What would Grandma say?

In both Australia and the United Kingdom over the past several years, services for people with disabilities have increasingly been outsourced from the public sector to the non-government or charitable sector. If the Western welfare state can still be presumed to exist, we need to ask the question as to why governments have seen fit to retreat from direct service delivery. We also need to scrutinise the rationale often cited that funding non-government organisations (NGOs) is more cost effective than public provision and provides individuals with more choice and control over the services they use. Arguably, people should be able to make further choices to restore and repair the neurological and physical incapacities of their bodies. This is the next logical step, given the development of technology, particularly if you accept the hypothesis that in this modern age, all people should be able to expect something more from their lives beyond dependence on charity.

This should involve facilitation of opportunities to participate in research, with the potential to augment, improve and amend the broken bodies we currently live within. The conception behind supposedly historic government policy was
perpetual impairment and disability, as well as continued and growing dependence of people with disability on charity. The absence of a research focus, or any apparent public debate on the lack of a research focus, is telling. It
suggests much about the Australian public’s view (or lack thereof) of their place in research, some people with disabilities view of themselves and what their lives can mean, not to mention the Parliament’s view.