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An Open Letter to the National Disability
Insurance Scheme as Though It Were A
Man Named John
Dear John,
We can’t use the word submission any more. I’m sorry. Let’s just call this a
letter, darling. A post mortem on a spectacularly abusive relationship that
lasted a whole thirteen years.
We used to like a bit of BDSM. Remember when we wrote 150 Shades of
Grey? We even appeared at a Senate Inquiry, way back when.
Diva Jackie appeared, looking over her glasses terrifyingly, while Bronwyn
wore her black leather cat suit and cracked a whip (yes, a real one) down the
aisle after sauntering in and purring. The submission appeared in a Senate
Community Affairs exhibition, some years later. We were proud to be part of
our democracy’s history and a great moment in Australia’s history, where all
sides of government had agreed to breathe life into a reform as great as
Medicare.
But John, that was then. And this is now.
We were the Bolshy Divas, dragging you out of the dark ages of charity and
building you as an investment in human dignity. We handed you the
blueprints - The Tricky Bits, 150 Shades of Grey, and Your Life Plan - giving
you the exact instructions on how to ensure disabled people weren’t locked
in cages or left to rot.
It was like that sweet, blissful start of a relationship. There was moonlight
and champagne and you were making sweet, tender love to us with your
whispered promises of choice and control, rights and dignity, reasonable and
necessary. You could make us tingle, John. You promised us certainty and
we knew, knew, knew that you were there forever.
And what you gave us! A real life, John. A partnership, where we could be
emancipated from oppression and go to work like we had the same right to
take up space in the world, like every other human.
But now. Now, it is like something out of a nature documentary, John. But
more tedious. Your idea of bureaucratic foreplay is not even ARE YOU
AWAKE, HONEY. Is it even legal? I guess we’ll find out later. They say that a
lot of relationships end up in court.
But now you’ve taken it to another level. We’ve gone to being rudely woken
up to scowling at the wet spot to checking your phone every time you go to
the dunny. Yes, John - things are that bad. The trust is gone. As well as the
certainty you promised us.
But John, good Lord.
I look at your shiny new Amendment (Securing the NDIS for Future
Generations) Bill 2026, and I am struck by the sheer, majestic scale of your
bureaucratic psychosis. We asked you to build a system based on the UN
Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. It’s as if you decided to
pass human rights through the digestive tract of a PWC consultant and
present us with this steaming pile of legislation, gift wrapped.
Darling, your use of DARVO is textbook. You Deny our needs, you Attack our
integrity, and you Reverse the Victim and Offender by constantly claiming
that we are the greedy ones threatening your ‘financial sustainability’. You
watched the $1.8 billion bloodbath of Robodebt unfold, you read the Royal
Commission’s explicit warnings about the devastating human cost of
automating the welfare state, and you apparently thought, “Hold my beer,
let’s do that to the cripples.”
John. Have you even MET us?
We started drafting some of our grievances about it to our friendly divorce
lawyer, Roger.
‘We cannot believe that he is doing this to us, Roger. Schedule 3, Part 2 of
John’s miserable Bill grants his Agency express legislative authority to
unleash computer programmes to make evaluative decisions. He demands
we submit claims within a frantic 90 days, but legally mandate we hoard the
receipts for three years, our nominees for five, and our providers for seven. If
his newly emancipated secret algorithm randomly audits us in three years
and we have lost a docket in a house fire or because of our own cognitive
disabilities, we automatically owe him a non-reviewable debt with zero
exemptions.
Remarkably, Roger, he has built a fully automated debt-trap for people with
executive dysfunction. It is like demanding a goldfish perform open-heart
surgery and then fining it $19,800 when the patient dies.
And his communication standards? They belong in a museum of sociopathy.
Under Schedule 1, Part 7, if we don’t answer the phone for 90 days
perhaps because we are in the ICU, having a psychiatric crisis, or simply
because his communication methods are totally inaccessible to Deaf or non
speaking participants – he can suspend our plans and revoke our access
entirely. He will literally cut off our lifeline because he failed to use accessible
communication.
Check this out, Roger. CHECK THIS OUT. I’m not even kidding. The same
man that sends letters to blind women and phones Deaf women is
threatening to end a relationship because we didn’t pick up the phone.
Yet, if our lives physically collapse and we beg him for an urgent plan
reassessment, he wants to legally gift himself 90 days to simply stare at the
wall and ignore us. And by removing “deemed refusals,” he will have stripped
away our right to appeal that majestic indifference to the Tribunal. We must
be flawlessly available to him at all times, while he possesses the
accountability of a drunk slug.’
It feels like we have spent the last thirteen years submitting, John. Making
submissions, bending our knee to you, writing endless, patient emails,
ignoring the fact that you were – look, lets call it what it has been – frankly,
abusive. We have tried to be patient and ignore what this relationship has
become. But even the most patient of women get tired of endless gaslighting
and DARVO. Our mutuals think we are all swanning around on gold plated
sex yachts and stealing from the government, but most of us are on the very
edge – on that awful line between life and death.
And teetering.
John, you don’t even accept us for who we are anymore. You’ve decided to
play doctor. I guess it’s an inevitable conclusion once you fall under the
Health portfolio, but son, you must understand that we worked for decades
before you came along for rights and dignity and to get away from the
medical model and embrace the social model. It’s not even all that radical,
John. It’s not like we are asking for you to forget the missionary position
exists. We’re just asking for a bit of respect and consent.
We understand that you are no longer the John that you were, that
sweetheart who would give us what we needed, if reasonable and
necessary, to be who we are. In a partnership with not just us, but every
Australian, who would share in a social contract with you to make sure all of
us would be okay. Just like Medicare. But hell, John, be honest about what
you’re doing and who you are now.
Nature documentary lovemaking aside, John, let’s not pretend that the
conditions that you currently imposing on our relationship are not flat out
ridiculous. You have not so much reformed our relationship as taken it into
the garage, removed the brakes, painted “sustainability” on the bonnet, and
driven it directly at the women who were already lying in the road.
Under your new definition of permanence (Schedule 1, Part 8), you demand
we exhaust “all appropriate medical treatment” before you’ll even admit our
impairment is permanent. We must prove we have undertaken every
evidence-based treatment in Australia, ignoring the minor inconvenience that
we might live 800 kilometres away from the clinic and have zero dollars.
Should we also forage for magical herbs? Send the child to a wellness
retreat run by a man called Brayden? Drink a kale smoothie on a full moon?
Have the autism steamed out in a Himalayan salt cave? Chant “evidence
based” into a jar of kombucha? I just don’t even know, John.
Do you really want us to mortgage all our personal assets for our children to
have ABA? Unless, of course, they are the redheaded stepchildren that you
detest, who are now kicked out of the family home. Even if they need help
because they are under nine years old. It feels like you want us to bankrupt
ourselves chasing non-existent or inaccessible miracle cures just to prove we
are still sufficiently broken for your liking.
John, my love. I miss who you were so much. But darling, you have become
a megalomaniac. You have handed your best mate, the Minister, the power
of a medieval monarch. Through “support determinations” (Schedule 1, Part
4), one politician can unilaterally slash social and community participation
funding by 50% across the board. If Parliament objects, who cares? And then
you told him that sure, it’s okay to tell the world (at National Press Club, no
less) that you are going to lock your wife in the house fifty percent of the
time, for ‘social and community participation’.
That doesn’t just mean going to bowling in a white bus, John. You know that.
It means going to work. Not just to the sheltered workshop where it’s still
legal to pay us $2.00 an hour (despite Disability Royal Commission
recommendations). It means that in a cost of living crisis, you have stopped
us getting support to be gainfully employed and now we can no longer afford
our skyrocketing rent, let alone see our mums.
You handed that same Ministerial bestie “Henry VIII” transitional rules to
rewrite the Act overnight without parliamentary approval to fix your
“unforeseen operational issues”. Handed it over like they were keys to the
family station wagon or your house. Or control of your entire family.
We are never going to sleep with the light off again. Just saying.
And you want to give yourself powers to send in the goon squad? What the
hell, John? You integrated the Regulatory Powers Act 2014, giving your
investigators police-like powers to raid premises, seize evidence, and force
us to decrypt our computers. Are you running a disability support scheme or
a secret police force?
We saw your (hilariously backdated) Treasury modelling, finally produced
sulkily like a DNA test at a paternity hearing, despite a Senate Order to
Produce Documents. It looks like it was written on the back of a napkin,
John. We know your master plan is to purge 241,000 of us by 2030, punting
us into a $10 billion “Foundational Supports” rebound relationship that is
currently nothing more than a political hallucination in the government’s fever
dreams. You think you can legislate us out of the budget.
That is not policy design, darling. That is like a man putting a toaster in the
bath and then asking Treasury to model the savings on soap.
Oh, a further note to Roger.
‘Roger, the reason that John looks like he has aged ninety years is that he is
having another secret liaison with the States, and there’s a fair bit of hostage
negotiation involving money.
Only they can’t talk about it because they are from the same family, so things
like the bilateral agreement that runs out at the end of the year isn’t talked
about, just like the NDIS blockchain digital payment system that he’s
implementing ever-so-quietly under the table in conjunction with that cool
little data matching program and the identity verification system and quite a
lot more that his peers would understand if they were not boomers.
I almost feel sorry for him, Roger. For whom he was and what he is now. I
can almost see his best mate, sitting there gripping the wheel like a man
trying to parallel-park the Titanic, while the whole machinery of reform rolled
downhill behind him: no brakes, no map, no real co-design, and a horde of
cyclists in front of him pedalling furiously on the doomed assumption that
someone in government had checked whether the thing could stop.
But he made choices, Roger. And here we are.’
Here is the one thing you forgot, John: Disability is forever.
It is the one minority group your politicians can join in a heartbeat. You can
cut our funding, you can let your algorithms deny us, and your neglect will
absolutely kill many of us. But where one of us dies, another will pop up. We
are eternal. We are like cockroaches during a nuclear war. One or another
of us will outlast your Ministers, we will outlast your governments, and we will
certainly outlast this vile legislation.
We are the Bolshy Divas, we are the disabled people, we are the families,
and we are everywhere.
You made a mistake, John. You gave a whole group of people a taste of the
freedom and the life that you enjoy, and then you decided you wanted to take
it back. You built a market of 300,000 workers and jobs, then decided you
would cull 204,000 of them.
There are more of us. So many more of us. And not just us – our families,
our workers and our supporters.
And you forgot one important thing.
We vote.
Destroying us is a terrible, terrible way for a government to lose an election.
But we are going to make sure that in two years, that we judge those who let
this Bill pass – any single politician and their party - according to their
actions.
We promise.
But, John – we keep our promises.
Submitted on behalf of the Bolshy Divas
by Samantha Connor AM
About the Bolshy Divas
The Bolshy Divas are disability activists in the style of feminist masked avengers, exposing and discussing discrimination, unmet need and issues that affect people with disability and their families.
We use humour, art and passion to talk about the overlooked, the unfair and the subtext behind real issues affecting Australians with disability. There are no requirements to be a Bolshy Diva, just a desire to bring about change, a sense of humour and enough bolshiness to talk about the issues openly and honestly.
We could be anyone. We are everywhere. We are strong. We are Bolshy Divas.