Opposing the NDIS cuts

The Labor government’s announcement of major cuts to the NDIS is nothing short of cruel and inhumane. This is a major attack on the working class. The government is proving there is money for war but none for workers and the vulnerable.

The Socialist Party opposes these cuts. No person currently receiving support should lose funding or be further restricted from accessing care. Further, we call for a fully funded universal and public disability care sector.

Money for health and welfare not warfare.
These latest cuts will strip a further $15 billion out of disability care and see more than 160,000 people cut off from the scheme. Everyone currently covered by the NDIS will be reassessed based on tighter eligibility criteria and funding for community supports for each recipient by an average of $7,000 per recipient. These funds are essential to supporting people with disabilities to participate in ordinary life and in their communities. Cutting access to support does not make the need for that support disappear. Instead, it shifts the burden and cost of care onto working class families, which falls disproportionately onto women.

These changes are even more obscene in the context of the government increasing defense spending by $53 billion over the next decade, and spending $368 billion on the AUKUS submarine deal.

Disability care should not be market driven or ‘for profit’
Even before these cuts were announced, the NDIS was a Labor created mess. From its inception, the NDIS was about reducing the cost of disability care for the government by shifting away from government-run support schemes and opening up disability care to for-profit providers and private businesses. The heartless and punitive bureaucracies of the NDIS deny care where possible, whilst for-profit, private providers cash in on administrating the funding of NDIS participants.

The Socialist Party stands for putting public services back into public hands and re-establishing universal, government-run public disability care.

The profit motive needs to be removed from disability care and healthcare entirely. Disability care should be first and foremost about meeting the needs of those living with disability and ensuring their basic dignity. Services should be funded by taxing the rich, cutting military spending and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry.

We need to take a stand in our workplaces, in our universities and in our unions.
Print out this photo petition, take a photo (with your work mates, friends, family or just by yourself) and share it online. Tag us at @aus_socialists

Photo petition placard link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uREpJxqZ6Y0AiFWA7jOcwNhjrk_E8Yu8/view?usp=sharing