Posts by Hilary Stace
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Navigators is a good term for the type of support people need to find their way to appropriate services.. That concept has been around for several years. But there are some sea faring metaphors I could use for the numerous potential hazards on the journey.
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Oops meant very 'different' circumstances.
I just hope the future is more inclusive and positive for all 'cultural elements'.
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I have three friends - with very circumstances - who all have adult disabled children. They are at the front line of needing disability support. The system does not work well for any of them at the moment - it's fragmented, nothing lasts long and the future is bleak. With the choices currently available one family has changed provider - with some things better and some worse - but on balance not much difference.
If the changes which are coming make any positive difference to any of these families I will happily report back on this blog.
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The people who write like this and who are driving change, are not necessarily the allies of disabled people. I would be very wary of assuming they are. OK we know the current system largely sucks, but will change be any better?
This all sounds very similar to the state housing sell off on the assumption poor people would be just as happy living somewhere else, and better off, with a new unknown provider. Yet the first thing that happens when they shift is they lose their income-related rent subsidy. No one told them that, and they didn't have any choice anyway. Or the charter schools, theoretically all about parental choice, but when a parent takes their disabled child along they say we don't want them and have no obligation to, the choice is all on our side, not yours.
If this was really led by disabled people, and came out of the struggles of disabled people - as Enabling Good Lives was at the start - they wouldn't use such language as I cited above. I personally don't see any champions or allies of disabled people high up driving this. I see people who are ideologically driven and think they know best for a group of which they have little or no personal knowledge.
But then I am an 'old cultural element' - the sort who needs to be destroyed. Glad to know where I stand.
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Sorry, if that was too harsh. But we are talking about a very vulnerable group of people who are already at the bottom of the heap in many indicators (as the report mentions) and who have little security and enough anxiety as it is. Who are being told what is best for them once again - as though we have learnt nothing from the past. So whose values/whose culture is driving this? Not mine that's for sure. I am an 'old cultural element'.
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Basing your policy on fear and anxiety, destroying people. You fine with that?
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Scary extract from the Productivity Commission's report Appendix D: Services for People with Disabilities p 17
"The Commission has previously noted five principles for managing cultural change:
1. Survival anxiety must be greater than learning anxiety. That is, the fear that something bad will happen to the group if they do not change must be greater than the group’s fear of learning new ways of operating.
2. Leaders should look to motivate change by reducing fear of learning new things, rather than increasing survival anxiety.
3. The change goal must be clearly defined in terms of the specific operational problem to be fixed (as opposed to the culture problem that must be addressed).
4. Old cultural elements can be destroyed by removing the people who carry those elements. But new cultural elements can only be learned if the new behaviour leads to success.
5. Cultural change is always transformative change that requires a period of unlearning and psychological pain. (NZPC, 2014, p. 108)"Points 4 and 5 would not be out of place in the instructions for a cult, dictatorship or even a terrorist organisation. But explains why history, learning from the past, and respecting those with institutional knowledge is seen as dangerous by NZ public policy (The reference to NZPC 2014 does not appear in the bibliography)
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Just an example of what happens when disability is not considered as part of public policy. A redeveloped theatre in Palmerston North that is not accessible.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/news/68398780/globe-theatre-patrons-plead-for-disability-accessAnd Palmerston North has many citizens with mobility impairments as it is a nice flat city. You would think someone would have realised that even disabled people like to go to cultural events.
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Access: Disability as a wicked policy problem, in reply to A S,
I heard that some of the appendices were commissioned. It is unusual for anyone outside the disability sector to know the level of detail that is in that report - although of course anyone could find it all out with a lot of digging and knowing the right people in the relevant ministries. Much of the detail is not readily or publicly available.
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Cracker: IT'S ALIVE, in reply to Vivid,
Real Me is an example of how to make a system as complicated and un-user friendly as possible and then require everybody to use it to communicate with agents of government such as Work and Income, particularly those with the least access to or expertise with IT.