The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was founded on the promise of choice, control, and empowerment for people with disability. It was designed to be a lifeline, enabling participants to access the supports they need to live full and independent lives. Yet, recent reports suggest a concerning shift, with an exclusive article revealing an alleged direct intervention by the NDIA chief to remove a prominent advocate from the scheme after reviewing his YouTube posts and deeming them to be encouraging rorting in the scheme. This news sends a chilling message and raises serious questions about the integrity and future direction of the NDIS.

The Alarming Allegation

The article, "Exclusive: NDIA chief intervened to throw advocate off scheme," paints a troubling picture. 

The chief executive of the National Disability Insurance Agency directed her most senior executives to revoke the access of a disabled participant after their advocacy work was slammed on conservative talkback radio as a “rorting” risk. The claims aired during a segment where then minister Bill Shorten was a guest.

The Saturday Paper - July 5, 2025 by Rick Morton:

“Hi everyone, I just need to be clear my priority is revoking access as quickly as possible for this participant,” NDIA chief executive Rebecca Falkingham wrote to senior colleagues on June 7 last year. “All other issues are a second-order priority.”

According to documents released under freedom of information laws, Falkingham, who was hand-picked by Shorten to lead the NDIA when Labor came to power in 2022, sent this note to four of her deputy chief executives, the general manager of the fraud fusion taskforce and the general manager of strategic communications after being told about a “Ben Fordham story” that had aired on 2GB the day before.

In it, Fordham took 90 minutes of YouTube videos from a disability advocate and NDIS participant and played carefully selected clips that he claimed showed the participant had coached their doctors and now others about NDIS “buzzwords” that are more likely to grant access to the scheme.

Fordham was following his colleague Ray Hadley, who had interviewed Shorten on the subject of NDIS “rorts” and played a short grab of the participant to the then minister, before adding it would “be nice” to see “where [they are] at and what [they’re] doing”.

On the Friday morning, after both shows had aired, and with no official investigation and no contact with any of the person’s medical practitioners, Falkingham issued instructions to her top lieutenants to remove the disabled person from the scheme.

Her email was sent at 11.44am. Four minutes later, there was an email from the deputy chief executive in charge of scheme integrity, John Dardaneliotis: “Have found … participant. So far have found $15k in supports in last 12 months. Team is putting stoppers as we speak. Other stuff also being progressed. Will update in a few hours.”

The participant had a $30,000 plan and had underspent their funding by half.

Within 18 minutes, immediate blocks had been put on payments and the agency was working on an eligibility reassessment focused on “determining that access revocation is legally defensible”.

The process would ultimately cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in time and legal fees. More than 10 months later, the person at the centre of the scandal was reinstated to the NDIS with more officially recognised disabilities than when they had their access revoked.

Throughout, however, Falkingham was clear she just wanted advice on revoking access. This was “what I want to announce today”.

A director in the fraud team had already suggested the agency initiate a plan review “which would ideally lead to an eligibility reassessment”, but after a day of seeking legal advice, over which the agency has claimed privilege and which has not been disclosed, it opted to “fast track” an eligibility reassessment.

On the afternoon of Falkingham’s first email, the access team’s branch manager, Cassie Hammond, provided the NDIA’s internal policies, guidelines and template letters on eligibility assessments to the three deputy chief executives and other key managers.

“I have attached the current manual eligibility reassessment letters that are in use,” she wrote.

“We provide a right of reply process at ER commencement which is 28 days.”

For reasons that are never explained, however, the agency sent a letter to the participant that provided only seven days’ notice for a right of reply. It was sent on June 11, after the long weekend, and they were given until June 18 to respond.

This timeline was not supported by the operational guideline used by the access and eligibility team, which was also provided to the deputy chief executives as advice.

Before that severely truncated timeframe had expired, the general manager of strategic communications, Shannon Rees, was chasing an update on the matter for her higher-ups.

“Hello team, RF [Rebecca Falkingham] has asked we track outcomes of such cases for the minister,” she wrote. “Do we have an outcome on this one yet?”

Cassie Hammond replied: “The seven days provided for notice of decision is up tomorrow, so we will be finalising the revocation.”

The NDIS participant provided 259 pages of evidence, old and new, in addition to writing their own statement addressing the central contention made by the agency: that they had potentially provided “false or misleading” information during an initial scheme access application. The evidence included an impact statement and a 12-page personal response to the proposed reassessment, in addition to the professional opinions of multiple treating specialists.

“The lack of compassion, and the urgency in which I have been forced to organise the demands of the NDIA to retain much needed support, has considerably impacted my health and wellbeing,” they wrote.

“I find it disheartening that the NDIA has given me only a week to assemble the necessary evidence (with no option for extensions), to contact my medical team and ask for their time, given how limited my functional capacity is and how strained our medical system is.”

The participant sent their response less than a day after the deadline. A letter advising they were going to have their status as an NDIS participant revoked was sent 41 minutes later. The decision had already been made.

Shortly after the official letter was sent, on the afternoon of July 19, a delegate informed her colleagues by email that she had “completed the revocation decision, and the participants [sic] access status will cease effective the 17th July 2024”.

She noted the participant’s response but said she hadn’t read all of it. She wasn’t required to. “Since finalising the decision, the participant has provided a response with additional evidence, however this was provided after the due date. I haven’t reviewed all of the evidence, because ultimately the decision has been made and will require an s.100 if it were to be reversed, but I did want to flag [their] actual response, particularly the last 3 pages.”

The participant fought the decision and was listed for hearing in the new Administrative Review Tribunal. Just before the case was to be heard, however, the NDIA folded. This mirrors the approach during the robodebt saga, where departments settled cases to avoid material being made public at a substantive hearing.

Elise Almond, a senior lawyer at Villamanta Disability Rights Legal Service, who is representing the NDIS participant, says one of the earliest internal emails that triggered this episode suggested the agency could contact the medical experts that had supported the participant’s access to the scheme, which could have ended their inquiries then and there.

“That never happened, and our client was more than happy for that to happen. In fact, encouraged it to happen and said so in their response to the agency,” she says.

That would have made sense, Almond says, if the agency was concerned about doing its job in safeguarding the public funds that go to NDIS participants. Instead, she said, this was a publicity exercise.

Advocates play an absolutely vital role in the NDIS ecosystem. They are the navigators, the interpreters, and often the last line of defence for participants struggling to understand complex plans, challenge unfair decisions, or simply access the supports they are entitled to. Their work is fundamentally about upholding the rights and interests of people with disability. To suggest that an advocate could be "thrown off" the scheme dueence to their advocacy is not just concerning; it's a direct threat to the very principles the NDIS was built upon.

“I would say there was only one outcome that was acceptable from the agency’s perspective, and that was the one they got,” she says.

“It seems to me to be a pretty clear overreach of powers. But at the tribunal, after they briefed a private law firm, suddenly it was, ‘Okay we are now satisfied that access is met’, for all of the diagnoses that were on the record originally, plus a new diagnosis that had come up throughout the course of the appeal that our client paid [for] out of pocket to go and get that assessment.”

This case is a particularly sharp example of the crisis in leadership that has beset the National Disability Insurance Agency since its inception and that has continued under the tenure of Falkingham, the former Victorian public servant brought to the federal arena to draw a line under a run of controversial choices made under the Coalition.

Following the illegal robodebt scheme, two of the key architects of the program, Scott Britton and Jason Ryman – found to have designed and implemented it by the royal commission but ignorant of the fact it was unlawful – moved to the NDIA in fraud and integrity roles. They remained there as the royal commission into robodebt began.

Britton and Ryman have since left the agency or gone on leave but the debt-raising practices that began or evolved while they were employed there have since met with criticism from the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO).

Last month the ANAO released an audit on compliance management at the NDIA, which found serious lapses in oversight at the agency. It found the NDIA was raising debts against participants without any legal basis.

The report cited an internal briefing that “uncovered a number of issues in the current Post Payment Review process”. These included a “lack of alignment with the NDIS Act (2013), resulting in the raising of unlawful debts, inaccurate or absent references to the Act in outbound comms, jeopardising procedural fairness … [and] an absence of an established quality assurance processes [sic]”.

These institutional shortcuts have created a historic liability of almost $10 million on this issue alone. They pose significant threats to disabled participants, who are increasingly subject to the vague threat of “compliance” after Labor’s sweeping scheme reforms. Those reforms were framed, after market research, as necessary to address an out-of-control fraud problem the government has never been able to define.

Similarly, the ANAO released a June 10 audit of the NDIA board and found it “largely effective” but noted board decisions did not always show “consideration of relevant legislative criteria” and the body lacked detail on regulatory compliance, did not always respond to non-compliance and was shy about demanding more information from the executive it was designed to oversee.

Now, as new price caps and rules are introduced unilaterally and threaten to damage access to therapy for participants, those worried about the pace of change and adherence to policy and the law have few places to turn.

“We have many, many calls with participants concerned about things that have happened, decisions that have been made by the agency, and often my response has been, ‘It’s not a conspiracy, they’re taking this action in response to this thing that you did,’ ” Elise Almond says. “But this case does illustrate that there are situations where the agency does genuinely do the wrong thing and does seem to have it out for individuals. So it is incredibly scary for participants out there. We can’t, in good faith, say, ‘No, they’re a big government agency, they have their policies, they will follow them, at least in that you can trust.’ Because this case shows that, no, you can’t trust that they will follow even their own policies.”

Villamanta is now fighting for further records under freedom of information laws, after a protracted battle that has seen the NDIA forced to release these damning emails despite initially attempting to keep them hidden.

“The actions of the Respondent [the agency] are highly contentious, with the revised decision including clear disclosures of those in the highest positions within the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA), including the CEO, knowingly rejecting the NDIA’s own procedures in their mission to remove the Applicant from the NDIS as quickly as possible,” Almond wrote to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner last month.

“The manner in which the Respondent triggered and conducted the eligibility reassessment has created skepticism regarding the Respondent’s integrity and adherence to their legislative obligations and policies.”

NDIS Minister Jenny McAllister did not respond to questions from The Saturday Paper about whether the conduct of the agency executive should be investigated, but a spokesperson for the minister said: “We are focused on ensuring the NDIS operates transparently and delivers fairer and more consistent decisions.”

A spokesperson for the agency said all participants have a right to review at tribunal and “new information” was provided that allowed them to reinstate access for the participant in this case before it went to hearing.

The Saturday Paper asked if the agency was confident the conduct of its executives was within the bounds of the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act that regulates Commonwealth Officials.

“The agency has at all times in this matter conducted itself legally and in line with the NDIS Act 2013,” the spokesperson said in a statement.

The Chilling Effect on Advocacy

Imagine being an NDIS participant, or a family member, relying on an advocate to help you navigate a system that can often feel overwhelming and impenetrable. Now imagine hearing that the very person fighting for your rights can be summarily removed by the scheme's leadership. This creates an immediate "chilling effect."

• Fear of Reprisal: Will other advocates now hesitate to speak out, fearing they too might face similar consequences?

• Silencing Participant Voices: If advocates are silenced, whose voices will be heard? Many participants, particularly those with complex communication needs or limited capacity, rely heavily on advocates to articulate their needs and concerns.

• Erosion of Trust: This alleged action further erodes the already fragile trust between participants, their families, and the NDIA. How can participants feel confident in a scheme where those who champion their rights are seemingly targeted?

A Pattern of Concern?

This incident doesn't occur in a vacuum. It aligns with broader concerns that have been voiced by the disability community for some time. We've seen discussions around the perceived "mishandling" of the scheme, including budget cuts, increased bureaucracy, and a narrative that has, at times, unfairly "demonized" essential roles like Support Coordinators and Plan Managers.

Support Coordinators are crucial in helping participants implement their plans and connect with providers. Plan Managers handle the complex financial administration, freeing participants from significant burden. These roles, like advocacy, are designed to empower participants. If the NDIA is perceived to be actively working against these facilitating roles, it raises fundamental questions about its commitment to participant choice and control.

What Needs to Happen Now?

This exclusive report demands immediate attention and transparency. For the NDIS to truly serve its purpose, we need:

1. Full Transparency and Investigation: The NDIA must provide a clear and public explanation of the circumstances surrounding this alleged intervention. An independent investigation may be necessary to ensure accountability.

2. Reaffirmation of Advocacy's Role: The NDIA must publicly reaffirm the critical and independent role of advocates within the scheme, ensuring they can operate without fear of reprisal.

3. Return to Participant-Centred Principles: All decisions and policy adjustments must genuinely prioritise the needs, choice, and control of participants, rather than focusing solely on cost-cutting or administrative convenience.

4. Open Dialogue and Co-design: The NDIA must engage in genuine, respectful dialogue with the disability community, including participants, families, advocates, and service providers, when making significant changes to the scheme.

The NDIS is too important to fail. It is a beacon of hope for hundreds of thousands of Australians. However, incidents like the one reported threaten to extinguish that hope. It's time for the NDIA to listen, to be accountable, and to recommit to the foundational principles that make the NDIS a truly transformative scheme.