NDIS and foundational supports come up a lot in my life, mainly due to my job. And I’m kind of sick of it. Not only is life under the NDIS only a reality for a small percentage of people with a disability, I feel like we’re rapidly losing the opportunity for foundational supports to be an actual useful service.
The focus at the moment seems to be on shuffling, not designing.
What do I mean? Foundational supports sessions seem to be focusing on budget shuffling. Eg the one I attended was effectively all about kicking ND kids off of NDIS and onto foundational supports – shuffling the budget expense from federal to state.
What about all the people who need disability supports right now and can’t get NDIS? Because that’s actually most of us. My fear is that the shuffling will end up with no positive outcome for those of us not currently within a system. That the shuffling of (eg) ND kids from federal to state will use up how the states are willing to include people and then when the rest of get the lung capacity to scream “what about us”, the state will say it’s too hard/expensive/whatever other convenient political excuse they pull out of their butts.
The other bureaucratic roadblock I can foresee is around permanent and severe. The state will tell you that you have a permanent and severe disability, and therefore need the NDIS. The NDIS, as we all see in the community, refuses to see things (eg MECFS) as permanent and serious. I wonder how many of us will be caught in this argument.
All for the shuffling of some fucking money.
I don’t know about other people but I don’t give a flying fuck which bucket of money my supports come from, and if they’re called NDIS or something else. I just need the fucking support. Actual support, not capacity building or peer support or self advocacy or other faux half-solutions. I need someone to do the things that I cannot do.
I’m still recovering from the flu and pretty weak, so I hope these words from my clogged up brain make sense.
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