Mental Health Australia says psychosocial supports outside the NDIS are underfunded

On 3 September 2026, Mental Health Australia published its submission to the Australian Government's consultation on the Inclusive Communities Fund. MHA supports the fund's goal but calls it "deeply inadequate in the context of significant cuts to personalised Social, Civic and Community Participation (SCCP) supports from NDIS packages". The submission closes by saying governments "must prioritise addressing the unmet need for psychosocial supports outside the NDIS to deliver effective and efficient personalised community participation support". This is the third time in four days the sector's federal peak body has described a supply gap in psychosocial supports. On 31 August, MHA's National Report Card put federal psychosocial funding at roughly $2.47 billion through non-government organisations plus about $6.07 billion through the NDIS, around $8.54 billion a year on MHA's numbers. On 1 September, MHA's Priscilla Brice cited roughly 500,000 Australians with psychosocial disability who have no supports at all. These are MHA's figures and characterisations, not government ones, but the direction of the argument is consistent: demand outside the NDIS is not being met, and support at the edges of NDIS packages is being trimmed. That has a practical edge for any PCBU whose workforce includes people living with psychosocial disability. Employers often treat external clinical care, community programs and EAP access as part of their control set for psychosocial risk. If the peak body is publicly describing that external system as underfunded and shrinking, leaning on it as a control becomes harder to defend. The weight moves back to what the employer directly controls: how work is designed, what adjustments are made and reviewed, and whether both are recorded as they happen. When external supports are thin, the contemporaneous employer-side record is what holds the risk position. MHA is running several federal policy lanes at once. For an officer or PCBU, the takeaway is narrower: check that your psychosocial controls do not quietly assume external supports that may not be there, and that named hazards, control owners, review dates and monitoring are documented with dates on the day decisions are made, not reconstructed later.