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The NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 does not touch SDA funding. But for tenants who rely on SIL and Onsite Shared Support to make SDA living possible, the threat runs through every schedule of the legislation.

“They may not muck around with your SDA funding, per se, but they are certainly coming for your SIL funding and for the different types of funding that make living on your own possible.”

Senator Jordon Steele-John said that at our 2025 Annual Forum. He was right then. Read the NDIS Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future Generations) Bill 2026 with that line in your ear, and the architecture becomes clear.

The Bill was introduced to Parliament on 14 May 2026.

It does not touch SDA pricing. Tenants will read the Department’s reassurances and exhale. The bricks stay. The rails stay. The ceiling hoist stays.

What changes is everything that happens inside those walls.

Big Safety and Little Safety

At last year’s Tenant Voice National Forum and in our reference groups across NSW, Queensland and Victoria, we kept hearing two layers of safety. For 2026 we’re naming these as our focus: Big Safety and Little Safety.

Big Safety is the structural stuff – the things that hit the headlines: violence, abuse, neglect, people pushed into group homes they don’t want, or the systemic steering back towards congregate settings in the name of cost control. It’s the funding rules, the assessment models, and – as Senator Steele-John put it – the quiet dismantling of everything that makes living on your own actually possible.

Little Safety is the everyday cuts and bruises. The support worker you trust. The roster you can predict. The ability to say “no” and have it stick. The long delays, the repairs that take weeks, the “sweetie” and “honey” in your own lounge room. The anxiety of never knowing if your plan will be cut – a stress that people without disability couldn’t possibly imagine. Both matter. Both add up.

The Bill puts pressure on both. But Little Safety is where tenants will feel it first, and hardest.

The SIL and OSS risk: what the Bill actually does

The Bill itself does not directly regulate SIL or OSS. But it sets in motion two mechanisms that will reshape how those supports are delivered.

First, a new commissioning model for home and living. From July 2026, consultation begins on designing a commissioned approach for SIL – including the OSS arrangements that make independent SDA apartment living viable. Commissioning means government contracts a panel of providers rather than tenants choosing on the open market. The stated aim is quality and provider viability. The unstated consequence is that the person who walks into your apartment at 2am may no longer be someone you chose.

Second, a new Ministerial power to cap worker-to-participant ratios by legislative instrument. The Bill introduces a provision allowing the Minister to specify, for any support or class of supports, a maximum ratio of worker to participant. This instrument does not require parliamentary debate, and it is exempt from sunsetting – meaning it does not expire unless the Minister chooses to change it.

For tenants in OSS apartment models – typically structured around a 1:10 ratio where everyone has their own front door and shared support sits onsite – this matters enormously. If a ministerial instrument sets a more restrictive ratio, or if commissioning is designed around a different model of shared support, the OSS arrangement that underpins independent apartment living could be redesigned out of existence in the name of fixing group homes.

Neither the ratio power nor the commissioning consultation are presented as being aimed at SDA apartment tenants. But neither excludes us. The detail will be determined through instruments and consultations that we are not yet guaranteed a seat at.

The quiet squeeze: community life and the new legal test

From 1 October 2026, budgets for social, civic and community participation supports are being cut by 50 per cent, and capacity building daily activities by 10 per cent. The mechanism is a Ministerial legislative instrument under the new section 34A – which the Bill explicitly exempts from sunsetting provisions. Once made, this determination does not expire.

The Department says critical care is protected. That is true on paper. But for tenants who already face accessible transport shortages, venue access barriers, and the energy cost of getting out the door – this is the funding that lets us have a life, not just be kept alive.

Halve it, and the world shrinks to the four walls. Even when the four walls are SDA-compliant.

The Bill also introduces language that has never before appeared in the NDIS Act. Section 3(1)(d) is amended to state that the NDIS will provide supports “so far as is consistent with the financial sustainability of the scheme.” Scheme affordability is now a legal test for individual support decisions – not just a background principle, but a criterion the CEO must actively consider in performing every function.

There is more. The Bill introduces new sections 17A and 17B, which require the CEO to have regard to the financial sustainability of the scheme when performing any function. It introduces a hierarchy of evidence in which peer-reviewed published research comes before individual clinical evidence – meaning that supports for complex or rare presentations, for which published research is limited, face a higher bar. And it introduces the “directly arising” test, removing the “whole of person” compromise that advocates fought for in 2024, and replacing it with a requirement that needs arise “directly from” the qualifying impairment. For tenants with complex, overlapping impairments, that word “directly” will carve away supports for cascading effects.

For tenants with high and complex needs – exactly the cohort SDA was designed for – these provisions compound each other. The clause where future reviews will turn is the one that was never there before.

Harder to navigate when you need it most

Plan rollovers end under this Bill. When a plan reaches its end date, it automatically renews as an identical copy. The new plan takes effect immediately and unspent funds from the previous plan are not carried over. Critically, the making of a renewed plan is not itself a reviewable decision.

The Bill also tightens access to unscheduled reassessments. Only participants, plan nominees or guardians will be able to request them – providers will no longer be able to flag a needs change on a participant’s behalf. The time for the Agency to respond to such a request increases from 21 to 90 days. And appeal rights on the decision are removed.

If a participant cannot be contacted after “reasonable attempts” – a term not defined in the Bill – their plan can be suspended. If they remain suspended for 90 days without making contact, the CEO may revoke their participant status entirely. There is no minimum number of contact attempts specified, no requirement to try different channels, and no requirement to contact known providers or support workers who might reach the participant.

For tenants with complex communication support needs, episodic health conditions, or who rely on support workers to manage their affairs, this provision could operate with brutal efficiency. It also interacts poorly with the end of unscheduled reassessments as a safety valve: if you do lose contact with the system during a crisis and then return, you may be doing so into a plan that has automatically renewed as an out-of-date version of your previous life.

The mental safety cost of uncertainty

None of this is hypothetical for the people we represent. Our reference groups are already reporting sleep loss, hypervigilance about plan reviews, and the particular exhaustion of having to re-justify your existence to a system every time it reforms itself.

Across our groups, tenants described the fear of “computer says no” – and the Bill does authorise expanded automation, including for payment screening and plan management, with oversight provisions the sector’s own legal analysis describes as “a very thin meal.” The Agency’s new assessment and budgeting systems will be built on an undisclosed budget method, freedom of information requests for which have been blocked. We are being asked to consent to a new planning framework without knowing what the formula is.

Uncertainty is its own kind of unsafety. When you depend on funded support for every transfer, every meal, every shower – “we’ll consult on the detail later” is not reassurance. It is a year of not knowing whether the worker you trust will still be there.

And this is on top of the Little Safety issues our tenants live with right now: the hoist that takes months to arrive, the property manager who walks in without knocking, the “sweetie” and “honey” that marks you as less than adult in your own home. The Bill adds a structural layer of anxiety onto a daily reality that is already wearing people down.

Tenants need a seat at the table

Senate submissions on this Bill close on 1st June (extended from 29 May 2026).

Originally only fifteen days from the first read. For legislation that restructures how tenants with the highest support needs will live for the next decade.

That timeline tells tenants exactly where we sit in the consultation hierarchy. The Bill has been drafted, the timelines published, the second reading speech delivered – and then a fortnight is offered to the people whose homes and bodies the legislation reaches into.

What comes next is, in many ways, more consequential than the Bill itself. The commissioning model for home and living will be designed in consultation beginning July 2026. The new framework planning rules – including the budget method that will translate your assessed needs into a dollar figure – will be released a few months after that. The Ministerial instruments that will set worker ratios, cap funding categories, and define what a “directly arising” need looks like will all be made through delegated legislation, not primary legislation, with no requirement for parliamentary vote and, in many cases, no sunsetting.

Tenant Voice’s position is simple: tenants are not stakeholders to be consulted after design. We are the people who live the consequences of every clause, every instrument, every formula. The home and living commissioning model must be co-designed with SDA tenants in the room – not tenants as a category, but tenants who live in OSS apartment models and can speak to what those arrangements actually make possible.

Tristram spent 18 months fighting to get into his SDA home – conditional offers, wrong decisions, missed appeal windows, his life on hold. Greg described AAT battles where the fight was described as harder than the decision to have an amputation. They are the cost of being locked out of the room where decisions are made, not edge cases.

If you can make a submission before 1 June, please do. Half a page is enough. Personal stories matter more than legal argument. Speak to what Little Safety means in your home, what your OSS arrangement makes possible, and what happens to your independence if the worker you trust is replaced by whoever wins a government contract.

And if you cannot make the deadline, write to your Senators anyway. The Bill is not the end of this process. The consultations and instruments that follow are where the actual shape of home and living support will be settled.

The bricks may stay. Whether the life inside them stays is the fight in front of us.

Note: This article draws on the actual Bill text, the official government reform timeline, and the detailed legal analysis in the sector readthrough document. The 50% community participation cut is government policy announced alongside the Bill, not in the Bill text itself. The mechanism is section 34A, but the specific 50% figure is in the Ministerial announcement, not the legislation.