Disability services - efficient, standardised, impersonal

This provision of personal care, which has not been responsive to my changing disabilities and life style, again reveals significant problems in attaining the goals of the State Disability Plan in the context of the everyday lives of people with severe physical disabilities. It is a long way from the stated goal of the State Disability plan to “focus on supporting people with a disability in flexible ways, based on their individual needs, so that each person can live the life style they want to lead”.

This highlights the confusion that can be born out of political misstatements. Victoria’s Disability Act 2006 was passed to further the Victoria’s commitment to its State Disability Plan. Is the Disability Act 2006 just another social dilemma? After all the initial set-up costs are taking vast amounts of money out of a shrinking budget.

Traditional social-democratic and progressive theories reject the notion that inequality is a necessary evil, and contend that sustained economic equality is desirable to maintain social stability and to promote justice and sustain political democracy. Traditional social democrats believe that the market is not self-regulating. Government efforts to counterbalance the negative effects of supply and demand include spending to create more jobs, market intervention to equalise skills and increase job training, and legislation mandating equal access to jobs through civil rights and affirmative action.

Stretton outlines the traditional Social Democratic belief:

Societies like ours needed to change some of their moral beliefs. But instead of replacing old morals by better ones, a lot of people were persuaded that societies didn’t need moral beliefs any more. That is of course a moral belief with a vengeance and one which capitalists and intellectuals can exploit for fun and profit.

Stretton believes selfishness is part of human nature, and its opposite unselfishness is directly related too much that is good in society.

Based on such thoughts is an ideological dilemma that troubles economic thought today. Should the welfare sector become more efficient by developing a more market-like system that could supply and deliver individual social services to those in genuine need of them?

Stretton asks how could individual preferences in practice produce workable public policies? The technical planning, budgeting and co-ordination which now strain the resources of elaborate public services would have to be designed instead by each voter as he or she registered his or her vote.

In practice critics of existing public services want to privatise the social services that could in principle be paid for by their customers, as we have done to telephones, banks, electricity, public road and rail and air transport and some security services. But hospital and medical services and education for all, regardless of capacity to pay?

As a particular example, there is a huge unmet need for disability services where politicians consistently use the old cliché of not having the money in the budget to solve the problems, while they find ways to waste the public’s monies by setting up new initiatives that are bound to fail.

Disability services cannot responsibly be effectively systematised or standardised for the efficiency objectives of a purely competitive society. Efficiency of disability services is irrelevant in my case and for most disabled people who require services to live. Disability services can help to provide essentials of life to people who are severely physically disabled.