We Want More Life, F*CkEr: On the Disability Rights Movement in Australia and the Wrecking of the NDIS
“It [i.e. disability justice] means we are not left behind; we are beloved, kindred, needed.”
— Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice
In 2013, something extraordinary happened. For five brief days, same-sex couples in Canberra were able to legally marry. The ACT had passed its own Marriage Equality Act, and on December 7, people lined up to be wed, many of them after decades of waiting, fighting, and hoping.
Joel Player and Alan Wright were two of those people. On December 7, 2013, The Sydney Morning Herald published an article featuring the dapper, giddy couple, who shared their lifelong struggle for essential human rights and their love for each other. Journalist Matthew Ragatt wrote of that struggle —
“The decade-long public battle for same-sex marriage laws has been marked by challenges at every turn.”
[Image Description: Joel Player and Alan Wright, in formal wear, stand smiling at night outside a building. Joel is leaning with one hand on the wall, wearing a tuxedo with a bow tie and suspenders. Alan, on the right, wears a suit and tie. Both appear joyful and relaxed, celebrating a special occasion - their marriage.]
Five days later, the High Court struck it down, deepening that struggle. On December 12, those marriages were declared void. Not just invalid, but non-existent. Love that had been publicly celebrated was now bureaucratically erased, as if it had never happened.
Of course, it had happened. People had felt it and lived it - which mattered. The bodily memories of this cruelty are still held by those who fought to be recognised as equal, and so too are their memories of how it enraged them to fight even harder. It urged them to further network, collaborate, organise, and act as a community convinced of its own right to exist on an equal basis with others.
The High Court decision caused pain but also fanned those flames.
Here’s the thing: once people taste liberation, you can’t take it away without consequence. Once they’ve savoured even a morsel of dignity, autonomy and belonging, they remember. They fight harder. They get angrier. They get louder.
Ultimately, they win. Because liberation, once sparked, is very hard to extinguish.
It’s happening again now for Disabled people in this country, who make up 20 per cent of the Australian population. One in five people is Disabled — a number that should make politicians very uneasy. We are having essential supports stripped from us with the wrecking of the NDIS by the Albanese Labor government.
It is rapid, cruel and ugly.
The NDIS was built on a promise — the realisation of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2008), to which Australia is a signatory. The NDIS was fought for through the labour and commitment of Disabled activists, many of whom are still living and witnessing the erosion of decades of their toil.
On many days, I cry tears of rage and grief just at the thought of this. They are much my superiors; some are my colleagues, and some I am privileged to now call friends. They are watching their work be smashed apart in real time. The disrespect of that hurts me to my core. Their work is important and it must be built on, not broken. Disabled activists who have come after them owe them a debt and owe them the respect of learning our shared history, our lineage, and taking care of it.
[Image Description: Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2013, a woman with red hair and glasses, dressed in black, leans forward warmly to greet a Disabled woman, who is smiling. A young man sits beside the reclining woman, holding her hand. Several other people, including a man in a suit and women in business attire, stand nearby watching. A communication device is on the table in front of them, and the setting appears to be a cozy room with natural light from a nearby window.]
The NDIS told Disabled people that we mattered. That our lives were worth investing in, that support would no longer be charity, or crisis, or crumbs — but a right. A system designed to support lives of dignity and choice and self-determination, not just survival. Of the NDIS Act, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard said -
''This is a united embrace of national responsibility and a great act of mutual care and solidarity.”
And now, we are here. The promise of solidarity made to us under Gillard is being broken by the Albanese Labor government. As a feminist and as a woman, I have some strong thoughts on the fact that the work laid down by the only woman Prime Minister to date is being torn to pieces by a male successor.
Thousands of Disabled people — children, adults, families — are being reassessed, removed, left without the supports that helped them function, thrive, and belong in our communities. They are being forced back into isolation, hospitalisation, group homes; and aged care facilities while still young. What is happening right now should devastate and shock every citizen of this country.
Activists are being handed credible reports of the NDIA threatening to raise a debt against people using Supported Independent Living (SIL) funding to live on their own terms in the community; threatening them with this if they don’t agree to move back into group homes. If we listen to the stories of those who have lived both ways — like Sam Petersen, a fierce rights activist for SIL — it is quickly apparent that group homes are a nightmare for Disabled people.
Sam talks about being unable to sleep because of the screaming of others whose needs were not being met. Of being so desperate to escape the chaos, despair and filth of the group home, that they would wander all day in their powerchair; once so exhausted that they fell asleep and drove toward traffic, saved by a traffic barrier. They describe how basic hygiene needs often went unmet — wet pads sitting against their skin, which concerned their GP and led to complications that could have been avoided with real support.
Is this a way that you would like to live, Prime Minister Albanese? Is this how you would like your son, Nathan, to live if he were to become Disabled tomorrow? I think we all know the answer to that question.
[Image Description: A person, Disability Rights activist Sam Petersen, sits in a wheelchair, wearing a brown cable-knit jumper and looking to the left. They have short hair and an expression that appears tense or thoughtful. A communication device is strapped to the table mount on their powerchair. Overlaid text in bold white letters on black bars reads:
"I would eat my breakfast and just go.
Running away from the noise, the heat and abuse.
I could drive my power wheelchair, but not much else.
I only had one on one support for 6 hours a week. And by this point I felt I would get abused by everyone.
So I went alone." Image Credit: Sam Petersen, 2025.]
Psychosocial disabilities and Neurodivergence are also being reclassified into invisibility. Therapy access is being hacked away, which will remove delivery capacity, and isolate many Disabled people in our community. All the while, the government insists this isn’t cruelty, it’s “reform.” They tell us they are doing us a favour, which is the biggest pile of gaslighting turds I have read in some time. Absolutely nobody is buying it.
Emily McCann, a Disabled mother of Disabled children and member of The Australian Neurodivergent Parents Association, relayed how devastating the removal of supports for families with Neurodivergent children will be if the currently proposed cuts to therapy services under the NDIS go through on July 1. She described this week how families are ‘already struggling’ and how taking away access to in-home therapies is just another way to isolate us further. ’
Emily is an experienced social worker who spent ten years working in child protection with the Department of Communities and Justice. She has raised serious concerns that isolating already vulnerable families will cause significant harm. Emily has questioned the direction and safety of recent decisions taken by the Federal government, describing them as “really disappointing.”
Let’s be really clear what these decisions are: They are not reforming anything. They are rolling back the NDIS.
We’ve seen what this is before. It’s not new. It’s revocation of rights under a government that has failed to understand what Disabled people intended with the NDIS: pursuing our fundamental rights, just as those who struggled for Marriage Equality did. It’s a retreat from their responsibilities under International Law — obligations set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), to which Australia is a signatory. There are no take-backs, Prime Minister — Labor must stay the course.
For those Disabled folk playing from home, here are some of your essential rights under International Law and the UNCRPD (2008). These rights belong to every human person because anyone can become Disabled at any time.
Article 19 guarantees the right to live independently and be included in the community.
Article 23 affirms the right of children and families to the support they need to stay together.
Article 25 recognises the right to health, including habilitation and rehabilitation services.
Article 28 establishes the right to an adequate standard of living and social protection.
The erosion of the NDIS cuts across all of these.
In the powerful documentary Defiant Lives by Sarah Barton — a must-watch for anyone seeking to understand the roots of our movement — Disabled activists recall that, in the early days of the Independent Living Movement in the United States, support workers weren’t called carers or support workers. They were called personal assistants.
That language mattered. It reflected the spirit of the 1970s rights movement as it exploded into the streets with revolutionary heat and fervour, asserting that people with disabilities weren’t passive recipients of support, but active agents in their own lives. A personal assistant wasn’t there to manage or monitor, but to enable autonomy, choice, and control.
That framing — that we are people with lives to lead, not problems to manage — must not be lost in this new era of cuts, compliance, and creeping paternalism. You can’t part-way liberate a people and expect gratitude for the scraps. You can’t build a bridge to freedom, and then demolish it once we’ve stepped onto it.
We remember what you promised — and we are not going back.
Let’s be clear: the Disability rights movement doesn’t need to learn that rights are not gifted. We’ve always known that they are contested and then won. We’ve known it in our bodies, in our families, in our histories. We’ve carried the truth that every inch of justice we hold today was won through resistance and not benevolence. Everything we now have, we have extracted from unwilling hands. Julia Gillard may be a shining exception to that in our living memories.
We are now at a critical juncture.
Labor can choose to uphold its promises and realise that it is not too late to support the advance of our rights. Or it can continue trying to push us back, and go down in history as the Howard government of this generation of Disabled children and young people.
Make no mistake, Prime Minister Albanese: those children will grow up. And they will remember.
They will become the next wave of activists. Writers. Leaders. They will speak of this moment of political regression in every forum and every hearing, and every protest for decades to come. The twenty per cent of Australians who are Disabled will hold the memory of this wrecking time in our bodies, just as Marriage Equality activists did. That is a lot of simmering resentment to gamble with. It will erupt.
The collapse of Disability rights in this country is happening under a Labor government. A government that once promised to build a safety net that no one could fall through — now presiding over its dismantling.
And for what?
We should all be asking: what is this for? Who benefits when support is stripped away from Disabled children, families, and adults? When life gets harder, more dangerous, less liveable? When therapists close their doors and services disappear? What masters, what financial backers, what deals done have brought this catastrophe of human rights contraventions about?
Importantly - how is all of this tracking for them in the court of public opinion?
I can answer that: not well.
Labor’s concerted efforts to smear us — and those who stand with us — have been thoroughly unsuccessful. The Australian public knows who we are. We are them; their children. Their parents and neighbours. Their teachers and nurses, their cousins and aunts. We are the ones who fight for a better future, not just for ourselves, but for everyone.
The NDIA may cut our plans and gut our budgets and remove the supports we need to leave the house. But they have not — and will not — win.
We are still here and we are still organising. We are louder, sharper, and stronger than they ever expected and have ever been before. The many disparate parts of the Disability are and will continue to come together — because we know what they forget:
You may strip our supports, but you can never take our rights. We will fight for those rights until they are realised. Just as the marriage equality activists won - we will win. In unity, in power and in our collective strength.
Nothing About Us Without Us. The fight is not over until we, the Disabled, say it is over.
[Image Description: Two protest signs are propped up against a large wooden coffin laid on a city pavement. The sign on the left reads “WE WON’T GO BACK” in bold red letters with a dripping blood effect. The sign on the right reads “NOBODY WORSE OFF” in black block letters. White candles and white lilies are placed around the coffin, and people in dark clothing are standing behind it, suggesting a symbolic funeral or protest against harmful policy changes. Image Credit: Samantha Connor OAM, 2025.]
