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From the time that development of a National Disability Insurance Scheme arrived on the agenda of the Australian Labor Government's 2008 Ideas Summit, the lives of disabled Australian citizens have been widely discussed, consulted on, planned for and acted on. This discourse analysis (Fairclough 2003; 2010) critiques the ways in which disabled lives have been framed in these high profile policy debates, with detailed focus on two key policy documents. The Shut Out Report: the Experiences of People with Disabilities in Australia (2009) (2009) and Disability Care and Support (Productivity Commission 2011) are both grounded in extensive national consultations and provide significant evidence about the ways that disabled Australians talk about the problems they face and the solutions they advocate. The paper employs the well‐known recognition‐redistribution debate of Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth (2003) to interpret the findings that narratives of suffering, burden and marginalisation predominate in current policy conversations. This tends to push out discussions concerning the non‐redistributive aspects of disability reform, potentially contributing to non‐integrationist discourse entrenched over 150 years of policies of segregation. Minority voices advocating social integration are present but muted. At this stage, their influence is undetermined.

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This paper examines the policy practice of a social worker academic with lived experience of disability. The author illustrates her reflections through an exploration of national consultations that contributed to the development of a National Disability Strategy. Policy is presented as a discursive practice built on an intersubjective framework for interpreting disability experience. Social work's unofficial mantra is that we work from private pain to public issues in pursuit of personal liberation and flourishing in civil, inclusive, and just communities. Using Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of capital, fields of power, and habitus this view of social work, expressed through the politics of presence of people living with disability, is problematised as potentially tokenistic and exploitative. Electing to steer away from any processes that approach the politics of the tragic spectacle (Elliot, 2002), the author concludes that her practice is legitimised through a commitment to mobilise the cultural and knowledge capital built through the habitus of social work policy practice and the symbolic capital of disablement-both of which can be deployed to develop the capacity of colleagues in the disability movement.