Surviving the Assault? The Australian Disability Movement and the Neoliberal Workfare State

Abstract

This article provides an analysis of the key areas of struggle for the Australian disability movement during the Howard years of government. After providing a brief overview of the Australian disability movement and its historical development, we then move to situate the struggles of the Australian disability movement within the broader context of welfare to work, one of the central tenets of neoliberal social policy restructuring. From here, three sites of struggle emerge that have been central to the Australian disability movement's struggles for representation, recognition and redistribution and principally include state restructuring of disability open labour market supports, state legitimation of disability sheltered workshops and, finally, the pensionercategorization of disability within social security law and policy.

The Place of Disgust: Disability, Class and Gender in Spaces of Workfare

“…Further, we hope that this paper encourages the critical examination of the contradiction of disabled people's right to work as central to citizenship claims [83] and the ways in which this demand has actively undermined disabled people's just claims for welfare social provisioning as an entitlement of citizenship (see [19,84]). …”

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

“…It is assumed that recipients either do not want to work or lack skills. This misrecognises the experience of many disabled people who, if not already engaged in part-time work, face substantive barriers such as employer discrimination and the lack of meaningful education, training or retraining opportunities (Humpage 2007;Soldatic and Chapman 2010). These structural barriers remain unaddressed because policy is designed around assumed needs while service users' own definition of their needs is ignored.…”

“…This includes segmentation along impairment lines that, when combined with significant cuts to advocacy services under the socially conservative Liberal-National Coalition government (1996)(1997)(1998)(1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007), arguably undermined the movement's capacity to mobilise collectively for social change (Soldatic and Chapman 2010). At the same time, new networks and peak organisations such as Women with Disabilities Australia (WWDA; Meekosha 2001), the Aboriginal Disability Network New South Wales, the First Peoples Disability Network Australia (FPDN) (Hollinsworth 2013;Soldatic and Chapman 2010) and the National Ethnic Disability Alliance (NEDA) emerged. These organisations recognise diversity within the disability movement and the intersection of disability with other forms of oppression.…”

Neoliberal restructuring, disabled people and social (in)security in Australia and Britain

“…In the case of out-of-work benefits for disabled people this meant attempts to tighten access to the DSP by changing the temporal work test so that it could only be obtained by people deemed unable to work 15 hours per week (cut in half from 30 hours per week). Initially, this proved to be politically untenable with many of Howard's support base and it took four attempts (2002,2002,2003,2005), coupled with a substantial electoral victory in late 2004, to drive the changes through parliament (Soldatic and Chapman 2008).…”

“…Across many OECD countries, similar trends, including policies to move disabled people from out of work social security benefits and into the world of work, are visible (for example, OECD 2003OECD , 2009. Studies across anglophone countries, such as Australia (Galvin 2004;Soldatic and Chapman 2008), Canada (Chouinard and Crooks 2008), the UK (Grover and Piggott 2010;Roulstone and Prideaux 2012), New Zealand (Lunt 2006) and the USA (Russell 1998), have critically distilled nascent disability policy discourses and practices. The dominant theme in this body of work is that the restructuring of statesponsored benefits for workless disabled people in the past two decades or so has largely been driven by the logic of neoliberalism.…”