Equity and Dignity: The existential threat to those slashing the NDIS
“Aspire. Dream of a life where disability does not make your world smaller. Those are the terms of the contract. That’s how we’ll decide what you need.”
Forgive me for taking that promise, that law, that original intent, literally.
Forgive me for aspiring to a real life, when I was meant to aspire to getting un-disabled.
“We only want you to be independent enough for us to reduce your support, then take it away. You’ll be cured then.
Social and economic participation? On an equal basis with others?!
Yeah, nah. Just perform your ADLs like a circus pony for your next FCA. We will rewrite any difficulty you have in ‘I Can’ statements and cherry-pick reasons to refer you for eligibility reassessment.
Forget about independence as defined under Article 19. Forget about your real impacts and barriers.”
Never mind the cost.
Never mind if it renders us unable to do anything the next day. Or the next week.
Never mind if it skips over the cumulative moments and invisible struggles which define our daily existence. Which define our barriers to real participation. Which keep us shut out.
Never mind if disregard for the impact of our neurotype has already stacked the deck against us. Never mind if that is the bias deliberately built in to the rules.
“We don’t care if the outcomes we want to measure keep you housebound, isolated, financially dependent. We don’t care if that’s a recipe for other adverse outcomes.
Did someone say dignity? Risk? Dignity is irrelevant. So is risk, if it’s one we have underfunded.
You should be grateful if we can help you into an ADE. You’ll be more employed than the majority. How you wish to spend your days or contribute is irrelevant.
Oh, to hell with support for social and economic participation. We’ve done it so poorly, we’ll slash it for all of you. Including those of you we told to use your budgets flexibly when we shortchanged you on support for daily living.”
That’s the investment, you see.
It’s the assumptions built into our plans, and lists to which we are afterthoughts.
Those assumptions upon which quality is being defined and budget papers written.
Those upon which the original intent has been rewritten.
Those which erase the history of the NDIS fought for.
There is no real investment in us as people. Not in the way originally intended. Not the investment fought for.
It’s the return others get on those taxpayer dollars, but only in the most bureaucratically and politically digestible forms, amenable to kicking around.
It’s the assumption that social licence comes from investors who profit from the lives of disabled people – at least, those of us the narrative keepers think are ‘deserving.’
That social licence and deservingness should be defined by vested interests.
By those going under because they have been rejected by those they claim they want to protect.
By those intent on returning to the old ways and charity models left in the dust when we were promised the right to define support on our own terms.
By think tanks who have not turned their minds to what we think, and don’t want you to think too hard on that, either.
The assumption that the fair-minded taxpayer is not someone like me, my peers, or our informal supports.
The assumption that providers are not people with disabilities, or that they are not the highest quality providers by the measures of our individual needs.
That being the captains of our own ships doesn’t pass the pub test.
It’s the assumption that any of us can be churned through and spat out because a policy proposal manufactures a ‘scenario’ which rewrites the lifetime support needs of entire cohorts based on labels which were never accurate in the first place.
That the highest needs can be reduced to a single ratio: 1:3.
“But tracking outcomes as meaningful as those you have defined for yourself is too much work for quarterly reports.
We’d have to let you report that data.
Forget the value you might bring to Australia if you get to be who you are.
Our expectations for you are so low, we’ll fight you when you try to exceed them.
You should be grateful you get any support at all. We won’t even let you count on the certainty of that.”
So they bury us in administrative burdens and red tape, to make sure no one thinks we’re getting a free ride.
Even if we have no extra capacity to sacrifice, because it’s already substantially reduced.
When we come up for air to say this is not the NDIS we fought for? They bury us in lightning-speed consultations on everything but the details that matter, to exhaust us in the name of pretending we have any say at all.
They bombard the entire country with dehumanising narratives that drown us out to build the case for dismantling even more of our human rights.
They call us extremists and fear-mongers for fact-checking their own claims and misleading statements, and pointing out the predictable collateral damage in all its human cost.
They use the same tired playbook – the believable story they were advised to tell about existential threats to the Scheme, to manufacture consent for reforms they knew would hurt us, repackage with the lie that it is for our own good – and drown out any real stories which challenge the credibility of the evidence-base for their policy priorities.
They ARE the existential threat to the Scheme. To our dignity. To our very lives.
And then they announce their plans to throw us overboard, cohort by cohort, with a narrative that was always fiction.
That we did not need lifetime support.
That we needed a lower intensity cure.
That we did not have real and substantial support needs to break down our barriers to full inclusion and participation – and KEEP them broken down.
That they measured unmet need accurately in the first place, when so many were so very shut out that they missed us altogether.
That if they had counted us properly then, they would have no basis to question the integrity of our disabilities and support needs now.
“Being the author of one’s own story is for us, not for you.
This is the story we’ve written for you. This is the world you’re allowed to have.
Got a problem with that? We will make YOU you the problem.
We will abandon our promises and take a wrecking ball to social licence, to manufacture social licence for breaking those promises.
We will invest in turning the entire country against your human rights, in violation of those rights. And we will do it all on the taxpayer dime.
We will claim all the things you were told to aspire to are wasteful. Unsustainable.
We will claim this is about the NDIS being for the most vulnerable, while we let those with the highest needs die on our watch, under our brilliant new policies.
We will shut you out of briefings. Consultations. Drafting of legislation.
We will shut you back out of life, because you dared to try and live it, and dared to try and hold us accountable to the promises we made.”
When those are the lives they told us to write for ourselves.
The human rights they enshrined in legislation.
The futures they told us to imagine, on an equal basis with others.
Forced us to aspire to.
Forced us define in tangible outcomes.
The parts of the legal life contract the law says are ours to write.
“We were never going to uphold those. We can’t let you have the disability support you need to be who you are.
We definitely can’t let anybody think that's fair.
Because then everybody would demand we tear up the stories we’ve written for people like you.
We can’t have that.”
Because the narratives and policies and structures created without us, and the roles which speak over us in substitution for us, would not survive our goals and aspirations if everybody did.
No wonder our autonomy is framed as an existential threat to the Scheme enabling it.
No wonder the supports enabling our full and fearsome participation are being slashed.
That is reason enough for those policies and proposals to die.
Not our dreams. Not our rights. Not our lives, or our peers, or the children whose futures we also fought for and will fight for.
Not on our watch.
Equity.
Dignity.
What radically unsustainable ideas.