The NDIS revolution

cover of report found here

The care of individuals with disability is undergoing revolutionary change in Australia, with a shift of power and entitlement from the organisations of welfare to the individuals in need, an empowerment of those who need. Via a new thing, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, or NDIS.

I dug out and place a link here to a report by leaders in community care in the Illawarra-Shoalhaven in 2009,  principal author my partner Helen Backhouse.

This is also about empowerment of workers and volunteers in the sector and the general need for governments and commentators and 'experts' to see that the community service sector, in an economy, a political economy, increasingly overall a 'service economy' is a big part of the business of economic development. The OECD and Australian official systems of statistics do not place this sector in any such location.

We speak of economic advantages and the good sense, say, of locating steel mills where there is good access to iron ore, coal and water. Why then not address comparative advantage of providing community services in places where it is most appropriate and brings most cheer and where workers and volunteers to do jobs well. In a place like the Illawarra-Shoalhaven this sector accounts for a high percentage of new jobs too.

It remains that a great body of the population regard support for the disadvantaged with a sneer and a grumble. People presume the right to drive free on new roads, not to be impeded in their right to consume, for government to provide the hoi and polloi with all the panderisations of modernity. But still with a right to snarl at redistribution and fairness.

I digress.

There are good recommendations in that report see pages 3 - 10. Against which changes and achievements might wisely be measured.

I do not think that governments, or politicians, fully understand what they have unleashed. Give the disabled the right to choose who helps them with what and soon their voices might be heard wider on more.

Community, respect, diversity and change

Australia, indelibly my country, frets more often than it fixes problems. 

It is difficult to reconcile our general apprehension with our continued second place ranking by the UNDP on its Human Development Index.

My personal experience with local community organisation and motivation in regional Australia in the past 15 years has been the increasing difficulty in getting people engaged except when there is something that irritates them personally or threatens real estate. My speculations as to why have covered generational change, Howard-and-since encouragement of personal focus and distrust and the arrival of the flat screen TV and its outpourings.

In a 2008 local government electoral campaign in a 'city' of fifty towns and villages over a hundred kilometres of coast, I was conscious that some towns, on the Australian Bureau of Statistic's Index of Socioeconomic Disadvantage, ranked 'very comfortable', over 1100, while at the core, the biggest town, ranked troublingly disadvantaged at 820. The comfy big-number people were largely immune to or annoyed by any suggestion of shared interest in addressing the problems at the low score end. 

My experience in building, managing and shutting down a brain tumour support group over that period was of building something strong and happy with over 300 emails a month at times and wonderful mutual support... then evaporation of membership and of contributions with the arrival of social media. 

http://dinuovoinitalia.blogspot.com.au/2016/10/mantova-according-to-edith-part-2-plus.html

The current information revolution is comparable to the turmoil of the renaissance 500 years ago in which the distribution of printing presses (see some context here) altered entitlement to knowledge, distribution of ideas, challenges to established correctness and empowerment of local languages. With a difference from now in the extent to which new knowledge seemed 500 years ago to be sought everywhere possible, led by the merchant barons of Florence, while the puddles of information and the frissons of communication among the wider population now seem to grow smaller and murkier.

Source here. Being maintained by Canadian architects now.

 Experience in the last decade or so encouraging local empowerment and planning by communities in Africa, via the internet, (here for example) has been with people who may write to say "sorry I've been out of touch, it was the malaria again" and when one writes with concern about Ebola over the border, the reply is that "I hope it does not come here, we have plague in the next village now". 

My impression is that such people, minimally resourced and up against big problems daily, have far more strength for adaptation to change and use intelligence for that, than we do in comfortable Australia. 

They also have as asset real community and place in community, which is sometimes irksome, but is powerful. 

It was pleasing to be asked by Lucinda Marshall to find an African contribution to a feminist magazine's issue on peace and for this, called "Women, the Mother of Peace" to be written and published. 

My brief experiences in remote Aboriginal communities are also of powerful community. Government campaigns for indigenous literacy are not going to work if they cannot begin to comprehend and respect that that small girl over there, just starting school, whose kinship system says she is my mother or my aunty or my grandchild, arrives at school with probably three languages and a universe of special knowledge and understanding of the world. 

Diversity depends on respect. Respect is not just a polite utterance, it is a key to community building.

Technological dependency varies inversely with interest in local community; 

economic disparity inhibits meeting and communication and, 

this year, apprehension that "that person may be a Trump supporter" makes conversation harder to start.