Deaf people's stories around the NDIS

<p dir="ltr">In Australia, the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), introduced in 2013, invites disabled people to apply for individual funding to purchase what they need to achieve equity across all areas of life. To access funding, disabled people must narrate themselves to the NDIS in a way the system recognises. They must justify their needs by framing them in terms of what the NDIS considers to be ‘reasonable’ and ‘necessary’ while itemising them in terms of their aspirations and personal life goals. This thesis explores the way deaf people narrate their aspirations and goals in relation to the demands made by the NDIS. It does so by inviting deaf people to give accounts of their experiences of the NDIS. While deaf people and their representative organisations, such as Deaf Australia, welcomed the introduction of the NDIS, these stories reflect the challenges they faced individually and collectively in their efforts to secure support. The theoretical perspective I adopted for this research is based on approaches that value people’s stories about their experiences. People’s understanding of their lives is embedded in their stories about the narratives they’ve created. At the same time, life narratives are shaped by people’s awareness of the expectations of the institutions they are being ‘coaxed’ to tell these stories for (Couser, 2005a; Frank, 2010; Hall & Rossmanith, 2016; Smith & Watson, 2001). Analysing the alignment or misalignment of these two elements of life storytelling are central to my thesis. This thesis examines the accounts provided in semi-structured interviews with fifteen deaf individuals. I promoted the study through the social media page of a deaf service provider organisation, inviting deaf people to share accounts of their experiences with the NDIS system. The conversations were interpreted into Auslan, if requested by the participants, recorded, transcribed into English, and then uploaded to NVivo software for analysis. Thematic coding was used to organise the data into various categories where themes were identified for analysis (Creswell, 2017). These stories of encounters with the NDIS included accounts of the NDIA’s participants’ planning meetings with officials and the review process that many participants seek to engage with, and stories around how these deaf participants access their needs through the NDIS. Two areas of tension emerged from participants’ stories centring around the demands of the NDIS and the values held by the deaf community. Firstly, there is a conflict between the NDIS’s emphasis on reasonable requests and the rights of deaf individuals. Deaf Australia, the representative organisation for deaf people, points out that the NDIS’s definition of ‘reasonable and necessary’ blurs the distinction between ‘needs’ and ‘rights’ as outlined in the UNCRPD (Deaf Australia, 2020a, p. 6; United Nations, 2006b). Interviews revealed that individuals’ success in obtaining requested support depended on their ability to align their needs with the NDIS’s criteria. Secondly, there is tension that signals a shift between the traditional collective practices of the deaf community and the NDIS’s market-driven approach, which emphasises the role of NDIS participants as individual consumers. Commentators on the NDIS recognise it as typifying a neoliberal capitalist approach to social support provisioning where participants act as consumers within a supply and demand marketplace (van Toorn, 2021). Some participants in this research identified conflicts between collective approaches and a history of collective provision and this market-based logic. However, participants also tell of drawing upon their collective resources, such as the deaf ecosystem that promotes deaf-led businesses and deaf focused support systems, to ensure that the NDIS works for them.</p>