How Many Times Does the Disability Community Have to Win the Same Fight?

View this video from 2021, here:

https://youtu.be/_RnbeVymAlo?si=d7QTcG5ccwbfeGRJ

Five years ago, the disability community was already sounding the alarm, defending the National Disability Insurance Scheme as a nation-building reform worth protecting. And yet here we are again. Different language, same threats. Different policies, same underlying push to roll back choice, control, and dignity.

For decades, disabled people, families, and allies have had to fight, again and again, to resist being pushed back into systems that were segregated, unsafe, and built for “efficiency” rather than humanity. Each time, the community has organised, resisted, and won ground. And each time, that ground is contested all over again.

We are now fighting that same battle today.

The question is no longer whether the disability community will stand up. We always do. The question is: When will this cycle end?

When will Politicians, Bureaucrats, and Service Providers stop trying to rewrite history, and instead honour the promise of the NDIS?

When will they work with the disability community, not around us, not over us, to realise what this scheme was always meant to be: A genuine, rights-based, nation-building transformation.

Because we shouldn’t still have to prove that our lives are worth investing in.