All Australians should be angry with the government.

First they allowed private businesses to steal funding from disabled people.

Now the government is directly ripping funding away from disabled people.

Shameful.

Shameless.

#NDIS

Thank you. My head is overflowing and heart aching with and for our disability community.

Feeling big #DisabilityRage today about the #NDIS. This needs to be more of a thing.

Disabled people are expected to be quiet, grateful, polite, cute, inspiring, pitiful, invisible.

Their funding cuts are trying to make us small.

Let's get big. Let's rage.

why don’t we just get disabled people and old people to fight each other to death and whoever wins can have funding

The idea that stability of condition precludes people from support is terrible: creates a revolving door of medicalisation and relapse / flare / episode

If the government doesn't want to support disabled Aussies, hand the #NDIS over to the disability community!

I guarantee that we'd do a better job at making it a fairer, easier to use scheme that supported more disabled people with less fraud, admin and lawyers, and safer, higher quality services.

“We’re helping too many people with disabilities” is a hell of a line from a Labor government

Will lead to more abuse, neglect and exploitation.
Many people already in SIL don’t get a choice of where and who they live with, now people won’t even have the opportunity of a reprieve. It does very much feel like return to institutionalisation. So much for phasing out group houses.

The only answers that I've got are:
a) Scapegoating disabled people for the Cost of Living Crisis.
b) Helping out their mates in the disability industry
c) Being ableist jerks: Getting a kick out of kicking disabled people.
d) All of the above.

This is some twisted evil shit.

There's zero care here.

Disabled people have been reduced to numbers on a page to be politically manipulated.

And I've been asking myself - why? Why do this to us?

It was afterall the government who manufactured this supposed CRISIS in the NDIS. No one made them do this.

They want to indiscriminately cut funding to support disabled people to go out of their homes.

Q: Where's the plan to invest in in-home healthcare care and other services, more Telehealth services, and home delivery services since we can't go out anywhere?

A: You can rot at home for all we care.

They want to restrict plan managers and support coordinations to their own lists
of selected organisations.

Q: What about my wonderful (small business) support people? What happens to them?

A: Not our mates. Into the bin!

What I hate most about the announced changes to the #NDIS is the absence of care or respect for disabled people, their families and supporters.

Ok, they want to reduce NDIS
participants numbers.

Q: Where's the plan to carefully transition their essential care elsewhere?

A: Who cares! Yeet them.

#NDIS Participant First *again*:

"We received 211 expressions of interest and had only 10 places available. All spots are now filled, and you were not selected this time."

A huge thirst for users to give input.

But not enough spots for demand or a representative sample of participants and carers.

Question: Why do you think you're a complex client?

Me: Because I can't get anyone to understand that I have complex disability needs.

I'm not frightened of a disabled Black person calling out in distress.

I am frightened of a gang of professionals dismissing that person's concerns, showing zero concern for their distress and labelling them a hassasser.

For that could be me. That has been me.

Thank you 😊

I'm kind of glad it's not just me but also very unhappy that it's not just me

I've not talked about the racism involved in this incident because that's not my place and I'm not the expert on this. I've amplified and shared Black perspectives on this incident in my IG account.

I want to see professionals and organisations enthusiastically receiving feedback from disabled people. Sitting and engaging with it. Believing, supporting and taking corrective action quickly. Diving in to learn more. Wanting disabled people to be happy, safe and satisfied. Being our champions.

Professionals need to maintain their professionalism towards disabled people.

This includes not doing harm to disabled people, caring about disabled people's wellbeing, ensuring continuity of care, treating disabled people as adults, not tone-policing, and not being ableist, racist or sexist.

Disabled people must be *supported* to share lived experiences and to speak up for themselves.

The labour and risk of doing this should be respected and acknowledged.

The distress that comes with this should be expected and carefully supported.

People must learn from disabled people and change.

What needs to change?

Lived experience needs to be valued and treated as a precious commodity. People need to be paid for lived experience work. This work should be properly attributed. Attempts to summarise it must be carefully checked with the author. It should be celebrated and promoted.

The biggest sting is when these attacks come from professionals who promote themselves as neuroaffirming, trauma informed, etc and have lived experience themselves.

I've trusted professionals because they have lived experience, opened up to them and BAM! They turn angry and rejecting.

Traumatic.

I've been called names ("disgusting"), yelled over, told my views and observations are incorrect, and I've been cut off from communication and services.

I'm treated like a naughty, ungrateful, mean child.

They close ranks. Call in their supervisor. Dare me to report them.

This is ableism.

I've experienced similar defensive behaviour when receiving disability services and sharing disability lived experience. When I'm in a disabled role.

Some organisations and professionals say they welcome feedback, but as soon as you speak up as disabled person, they switch into attack mode.

When the disabled advocate spoke up about their mistreatment, they were told to grow up, I saw them called a ableist slur, several helping professionals said their complaints were "bullying" and "harassment", and communication was quickly restricted.

In addition, this support person was a psychologist. So this was choosing to promote the words of a professional over a lived experience advocate.

Too often lived experience is devalued: It's unpaid, not taken seriously, curated or edited, or the work is attributed to a consultant or organisation.

This was using the words of a support person in place of the disabled person's words.

This is the longstanding ableist practice of people talking to and through a carer instead of directly to the disabled person.

It's infantilising and dehumanising.

A disabled lived experience advocate gave a speech at a conference. They had a support person with them who summarised their speech.

A conference sponsor professional took a quote from the support person and promoted it on SM.

The disabled person's work wasn't included.

Why is this problematic?