#ndis

There are 760,000 Australians on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, the system that - if they feel like it and your personalised plan says you get to have it - provides funding for everything from personal hygiene care to support workers to therapies to assistive technology. It's already very hard for disabled people to get on the NDIS, regardless of your disability. It's near impossible to access most support and equipment without being on the NDIS. And the government has announced that they want that number to drop to 600,000 in four years. 160,000 of us cut off the Scheme - and countless more denied access. This will cause deaths. People will die and people will suffer because there is no safety net. The NDIS is the only option for most of us. Even private health insurance doesn't cover most of these things. Nobody will swoop in to save us.

The bill wants to give the (non disabled!) NDIS minister basically unlimited power to cut our funding. They're already planning what they'd do with that power. What rights they'll strip from us. What dignity and freedom they'll remove to make their budget look better.

The bill wants to force people to try every treatment out there before they're allowed to be on the NDIS. Including if the treatment is literally impossible to access. There’s a lot of us living in regional areas or out bush who can't just pop to the capital cities for specialists. This will especially hurt disabled First Nations people in regional and remote communities, who already experience limited access to healthcare. Oh, and it includes chemical restraint, too. The government has directly refused to exclude chemical restraint from the required process, calling it "trialling medication".

If you're australian and worried, the ABC did a good breakdown of the proposed changes.

I know australia stuff doesn't really pop up on the radar on this site, but I want everyone to know what's going on. What we're fighting for here. Your australian disabled friends might be NDIS participants fearing for their life, rights, and freedom. They might not be a participant and afraid these changes mean they never will have access. We deserve better. The government built a system with no backup plan, and now they want hundreds of thousands of disabled people to pay the price for their bad planning.

They are ALSO expected to WORK WITH CLIENTS if they themselves have COVID or other contagious diseases. Also with no PPE, not even a mask, provided or required.

Disability support workers are generally casual. No sick days, not even for COVID, not even if their work is why they got sick in the first place.

My disability support worker has had COVID 6-7 times. She refuses to work while sick during the contagious period - which her company does not like her doing and her income is heavily impacted by this - but has worked with broken bones and the like.

Personally I would fire my disability support company in a moment if someone with COVID showed up at my door. It's fucked up that the good support workers, the working class people, have to suffer the consequences of having integrity that their companies and the industry do not have. By refusing to kill their clients by bringing COVID to their homes.

It's so elementary but so many people don't realise that, like... the NDIS or social security or whatever it's called in your country doesn't exist to improve the lives of disabled people.

If the government wanted to give out "handouts", they would just do it. There would be no NDIS, no centrelink. The main, stated goal of these offices is to make sure as few people as possible are given government money.

That's why MyGov is so user-unfriendly. That's why centrelink makes you go through so many steps with so many arbitrary deadlines. They're padding it out for as long as possible in the hope that you die first.

The ironic part? If the government just gave out "handouts" to everyone who needed them, they would save money. Because their budget to keep the Disabled People Killing Machine running gets higher every year.

When you hear about the NDIS costing millions of dollars, the reporters saying it are using some tricky bullshit. They intentionally frame it as if the money given to people to live is what's costing so much. They conveniently don't mention the fact that, just like a business, the NDIS is expected to save money every year. So more and more money is spent on the systems designed to find excuses to kick people off it, enough that it offsets the amount actually saved.

Robodebt was only a "scandal" because of the public outcry. Robodebt was centrelink's greatest achievement at serving its purpose. That's why they're trying to do it all over again.

Obviously we don't have accessible infrastructure. Obviously we don't have the rights we need to survive. Obviously we're not given the tools to succeed. Disability is inherently oppositional to capitalism. For capital to grow, we must die.

I 100% agree, and personally believe that protection of sex workers, facilitating their unionization and providing equal protection to sex workers' labour is essential for disability liberation.

Sorry for the novel length post, this issue really pisses me off and I wanted to put my thoughts in order.

A lot of disabled people need specialized sex workers to facilitate sex with their partners, basically people who can position their bodies or even orchestrate specific motions for them. Even more disabled people will employ sex workers because, due to societal ableism, lookism and so on, sex workers are often the only way these people can access sex, because I mean, good luck getting dick on tinder when you're in a society that treats fucking an intellectually disabled bloke as morally equivalent to sex with a child, right?

I want to specify as well that disabled women and NB people also access sex workers often, so it's not a "disabled men" thing either.

Well! Where I live recently all sex-related services were cut from the disablity funding system, leaving many, many people, most of whom had been using sex services regularly before the implementation of the NDIS through preceeding systems, unable to get the pipes cleaned.

The liberal justification for it was a kind of faux-feminist, "no one is entitled to sex" line, with the usual fearmongering about sex work never being possible within a consent framework, all sex workers being trafficked women, yadda yadda. A thing that we could easily answer by effectively facilitating unionization for sex workers, right, but "sex worker's union" is a combination of words that the centrist liberal mind can't Scrabble out, so we're instead in this bullshit situation.

You have to understand, currently the primary political weapon against the disabled in Australia is that we're too expensive to keep alive.

It's all very,

"German worker, that is your money, too." Y'know?

So the moral demand is that we disabled must never indulge in anything but the bare minimum to keep us alive. Rice gruel and an empty room with a cot and a blanket is the best you should want for. You didn't earn being alive, and society has no responsibility to you.

Now, sex is not perceived as a "need," but rather a luxurious "want," especially by people who's access to sex is not obstructed by something like a disability. So, it's too expensive for Mark and Bethany, a couple who both have various levels of paralysis, to hire someone to enable him to have vaginal sex with his wife. Similarly, it is beyond the pale for Melinda, who has a facial difference and isn't exactly a hit with the ableist boys on tinder, to hire a sex worker for a fast and easy blowie so that she does not lose her goddamn mind. In fact, these people do not believe lack of blowies will lead to Melinda losing her mind because again, we live in a strange world where people refuse to acknowledge that lack of sex can, in fact, be psychologically harmful.

Further vital to this is the perception that sex work is not "real work," or is not fair work, or moral work, or some bullshit like that. Rather, these fiendish diabolical women (again, male sex workers do not exist in the anti sex work mindset) must be raping these poor innocent disabled people for money enabled by evil support services who want to, um, waste the public purse, uh, feeding the disabeld to fiendish hooker rapists? Or something? Anyway, in this mindset, the disabled can't consent because they're "children in adult bodies."

But also, to reiterate, the belief is simultaneously that sex workers can't consent. They're all victims of nefarious dubiously Chinese forces that want to enslave women, or they're victims of poverty (often correct!) who should be dependent on a church to keep them fed and alive (no!), or just whatever. The bottom line is that sex workers are all women, women can never consent to sex, therefore sex workers are all victims and by enabling disabled people to hire sex workers we are feeding innocent women to horrible violent men who are going to Texas up a Chainsaw Massacre in their pussyzones what with their Silence of the Lambs esque Conditions(tm).

It's this double-dehumanization that led to literally nobody winning. The sex workers remain struggling as a regular source of revenue was cut off, apparently solving the whole "forced into it by poverty" problem by exacerbating their poverty, meanwhile every disabeld person who was using sex work to deal with the basic human function of droppin loads was no longer able to drop any goddamn loads due to puritanism.

This is to say nothing of the fact that many sex workers are disabled and many disabled people end up in sex work due to societal realities like poverty and ableism in employment.

In this same country, it is legal to pay a disabled person a small percentage of minimum wage based on an inherently unfair assessment of their ability contrasted to a hypothetical able-bodied worker.

And so,

Many of us make far below poverty wages.

That's those of us who can even land a job. Often employers will just not fucking hire you if you have any accommodation requirements whatsoever. The disability pension has not had a meaningful increase in the entire time I have been alive, and I am not young.

This, of course, results in a lot of disabled people, most often women, ending up in sex work. We have "equity adjusted" wages but not "equity adjusted groceries," so before they can buy pork, they gotta swallow hog.

Of course the state entities responsible for all of this know about survival sex and sex work, but again, they ride on the perception that we are all innocent darlings that don't know about sex and can never seek it out. When convenient. Again, we are simultaneously all sexual monsters when it's more convenient to believe that.

So they create this specific bubble of extremely vulnerable sex workers, and then pretend they're not there, while obstructing adjacent systems like unions that would protect them.

That’s not even taking those all-day assessments from the OT which are needed to get any funding on my next plan into account. Most OTs have the same work hours too. Also the specialists appointments I need to confirm my disability effects what I say it does so they’ll even look at the OT’s report, and everything else. so I’ll likely end up loosing at least a few days of work at least by the end of it all. Oh and if you don’t do it fast enough they take the funding for the OT away because, “well you’re not using it”.

And then the gov complains about how too many of us “don’t want to work” and are on DSP? How do you expect us to hold down normal jobs when you keep making us jump through all these ridiculous hoops that can only be done during work hours?? You can only take so many days off and answer so many calls on the job before your employer starts getting the shits with you, even if they’re legally not supposed to. Again, I work from home and the only people I need to answer to right now are commission clients who are generally very understanding, but even that’s hard to balance with all this stuff when I need big adjustments done to my plan. The closest thing I’ve had to normal jobs have all been with specifically disability orgs who are understanding of this, but when all your employees have to jump through the same hoops every year it gets hard to manage. They’re understanding but they still need staff to cover shifts. And what about those of us with full-time jobs outside of the disability sector? A lot of people I know end up using up their holiday time to sort all this out.