The media wants disabled people to be locked inside until they die

If you’ve had the misfortune of reading the Murdoch press or the Australian Financial Review at all in the past five years, you would know they have been nonstop writing about a group of privileged elites using public money to fund their own lavish lifestyle with a blatant disregard for peasant taxpayers. Weirdly, they’re not talking about politicians, they are referring to a class of NDIS recipients who only exist in the imaginations of overpaid columnists.

In a country where billionaires avoid tax, fossil fuel companies avoid tax, social media companies avoid tax and media empires avoid tax, apparently the real strain on taxpayer money is disabled people who have the nerve to want to be alive.

This opinion is sadly common now in Australia, following multiple years of disinformation. I’m not just referring to the people on social media making up stories about how their friend heard of a guy defrauding the system, although you might even see some of those in the replies to this piece. 

Disinformation also includes using real things as a way to mislead the public. A great example of this is this recent depraved bullshit piece from Australian Financial Review: 

This headline is designed to make you think that the greedy disabled people are just taking your money to get haircuts or go for walks and it’s costing us billions, a claim that is both misleading and obviously ridiculous if you spend even two seconds thinking about it.

Something a small disclaimer in the paywalled piece does acknowledge is that the scheme isn’t paying for the haircuts. Something that goes against what the highly screenshotted and shared headline implies.

What they are talking about here is support workers, or ‘carers’, as the article puts it. The article takes issue with the idea that support workers go with clients to things like haircuts.

The article gives the impression that disabled people are choosing to take advantage of tax payers for the price of one ride to a haircut. But that simply isn’t how the system works.

I want you to imagine that you require a professional’s help to live. You also need that professional’s help to leave the house. You realise you need a haircut, and you know that you have a support worker coming over anyway for your regular assistance, so you ask them to drive you to get a haircut in the allotted time they are here to help you.

That is the reality we are talking about here.

Support workers are paid by the hour. They are there to support people physically and on a community level. If that includes driving someone to get a haircut during their shift instead of just staying home, genuinely, who gives a fuck?

This isn’t some way to get one over on taxpayers, it’s the only way for these people to get a haircut. To deny them this is to say that you think disabled people are less deserving of the ability to get a fucking haircut than non-disabled people.

The same with going to a cafe to grab a coffee or going outside to a park, or any other mundane normal parts of life. For many of these people, these moments are the only times they can leave the house. Disabled people should be allowed to leave the fucking house.

This isn’t the NDIS failing, this is a rare example of the NDIS working as intended.

The article also takes shots at dog walking but doesn’t elaborate. Now there are two ways for people to have a dog being walked counted, and both are incredibly valid but neither are explored in any way.

First is hiring a dogwalker, which is possible but only in the specific circumstance of it being a support dog and you are physically incapable of walking the lifesaving dog yourself. Obviously valid.

The other is someone who needs a support worker to leave the house, going outside and taking their dog with them. Which is also fair enough. People should be allowed to take a dog outside.

This is one way we constantly see disinformation pop up. They say out-of-context ‘costs’ without ever explaining them, because they know the explanations make it sound less scary. Now repeat that with an article every month for 5 years and boom, people are freaking out all over the place about disabled people daring to go grocery shopping or see a movie.

The entire article, and many like it, focuses purely on the cost of the NDIS with how people use it. But the math doesn’t actually add up because either way the support workers are still doing the same hours as that’s just how fucking jobs work.

It costs taxpayers the exact same to have a support worker check in on a person and stay at their house, as it does to check in on them and take them to a haircut. The only difference is what the support worker writes down in their diary for what activities they did at work that day.

But even that fact check feels gross because it is ultimately dehumanising. These are people’s lives and we are debating whether they are valued enough to let them live theirs.

This is where I remind you that the article is calling for the government to find ‘savings’ in this field of people receiving support workers. The article suggests refocusing and reallocating resources. In other words, cutting funding for support workers. Reducing access to support from a scheme about providing support from those who need it to live. A suggestion that is absolutely fucked.

Normally in a vacuum, if you wrote an opinion piece calling for disabled people to have their support taken away from them to save money, instead of talking about actual problems with the system or taxing the fucking rich, you would rightfully be torn apart. Their ability to call for this stems from years of disinformation about the scheme alongside a government who would rather let AI take over the NDIS, making it even worse than it currently is, than actually defend it.

In the world that outlets like the AFR want, disabled people would be eternally locked in their houses alone, being supported just enough to barely stay alive while they slowly die, away from where non-disabled people can see them, with maybe a dog to keep them company, but that dog also doesn’t deserve to go outside, and it’s slowly dying too. Greedy, good for nothin’ dog.