Reaching people who are marginalized in major disability policy reform

Policy changes often aim to improve the access of socially marginalized people who face systemic, social and personal barriers to the support they need. A major policy reform in Australia was the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which was introduced to meet the country’s human rights obligations. NDIS is publicly funded to allocate individual funding packages to 10% of people with disability and facilitates access to mainstream services for all people with disability. Support services are intended to be entitlements, consistent with a human rights framework. Predictably, the most marginalized people remain under-represented in both packages and mainstream access, including people with psychosocial disability who are at risk of homelessness. A 2-year project was conducted to familiarize people with disability and service providers who have contact with them about how to access support. People with Disability Australia managed the project as action research with university researchers. The research used interviews to study how to improve access. People with disability were advisors to the governance and research design. The findings were that it took many months for people with disability and the organizations that support them to trust the project staff, understand the relevance of disability to their lives, and to take steps to seek their entitlements to support. Some implications for policy are conceptual in terms of the policy language of disability, which alienates some people from the services to which they are entitled. Other implications are bureaucratic – the gap between homeless and disability organizations means that they prioritize people’s immediate needs and people who are easier to serve, rather than facilitating sustainable support. A global social policy implication is that specialized interventions to advocate for the rights of marginalized people with disability and to demonstrate how to engage with them remains a priority while gaps between service types persist.