NDIS Sustainability Breakfast, Perth / National LIVE Stream
About the event:
The National Disability Insurance Scheme has changed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Australians, and changed the country with it. But the Scheme now stands at a genuine inflection point. The 2027–28 Federal Budget lands against a backdrop of sweeping reform: New Framework Plans rolling out from April 2027, tightened eligibility through functional assessments, the shift of thousands of children into Thriving Kids and Foundational Supports, expanding mandatory provider registration, pricing reform, and the commissioning of plan management to a shortlist of providers. Taken together, this is the most significant redesign of the NDIS since it began.
The NDIS Sustainability Breakfast: Navigating the Federal Budget, the Reforms and the Path Forward for the Sector brings together sector leaders, policymakers, providers and people with lived experience to take stock of what these changes mean, not in the abstract, but in practice. This is a national conversation, held in person and nationally livestreamed across every state and territory, designed to move past headline reaction and into genuine, evidence-based dialogue about where the Scheme goes from here.
Across three panels, the morning moves deliberately from the fiscal to the operational to the human: from what the Budget actually funds, to what reform looks like on the ground for providers and participants, to what all of this means for the people the Scheme was built to serve. The goal is not simply to react to government policy, but to shape it, to give the sector’s leaders a direct, public platform to raise the questions that matter most, at a moment when those questions are still genuinely open.
This is a call to substance over spin: a room where sustainability is treated as a question worth asking honestly, not a conclusion to be assumed.
Panel One: The Budget and the Bottom Line
Title: Reading the Budget: Can the NDIS Be Sustainable, and for Whom?
Guiding question: What does the 2027–28 Federal Budget actually tell us about the sustainability of the NDIS, and who bears the cost of getting the Scheme’s finances under control?
Framing: This panel opens the morning with the fiscal picture, unpacking what the Budget commits, what it assumes, and what it leaves unresolved. It asks the question at the heart of the whole event directly: when government says the Scheme is being made “sustainable,” sustainable for whom, the Budget, or the people who rely on it?
Panel Two: Reform on the Ground
Title: Framework, Functional Assessments and the Sector Under Pressure
Guiding question: With New Framework Plans, tightened eligibility, expanding provider registration and pricing reform all landing at once, is the redesigned NDIS actually working for the providers and participants living through it?
Framing: This panel moves from policy to practice. It brings providers, delivery leaders and sector operators into direct conversation about what these reforms mean week to week, where the design is holding up, and where the gap between intention and implementation is already showing.
Panel Three: The People Behind the Numbers
Title: Nothing About Us, Without Us: Keeping People at the Centre of Reform
Guiding question: As Thriving Kids and Foundational Supports shift thousands of children out of the Scheme and eligibility tightens for others, are the people the NDIS was built for still at the centre of the conversation, or getting lost in it?
Framing: This panel closes the morning where the Scheme’s purpose actually lives, with lived experience voices and advocates speaking to what these reforms mean for dignity, choice and control. It’s a deliberate final word: numbers and frameworks are only ever a means to this end.
