NDIS Review final report: recommendations and what followed
The Review's Final Report: a quick summary
By Tristram Peters · Originally published 8 December 2023
Original article and dated context
Tristram Peters is Head of Participant Engagement at Clickability, helping participants find and connect with service providers. He also co-hosts the Grow Bold with Disability podcast.
The Final Report of the NDIS Review has officially been released.
Undoubtedly, this is a big moment for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), both for the people with disability who access the scheme and the people who work within it.
If you’re anything like me, you’re probably feeling a mixture of emotions, unsure what it all means in practice. After all, the Final Report makes a whopping 26 recommendations, with 139 actions.
To help ease some of this anxiety, I want to quickly explore the NDIS Review, to share what’s been done and what’s happening next. This is by no means exhaustive, but instead a quickfire summary.
As I’ll discuss below, I also need to stress that any changes, whatever form they take, won’t happen quickly. By all estimates, this journey will take five years to complete.
[Clickability update, October 2026: That was the original expectation, not a fixed legal timetable. Later legislation and phased reforms must be checked separately.]
With this in mind, let’s dig in:
What is the NDIS Review?
When will the NDIS Review’s recommendations be accepted?
What are some of the key recommendations of the NDIS Review?
What is the NDIS Review?
To understand the significance of the Review, we need to provide some context.
NDIS Minister Bill Shorten announced an independent review into the scheme on 18 October 2022, prompted in part by an increasing number of stories detailing the scheme’s prevailing issues.
With Professor Bruce Bonyhady AM and Ms Lisa Paul AO PSM named Independent Review Panel co-chairs, the Review’s goal was to ‘put people with disability back at the centre of the NDIS’ by:
evaluating the design, operations, and sustainability of the NDIS
building a more responsive, supportive, and sustainable market and workforce.
Over the past year, the Review panel has consulted with NDIS participants, carers, providers and workers, and the community more broadly to find out what’s worked and what hasn’t.
Now, the panel has shared its recommendations as part of its Final Report, with Minister Shorten saying the government will respond in full sometime next year.
When will the NDIS Review’s recommendations be accepted?
As I mentioned, nothing is going to change overnight, and the extent of that change is unknown.
Without the government’s full response, we simply don’t know how long any reform will take or how the recommendations will work in practice. We’re in a holding pattern until then.
This is a roundabout way of confirming: the Review has made its recommendations, we don’t know if they will be accepted or how they will work, but they herald the next iteration of the NDIS.
Although I don’t want to stoke that anxiety-fire, it’s time to explore what some of these recommendations are.
What are some of the key recommendations of the NDIS Review?
For participants, one of the biggest proposed changes is a shift away from using a medical diagnosis as the sole means to determine a person with a disability’s right to access the scheme.
Instead, the NDIS would look more closely at how much a diagnosis impacts that person’s day-to-day life – what the Review calls their ‘functional impairment’.
This means that the NDIS would revamp its eligibility criteria and clarify what’s ‘reasonable and necessary’, something that’s long been called for.
Other important recommendations include:
1. Introducing ‘Foundational Supports’
The Review identified the NDIS as an ‘oasis in the desert’, with many people fighting to get onto the scheme because they can’t receive necessary supports elsewhere.
To fix this, the Review recommends introducing foundational supports that exist outside the NDIS, helping with such things as basic home supports and early intervention, delivered through health services, schools, and other mainstream services.
The intent is for the NDIS to be just one part of a broader disability system.
[Clickability update, October 2026: The roles below are recommendations in the Review report. They are not evidence that a funded Navigator service is available to every participant now.]
2. Introducing ‘Navigators’
To help people with disability navigate this new disability system, of which the NDIS is just one part, the Review recommends introducing a new navigator role.
This role would combine Support Coordinators, Local Area Coordinators, and Psychosocial Recovery Coaches into one, helping people connect with services and access the NDIS if eligible.
These navigators would be local to you, but the NDIA would fund them directly and not through your own NDIS Plan. Every NDIS participant would be able to use a navigator.
The Review recommends that all providers be registered under the NDIS. This means no more unregistered providers like my local handyman. Well, sort of…
The NDIS would introduce a tiered registration system, so that some businesses simply perform a ‘light-touch’ registration or enrolment, to signal to the agency that they work in the scheme.
This is good: the likes of my local handyman can still register, but they don’t need to go through such a laborious and costly exercise to do it.
Minister Shorten committed to co-designing this with people with disability, to ensure that they still have real and meaningful choice and control when choosing providers.
Some miscellaneous points:
The Review calls for a change to Home and Living, with participants able to more easily choose and trial living arrangements before being committed to a particular home or model.
The Review encourages a new digital payments system that will potentially replace plan management when it becomes fully operational. Like my point above, any such change is a long way away, and we don’t even now if this will pass.
What’s next?
Okay, yes, this is a lot – and we truthfully haven’t even scratched the surface.
The Review was in-depth and its recommendations long, exploring a range of different ways to make the NDIS fairer, safer, and more sustainable.
But rather than worrying about any point, as I know I’m all too well prone to do, we need to instead wait for the government’s full response and for the co-designing to begin.
Besides, some things will pass, while others won’t. This is a five-year journey.
Clickability editorial update: October 2026
Read a recommendation as a question to investigate
The Review can help you identify what you want from the system: clearer information, a better housing trial or help finding mainstream services. Ask your current NDIS contact what available pathway addresses that need. A recommended future service is not an entitlement you can claim from your plan today.
Keep existing support arrangements separate from the report’s proposed changes. In particular, do not cancel plan management or coordination merely because the Review discusses a different future model. Check actual notices and current implementation information before making a transition.
Use the Review to plan improvement without inventing deadlines
Identify which recommendation aligns with a real service problem you can address, such as an inaccessible explanation or poor continuity between providers. Record the action, who owns it and how participant feedback will show whether it helped.
Maintain a separate list of current obligations and proposed policy directions. A tiered registration recommendation does not establish your current category, deadline or audit requirement. Use Commission guidance for those decisions.
Questions readers ask
Did the Review automatically change the law?
No. Recommendations and subsequent legislation are separate. Official guidance
Did the report make every provider immediately subject to the same registration rule?
The historical proposal is not evidence of an automatic replacement of a person’s current arrangement. Official guidance
Find a plan manager for the arrangement you use today
Tell Clickability what you need from plan management. Compare reviewed and rated providers and ask about communication, invoices and support with your current budget.
