In the years he has worked for the National Disability Insurance Agency, Lawrence (not his real name) has narrowly escaped violence on multiple occasions.
He managed to avoid being beaten up at a hospital, was present when an angry NDIS participant threw a table through a glass window at a service centre, and witnessed another participant try to smash glass and run over staff in their power wheelchair.
He has been filmed and livestreamed while doing his job, received death threats, regularly taken calls from distressed participants who have threatened suicide, and had service centres he has worked at locked down or evacuated.
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His experiences reflect those heard as part of a review into the safety of NDIA staff, commissioned by the government in 2023 and conducted by Graham Ashton. It was initiated after a Services Australia staff member was stabbed at a service centre that houses both a Services Australia and an NDIS office.
The review made 36 urgent recommendations to improve the safety and security of frontline NDIA staff.
Guardian Australia can reveal that despite this review being presented to NDIA management in May 2024, it took the government 15 months before it shared it with staff and the union.
The Guardian has also seen documentation from the NDIA that shows that the agency does not plan to fully implement some of the recommendations – including basic physical security measures like ensuring service centres have CCTV, lockable barriers, and opaque glass barriers – until February 2027, nearly three years after the government received the report.
The NDIA says it is committed to implementing all the recommendations of the review and had already made considerable progress in implementing them.
Beth Vincent-Pietsch, the deputy national president of the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), says the NDIA’s timeframe in implementing the recommendations is “outrageous”.
“What they’ve done is piecemeal and not enough,” she says of the NDIA. “They need to have control measures in place now to deal with the fact that people are getting damaged now.”
Vincent-Pietsch cites various incidents, reported to the union, that have occurred since the Ashton review was presented to the government, including one in which somebody came to an NDIS service centre, poured petrol over themselves and threatened to set themselves alight.
“The list goes on and on,” she says.
According to NDIA data, from August to October 2025 there were 445 security incidents across NDIS service centres, including 16 high severity incidents, which included multiple threats by participants of suicide and self-harm, threats to harm or kill staff and treating physicians, threats of bombing a local primary school, as well as actual assaults.
An NDIA spokesperson says: “We place the utmost importance on the safety and wellbeing of our staff and that’s why we proactively commissioned this review and are implementing all recommendations.”
“The Agency began implementing safety and security initiatives in early 2024, well ahead of releasing the report, including deploying security officers to all our sites, updating Code Gray [lockdown] and Code Black [evacuation] procedures, updating front-of-house designs at high-risk services centres, upgrading CCTV facilities, rolling out mental health and leadership training, and introducing additional wellbeing and support programs across the Agency.”
The Ashton review, which commended the “professionalism and commitment” of NDIS staff, noted that frontline staff were often the focal point of “frustration and poor behaviours of participants and the public”.
“Usually when participants attend the front counter at a site, they may already be exhibiting a level of frustration that has required them to attend in person. If this ‘in person approach’ is not successful, then they are likely to become more unhappy than when they entered the premises and thus poor behaviour can result because of this sequence of events,” the review found.
Vincent-Pietsch and Lawrence both have huge sympathy for the frustration felt by participants.
“This is not to say that some of it’s not understandable,” Vincent-Pietsch says.
“These are some of Australia’s most vulnerable people … and they have seen a lot of change in terms of the supports that were available being wound back and their plans being changed and a lack of capacity to have their plans reviewed.
“I understand the frustration and so do the [Australian public service] employees. They really do care deeply about the participants in the scheme and they do want to deal with them face to face. We just need to ensure that the safety measures are there to make sure that those interactions are positive.”
The latest Australian Public Service census data found that 22% of NDIA staff had a disability, compared with 5.8% of APS employees generally.
An NDIA spokesperson pointed to the results of the NDIA 2025 staff census which had more than 80% positive responses across most health and wellbeing measures, which are above APS averages.
Lawrence says that he has noticed a shift in the tone of interactions between NDIA staff and participants since October 2024, when new legislation was introduced that affected some aspects of NDIS support.
“The issue is there’s wariness from participants about how changes to legislation are going to impact their funding,” he says.
“And when those policies and rules change, we’re the ones who have to communicate it. And really, in terms of staff safety, when you have to communicate difficult decisions to people, there’s always going to be, unfortunately, a potential for a rise in aggressive behaviour.”
Lawrence believes there are simple measures recommended by the Ashton review – such as providing secure meeting rooms, lockable barriers and CCTV – that could be implemented immediately and would make a huge difference to staff safety.
“At the end of the day, the agency lacks a lot of very basic things that you could put into an office … and if you did that staff would be safer.”
• In Australia, support is available at Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636, Lifeline on 13 11 14, and at MensLine on 1300 789 978. In the UK, the charity Mind is available on 0300 123 3393 and Childline on 0800 1111. In the US, call or text Mental Health America at 988 or chat 988lifeline.org.
