour

The Senate committee examining Labour’s $37.8 billion NDIS overhaul hands down its final report today, as new agency data suggests the government’s own “unsustainable growth” argument is already softening on its own.

The Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee’s final report on the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 is due today, capping a process that began when the bill was referred for inquiry on 14 May. It has not run to schedule. A report originally due in June slipped after the government struck a deal with the Greens to extend the inquiry by eight weeks, producing an interim report and a handful of amendments: limits on the minister’s power to cut funding across an entire category of support in one move, and stronger transparency requirements around decisions made by automated systems. Disability groups say those changes were welcome but don’t touch the core of what they’re worried about.

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The bill would cut $37.8 billion from the scheme over four years and reduce participant numbers by roughly 160,000 over the same period. The government’s own account of the bill, published on the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing’s website, lists its purposes as clarifying eligibility, addressing fraud within the NDIS, and putting the scheme “back on a sustainable footing”. Labour has framed the changes publicly in the same terms: slowing growth to a sustainable rate and cracking down on fraud.

Skye Kakoschke-Moore, chief executive of Children and Young People with Disability Australia, said on Thursday the report needs to reflect what the community told the committee during the enquiry: that the bill is “neither reasonable nor necessary and should not pass in its current form.” She described the months of hearings, some of them “harrowing”, as work that “cannot have been for nothing.” Her organisation has been consistent on this point since June, when it warned the committee that the funding changes could “segregate people with a disability again”.

The Disability Advocacy Network Australia struck a similar note, saying it backs “genuine, well-sequenced reform that creates a sustainable NDIS” but that the bill as it stands “risks causing foreseeable harm to people with disabilities”.

Neither organisation is arguing against reform in principle. Both are arguing this specific version of it isn’t the right one, and both are making that argument on the record, hours before the committee that will decide the bill’s next stage hands down its findings.

What the growth numbers actually show

The government’s central justification is that NDIS growth has become unsustainable. That claim is worth testing against the scheme’s own reporting, not against either side’s press statements.

The National Disability Insurance Agency’s quarterly reports show 661,267 participants as at 30 June 2024, rising to 717,001 by 31 March 2025 and 739,414 by 30 June 2025. In annual terms, that’s growth of about 10.8 per cent to June 2025, below the 12 per cent the NDIA itself had projected in its 2024 Annual Financial Sustainability Report.

That doesn’t resolve the argument either way. It doesn’t mean the scheme wasn’t on an unsustainable trajectory over a longer horizon, and it doesn’t undercut the fraud concerns the bill separately cites as a reason for reform, which are a distinct issue from the growth-rate question. What it does show is that the specific number the government leans on most heavily in public, that growth is out of control, was already easing on the agency’s own data before the bill has cut a single dollar. Anyone assessing today’s report, in government or in the disability sector, is working from a starting point where that particular justification is softer than the rhetoric around it suggests.

Three bills, one fortnight

The NDIS report lands in the middle of a sitting fortnight where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Opposition Leader Angus Taylor are negotiating three separate pieces of contentious legislation at once. Albanese told Labour’s caucus on Monday he expects the NDIS changes to pass “in this sitting fortnight” after meetings with Taylor.

Those same two leaders have also met repeatedly this week on the Interactive Gambling Amendment (Gambling Reform) Bill 2026, which would cap free-to-air gambling ads at three per hour between 6am and 8.30pm, ban betting ads during live sport in that window, and bar athletes and influencers from appearing in gambling promotions. Its provisions are still being negotiated bill-by-bill rather than settled, with a separate Senate committee due to report on that legislation on 17 August. Albanese and Taylor have also been working on the News Bargaining Incentive, the scheme requiring digital platforms to strike commercial deals with Australian news publishers, where the two leaders are reported to have found the outline of an agreement.

Three unrelated policy fights are converging on the same negotiating table, between the same two people, in the same ten sitting days. Whatever concessions move on one bill are not happening in isolation from what’s being traded on the other two.

What happens next

Beyond today’s report, 1 October marks the start of the first phase of Thriving Kids, the state-run foundational support programme for children aged eight and under with developmental delay or autism and lower support needs. It is funded at $4 billion over five years between the Commonwealth and the states, with at least $1.4 billion of the federal contribution going directly to state governments, and it is intended to be one of the places some of the roughly 160,000 people leaving the NDIS will land instead. Whether individual states are actually ready to deliver those services by then remains an open question; several have previously said, on the record, that they are not.

The committee’s actual findings were not public as this was written. What’s already on the record, before the report lands, is a widening gap between the government’s framing of the bill’s necessits its own agency’s data on the problem the bill is meant to solve.

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