Listening for policy change: how the voices of disabled people shaped Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme

Abstract

Voice has become an important yet ambivalent tool for the recognition of disability. The transformative potential of voice is dependent on a political commitment to listening to disabled people. To focus on listening redirects accountability for social change from disabled people to the ableist norms, institutions and practices that structure which voices can be heard in policy debates. In this paper, I use disability theory on voice and political theory on listening to examine policy documents for the National Disability Insurance Scheme in light of claims made by the disability movement. Although my study finds some evidence of openness in the policy development stage, the scheme falls short of valuing the diverse voices of disabled people as partners in shared dialogue.

Keywords:

• disability
• voice
• listening
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the Australian Research Council’s Cultural Research Network for supporting the ‘Disability, Democracy, Media and Listening’ workshop and workshop convenors Gerard Goggin and Rosemary Kayess for their ongoing engagement with this project. The author is also grateful for the generous comments on versions of this paper from Lenore Manderson, Tanja Dreher, Jodi Frawley, Justine Lloyd, Dinesh Wadiwel and the journal’s anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1. While the use of people-first language is the norm in Australia, in this paper I use ‘disabled people’ to refer to people with impairments who are systematically disabled by social and cultural processes. This is because if disability is the product of social and cultural processes, then it does not make sense to talk about disability as something someone has. It makes more sense to talk about people who live with disability, but for reasons of space I use the term disabled people. I also seek to address the danger of reducing people to any one aspect of their experience or identity by discussing intersectionality.

2. Thanks to one of the journal’s anonymous reviewers for this point.