Without reprieve

These professional careerists have helped enshrine an "industry" that has built up egos and fortresses that cannot be breached by those they purport to represent and assist. It is quite astonishing when you look at the number of groups in the disability sector and realise that many openly oppose families having a voice at all.

Families of people with dependent disabilities are locked into providing the primary accommodation and personal care for their family member with a disability beyond an age when it is reasonable for them to be required to do so, because society allows it to happen.

Families are the “meat in the political sandwich” twixt well paid bureaucrats and those with vested interests who restrict people with dependent disabilities from making choices, while they “cream off the grossly inadequate funding pool” to make a very comfortable living for themselves. Such individuals conspire to refuse us a voice, and condemn families for seeking a fair deal for their loved ones.

By excluding families from being heard, the “system” has sentenced hundreds of thousands of caring families to isolation, poverty, discrimination, exploitation and abrogation of any rights. Governments have indeed sentenced more than 700,000 families, caring for profoundly disabled persons in the family home, to a death without reprieve.

By effectively forcing families to give up on caring for their children, through denial of adequate support, the government risks losing more than $30 billion worth of unpaid accommodation and personal care services. Society will then wave goodbye to a $17 billion federal budget surplus or any state surplus for decades to come!