Labor’s threat to slash-and-burn NDIS funding gives the lie to Jim Chalmers’ claim that the budget would offer “more help for some of the most vulnerable in our community”, argues Graham Matthews.
NDIS
Senator Jordon Steele-John has accused Labor of failing to draw on the expertise of the lived experience of disability advocates and fears that mistakes will be repeated. Nova Sobieralski and Zoe Wing report.
Disabled people can be paid as little as $2.54 per hour. Shaun Bickley urges candidates, companies and others to support equal pay for equal work.
Suzanne James spoke to trade unionist and Socialist Alliance candidate for the Victorian Senate Angela Carr about Australia’s economic and social equity crisis.
Suzanne James spoke to Angela Carr, Socialist Alliance candidate for the Senate in Victoria, about housing, health, National Disability Insurance Scheme and the party's plans to address the growing socio-economic inequality crisis.
Those with a psychosocial disability are being failed by the government’s arbitrary decision-making on who qualifies for vital health and community services under the COVID-19 lockdown, writes Marie Butler-Cole.
In delivering his third federal budget speech on May 8, federal Treasurer Scott Morrison claimed his government would guarantee the essential services Australians rely on. Presumably this included the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).
However, Morrison only mentioned the NDIS once in his half-hour budget speech, and that was 25 minutes in. He said, “every dollar and every cent committed to delivering the National Disability Insurance Scheme remains in place and always will,” before quickly moving on to "stopping the boats", "terrorism" and border security.
Socialist Alliance member, Sue Bolton, is standing for re-election as a councillor in the City of Moreland. Polling day is October 22.
While hundreds of thousands of people with disabilities will now get services they have never had under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), we must closely examine how the scheme is being implemented.
The public should demand nothing less in return for the $22 billion of public expenditure and the vulnerability of the recipients. But that is not happening.
The NDIS is brilliant for people with physical disabilities, but the scheme risks further marginalising thousands of people with profound intellectual disability.
Socialist councillor Sue Bolton convinced Moreland Council on July 13 to reinstate the after-hours Aged and Disability Home Support Services for existing clients as well as new ones.
Bolton said she was enormously grateful to the parents of children with disabilities who spoke up on behalf of all the parents who were unable to come to the meeting or who didn’t think it was possible to fight the cut.
“Those parents put a human face on the implications of a very bureaucratic cut: their stories had an impact on the other councillors”, Bolton told Green Left Weekly.
Hundreds of members of the NSW Public Service Association rallied outside state parliament on November 13 to protest against the government’s privatisation of disability services over the next 12 months.
Ageing, Disability and Home Care (ADHC) is part of the NSW Department of Family and Community Services, but the NSW government plans to hand it to the corporate and non-government sector.
The Disability Services Commission (DSC) in Western Australia announced last October that it planned to privatise 60% of its accommodation and early childhood intervention services, relinquish its status as a registered training organisation and dismantle its learning and development arm.
At the same time it abolished its Community Development Directorate, dissolved its Post School Options section and made its staff in the Community and Family Living team redundant.
The National Disability Insurance Scheme, now to be known as DisabilityCare, has become a central theme of Australia’s national debate. This is a tribute to the many thousands of people who have campaigned tirelessly for better support for and inclusion of people with disabilities in society.
