Hi Government,
I’m a bit sick of hearing that the NDIS was only meant to have a certain amount of people on the scheme. It’s often repeated in news and social media posts (for example). Your propoganda isn’t working. People with a disability have not caused the failures.
As much as I’d like to, I don’t have the capacity right now to go back to the original documents and shred your policy throughly. Unfortunately, you cut ILC funding and left it a year before new projects could start under the replacement funding, which means I am unemployed, so between a bad week for flares and needing to find work, I cannot shred your policy for free. My energy is needed elsewhere.
But we can discuss the obvious overarching variables that were missed.
It’s clear that from the start of designing the government lacks literacy on disability. That explains why “health conditions” (which can disable you) are treated as different from disabilities. This sort of false chasm means that prospective numbers were never going to be counted accurately. You assumed disability is static. You failed to account for changing access to diagnosis and changing diagnostic criteria. Population numbers change over time. We are in a mass disabling pandemic. There are so many variables you seem to have just not fucking looked at.
It’s framed as “too many disabled people use disability services”.
Actually, you’re the failure.
You poorly designed a system. You let the system be used for fraud. People with a disability did not allow that. You did.
And yet you’re unwilling to admit you’re the failure, because political egos blah blah, so you plan to punish people with a disability.
It’s time to grow up. Admit you screwed up. Listen to (and pay for) the absolutely massive amount of knowledge that exists in the community to design a functional system. Heck, you can probably still shuffle some of it to the states, because most of us don’t give a flying fuck which budget or named program our supports come from, as long as we aren’t left to die.
But you won’t do any of this. Because ego. You gotta be right, no matter how wrong you are.
And the disability community will pay the price. But we will always remember it is ultimately your failure.
Have a good day, or whatever the fuck. I don’t care.
No regards,
Me
Side note
Someone asked on socials recently why they aren’t going after fraud, and this was my reply (slightly tided up):
Because fraudsters have the money to sue, the NDIS doesn’t actually track fraud and therefore I reasonably assume never have evidence for a case that could be successful in court. And most people with a disability don’t have suing money, so they can attack us without legal challenges.
