NDIS: Choices, Risks and Human Rights

Choice No Matter How Small

 Can Be Empowering 

The National Disability Insurance Scheme seeks to raise the awareness of human rights of people with disabilities, their families and those who support them. Among this group are some of the most at risk individuals in the country. Not to introduce the NDIS results in saying its ok for people with the disability to be continually placed at risk and have no opportunities or choices to improve the outcome for their own lives or the lives of the family members the live with. 

Current 'Risks' for Individuals with No Choice

Advocates who oppose the introduction of the NDIS fail to remember, how deeply floored the current system for disability care is Australia.  Somehow 'our fear' of the known is paralyzing us.  Even knowing the failings of the current sectors, its biases and chronic funding shortage, we are rejecting a system we not yet understand, simply because of the risks involved in empowering people to make decisions for their own lives.

Lack of Choice 

Leads to opportunities for others to abuse us. 

We seem prepare to ignore the current risks to people with disabilities, the finical strain that places on families, the restrictions people in occur around employment and thus income, because of the time and the fatigue costs associated to caring for an adult child with disabilities, some carers liken the current system to a lifetime prison system.

I find it difficult to address the failings of funding systems for people with disabilities and their related care costs and can only speak for my own experience in Queensland in where I live.  A system that is compared to a lottery game.  Receiving funding for your basic support needs is a game of luck and chance. The risk of injury, neglect and abuse and even death are very high.  I know that first hand that all too often you need to be at the point of dying or homeless to receive assistance.  It was my own risk of death and being trapped in a hospital bed that saw me rise to a priority level where by chance someone passed away and their funding came to me.  That is the randomness of the current systems in Queensland. I was potential dying at the right time.  

Sadly the person whose funding I received passed away be for they received any advantage from the funding I currently enjoy. This is the crazy chronic shortage of funding in Queensland.  These are the luxuries Tony Abbot isn't sure we can afford.  So you do not need remind me of the type of risks involve when we're addressing the rights of people with disabilities and meeting their needs.

Even small choices can lead to the empowerment of people living with significant to profound disabilities.

The UN and the Human Rights Commissions has Australia on its watch.  At last check the Australian government was failing people with disabilities in 30 different articles and Australia is on notice. The world knows people with all forms of disabilities in Australia are at risk with no opportunities to address this and what is our defense.  The NDIS and empowering people with disabilities and their families to have and to make choices for there own lives.

Current lack of choice can see a person with a profound brain injury in need of 24 hour care place in a nursing home, whether they are 55, 45 or 25. If that's how your care needs are funded that's your lottery and ticked to life!  You and your family are given no say.  Long fights to campaign for alternatives more often than not, because alternatives in Queensland don't exist.  

The institutional care of people with significant disabilities and diminished intellectual compassity increase the risk of violance, neglect, (e.g. Stravation), finical abuse more than any other type of support we currently provide.  When there individuals are unable to speak or mental health issues compound their ability to communicate, as system which offers no alternatives to these individuals, whether the have access to advocacy or not fosters an environment perfect for the human rights of people with diminish intellectual compasity to be abused. Unable to access the justice system or report crimes such as 'rape' or torture, the number of ways these people human rights are violated because of lack of choice escalates.

So do you still think giving people options and choices for their own lives is too greater risk?  Do you still want to assume a system that totally dis-empowers all people with disabilities with playing a lottery game with there support needs is safer than empowering choices. 

With empowering all people with disabilities and those who to support them to make choices, greater opportunities to give with disabilities access to advocates who can give a voice to someone who has had no voice before.  Even where that voice is around the colour of the t-shirt they waaring or the right to a girl to say I don't want to wear a dress, because of the way male staff look at me.    

Even allowing small choices, which individuals are safety able to make on their own such as what they like to wear can empowered them to take small steps to improve their lives.  No one is going to give someone who has been cared for all their life the choice to live on their own.  Even so I don't think a person who at 50 who has lived with other people with  disabilities all their lives who enjoy lining alone. So choices are always limited to our knowledge, experiences and understanding. As we have seen even offering no choice put people at risk.