You and your day

A long-time participant changes their support arrangements with a week’s notice and a worker is suddenly without those hours. A new participant arrives whose communication needs are different from anyone the team has worked with before. The plan reviews this quarter are running late, and several participants are anxious about whether their funding will continue at the same level. A migrant support worker mentions her visa renewal is being held up. A young support worker quietly tells the manager she is not coping and does not know who to tell.

Disability services in Australia exists in its current form because of a political achievement. The disability rights movement, building over decades and across several countries, produced the political conditions for the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The American disability rights leader Judy Heumann spent her life arguing that disability rights were a political question first and a service question second, and that any service system that lost sight of that distinction would eventually betray the rights it was built to deliver. Australian disability services lives inside that argument every day.

Reading the politics is part of running a disability service well. It is also part of how workers and providers decide whether the system is being held to its founding political promise.

Your community and clients

Disability services sits inside community in ways that vary sharply by community. A regional town with one provider and a handful of participants has different politics than an inner-city LGA with dozens of providers and complex political ecosystems. A disability-led community has different politics than a family-led one. A First Nations community using a community-controlled provider is in a different political position than a non-Indigenous one. Each community has politics that reach the support relationship directly.

Different participants have different politics. A young disabled woman with significant family advocacy is in a different political position than an older disabled man without family. A queer disabled participant is in a different position again, especially if her support workers are not affirming. A culturally diverse participant with limited English is in a different position again. Disability politics in Australia has been doing the work of recognising these differences slowly, and the work is incomplete. Disabled women, disabled people of colour, disabled queer and trans people, and disabled migrants face conditions that vary sharply from one another, and from the conditions faced by white middle-class disabled people for whom much of the public-facing politics has been pitched.

When a participant changes arrangements without warning, the politics of self-direction is at the door. When a migrant worker’s visa is held up, the politics of migration and care are at the door. The work is always already political.

Your Council and neighbourhood

Local Councils shape disability services indirectly but materially. Council planning, public space accessibility, transport access, library access, and community service provision all shape what is possible for disabled residents and the workers who support them. Council political composition shapes how supportive the local environment is for disabled people moving through it.

The local town has historically been built without disabled people in mind, and the work of retrofitting it is political work. Some Councils are politically active on accessibility. Others are not. The difference shows up in pavements, in public toilets, in transport, in events, and in whether disabled residents can participate in local politics in the first place. Disabled people, especially those with significant support needs, are often poorly represented in Council politics. Their workers, especially migrants and shift workers, are typically less represented again. Whose voice is amplified in local decisions, and whose is filtered out, is part of reading the politics.

Your state

State politics shapes disability services through health system politics, mental health policy, anti-discrimination law, and the long-running boundary question of where state services meet the federally funded NDIS. State systems carry significant responsibility for disabled people who fall outside or beyond the NDIS, including in mental health, in justice systems, and in education.

State politics also shapes how disabled people from particular communities are recognised. State multicultural affairs policy shapes how multicultural disability advocacy is supported. State First Nations affairs policy shapes how community-controlled disability services operate. State LGBTQ+ policy shapes how queer and trans disabled people are protected from compounded discrimination. The state-level layer of disability politics covers health, mental health, education, justice, and anti-discrimination, not just disability-specific announcements.

The nation

The national politics of disability services in Australia has been one of the most active in the country. The NDIS itself is a political achievement, and its current state is also a political question. Funding settings, eligibility politics, scheme integrity politics, workforce politics, and the long-running conversation about whether the scheme is delivering on its promise are all national questions.

Disability politics has had to do significant political work to recognise that disabled people do not face uniform conditions. The disability rights movement that produced the NDIS has been doing the slow work of recognising that race, class, gender, sexuality, and migration shape disability experience. The political settlement is still incomplete.

The national workforce conversation in disability services is also a migration conversation, a gender conversation, and a race conversation. The disability services workforce is overwhelmingly women, disproportionately migrant, and often paid wages that have not kept up with cost of living. Inside that workforce, the conditions are uneven. A migrant support worker on a temporary visa, a young Australian-born worker, a queer worker, and a First Nations worker each navigate the same scheme under different political conditions.

The region

Disability services across the Asia-Pacific is shaped by very different political settlements. Aotearoa New Zealand has its own disability politics, in some respects more politically integrated with rights-based frameworks than Australia. Pacific Island disability politics is shaped by very different community structures, with extended family networks playing roles that the Australian institutional model does not assume.

Migration flows are central to disability services across the region. Australia recruits disability support workers from the Philippines, India, Nepal, Fiji, and elsewhere. The political conditions of those countries shape who arrives, and the political conditions of Australia shape what those workers experience here.

Regional politics also shapes how disability is understood. The Australian model assumes formal services, formal qualifications, and formal advocacy. Migrant families bringing different expectations into Australian disability services are part of a wider political conversation about what disability support is for.

The world

Globally, disability rights has been one of the most successful political movements of the past sixty years. The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been ratified by most countries. The political pressure on countries to deliver on the rights it articulates has been intensifying. Australia is one of several countries trying to translate those rights into a publicly funded system, with mixed results.

The disability services workforce globally is overwhelmingly women, disproportionately migrants, and often racialised. The political settlement that has produced this workforce is similar across many wealthy countries. The political backlash against migration in many of those countries is reaching disability services that depend on the workers it targets.

The political backlash against rights-based frameworks more broadly, present globally now, is also reaching disability services. Industries that exist because of political achievements are politically exposed when those achievements are contested.