2026-05-28
THE FIGHT FOR THE NDIS WAS NEVER JUST ABOUT ONE BILL
By Senator Jordon Steele-John
The passing of Labor’s NDIS cuts is a blow to disabled people across Australia. Labor, the Liberals and One Nation joined forces to pass legislation that will slash $38 billion from the NDIS and remove at least 240,000 people from the scheme.
Labor could have asked wealthy corporations and billionaires to pay their fair share of tax. They could have taxed gas. But instead they cut the NDIS. They should be ashamed of that decision.
From the beginning, the Greens were clear: we would not support cuts to essential disability supports.
We also understood that parliamentary opposition alone wasn’t enough.
One of the most important parts of this campaign was making sure disabled people had the information they needed to understand what the Bill would actually mean for them and the opportunity to make their objections impossible to ignore.
Disabled people, families, carers, workers and advocates wrote submissions, contacted MPs, attended rallies, shared their experiences and organised in their communities.
The Government might have had the numbers in Parliament, but it could not simply pass this legislation without scrutiny.
The Greens used our position in the Senate to delay the Bill for eight weeks, securing an additional Senate Inquiry and creating the time and political pressure needed for the community campaign to cut through.
Those eight weeks mattered.
They gave the community more time to organise. They gave disabled people more time to understand the proposed changes and tell decision-makers what they would mean in practice. And they kept almost $1 billion in people’s NDIS plans for longer than would otherwise have been the case.
That is a significant achievement. And it demonstrates something important about the role of the Greens in Parliament.
We may not always have the numbers to stop bad legislation outright. But we can use our position to create space for communities to organise, to expose the consequences of government decisions and to force governments to negotiate.
That is exactly what happened with this Bill. The Government was forced to make serious concessions.
The final legislation now contains a number of safeguards that were not there at the beginning, including an appeals pathway for large-scale cuts imposed by the Minister, stronger protections around debts raised against participants, expanded rights to request reassessment, whistleblower protections for people reporting fraud, and a clearer definition of parental responsibility that recognises disability support is different from ordinary parenting responsibilities.
These changes do not make the cuts acceptable. They do not change our opposition to the legislation.
But they will make the impacts of this Bill less brutal than they would have otherwise been for some disabled people and families.
These safeguards were secured because of the ongoing community pressure the campaign against the cuts created, and because the Greens took that campaign into Parliament and refused to let the Government pass its legislation without a fight.
That is something our movement should be proud of.
There will be challenging times ahead, but we are not going to stop defending what remains of the NDIS, and fighting to reverse the cuts.
But importantly, disability justice is about more than the NDIS.
We also need to fight for something bigger than restoring what has been taken away. We need a country where disabled people have the right to live independently, participate fully in their communities, celebrate disability with pride and shape the political decisions that impact their lives.
The Labor Government has spoken a lot about “foundational supports” in its defence of these reforms. So let’s talk about what foundational supports should actually look like.
- They should look like genuinely accessible housing and healthcare. Physically, financially and culturally accessible.
- They should look like being able to marry or live with the person you love without losing essential DSP support.
- They should look like properly funded disability advocacy organisations, rather than expecting chronically under-resourced organisations to pick up the pieces whenever governments make decisions that hurt disabled people.
- And they should look like more disabled people in Parliament, so decisions about us cannot be made without us.
That’s just a start.
The NDIS fight has shown us what is possible when community campaigning and political action work alongside one other.
We delayed the Bill. We forced concessions. We helped expose the real consequences of these cuts. And we created space for disabled people to be heard in a debate that too often happens without them.
Now we need to build on that.
Everyone who supported the campaign to stop these cuts should also be incredibly proud of what we achieved. The disability community and our allies mobilised on an extraordinary scale. Together we held them accountable at every opportunity, exposing the consequences of its legislation and using every parliamentary tool available to delay, scrutinise and improve the Bill.
There are lessons here about what grassroots community action can achieve, even when we don’t have the numbers to win the final vote. This movement is bigger than one Bill.
Nothing about us without us isn’t just a slogan. It’s a political project.
And we’re only getting started.