As a deafblind woman and NDIS participant, Jane Britt knows what keeps her connected to the outside world. Now, she’s watching the system dismantle such connections for women trying to flee violence.
She has had enough. She is tired of being scared, of waiting for the next outburst. Where does she start? She needs an accessible home. She needs to begin legal proceedings. She needs to stay safe while she works out how to access help.
Women with disability are being trapped in violent homes – and an unintended consequence of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) reform is making it worse, leaving fewer alternatives available to women trying to escape danger.
In 2023, the Disability Royal Commission reported that women with disability are twice as likely as women without disability to experience sexual violence over their lifetime. And often, they must navigate justice and housing systems that were not built with them in mind. When there is nowhere accessible to go, the only home is often the one a woman is trying to leave.
Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety (ANROWS) research led by Professor JaneMaree Maher is clear: without secure housing and service support, responses to support a woman leaving violence have little chance of succeeding.
In 2024-25, only 78 per cent of specialist homelessness services clients with disability who were experiencing family and domestic violence received accommodation assistance when they needed it, down from 87 per cent a decade earlier. Now, NDIS reforms are hitting an already strained system.
Providers are closing at an accelerating rate. Independent disability advocacy has not kept pace with surging demand. These are the supports that allow a woman to navigate housing failure: to find an accessible bed, to make a legal referral, to hold her supports together while she tries to leave.
At the same time, disability services often have limited capacity to respond to domestic and family violence, while family violence services often have limited capacity to address disability needs, according to ANROWS research led by Professor Sally Robinson. The architecture that helps women navigate that failure is being dismantled at the same moment access to safe, accessible housing is worsening.
Social and community participation funding, which gets women out of the home and into contact with people outside her immediate environment, is also being cut. The NDIS Amendment Bill, tabled 14 May, legislates a 50 per cent reduction those supports from 1 October 2026.
At a recent Press Club address, Mark Butler, the Minister for Health and Ageing, said justification for cutting this funding includes disability support workers not genuinely engaging with participants. But for a woman in a coercive control situation, a support worker may be the only point of contact to an outside world. The reform removes it on quality grounds, without considering its safety function.
Personally, this is the reform point that has concerned me most. I am not isolated, and this is only because of the support I’ve been given as a NDIS participant. As a deafblind woman, I want the guarantee of that community connection in case I should ever be in a position of needing to seek safety.
Therapist travel reimbursements have already been cut, by 50 per cent. For women with disability experiencing poverty, trauma or restricted mobility, attending a clinic is not feasible. Home visits may be the only point of contact with an allied health professional, the only person with consistent access to a woman’s home environment, and a potential lifeline.
Butler defended the Level E Medicare consultation item (extended GP consultations of 60 minutes or more) on the grounds that domestic violence victims need extended time with a clinician to disclose. The minister demonstrated his understanding of the interface between healthcare access and domestic violence, but only applied it to one portfolio, not the other.
He also confirmed that Supported Independent Living (SIL) participants can partially reallocate daily living budgets to offset participation cuts. Women living in private settings, including those living with perpetrators, have no equivalent reallocation pathway.
This all assumes a woman with disability will continue to have Scheme access. A new ministerial determination power in the NDIS Amendment Bill allows the Minister to cut funding for groups of participants with no merits review and no obligation to consult.
It tracks alongside Government modelling tabled this week, reveals 241,000 existing participants are projected to exit the Scheme; significantly higher than the publicly stated figure of 160,000.
We cannot quantify how many women with disability have remained in violent situations because of these compounding failures, because nobody has built the evaluation measures. And by the time the case studies emerge, the policy window will have closed.
The national discussion on NDIS reform has focused on budgetary cuts. Missing from it is any honest accounting of what happens when reform in one system collides with failures in another.
A gendered and disability-informed safety impact assessment, applied to every current and proposed NDIS reform measure, is the minimum any responsible government should deliver. It requires no new legislation and costs relatively little. Its absence is now indefensible. Because the bill for invisibility is never paid in budget papers. It is paid in women who do not make it out. She is still at the door. She is still struggling to get out. And the people whose job it was to help her find the key are, one by one, no longer there.