Although Australia has made formal commitments to fostering a rights-based disability framework, including the introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), a significant gap persists between policy and people’s lived experience. This presentation explores why this gap exists.
Drawing on stakeholder interviews, I will illustrate how disability is framed, first as an unsustainable economic burden, and second, as a medical deficit and how these frames are legitimised through public discourse and bureaucratic systems that ration support and limit what the NDIS can achieve. In response to these constraints, I will also show how the disability community turns to advocacy and media engagement to secure their rights. I argue that this is more than just activism; it is a crucial and often overlooked form of informal implementation. While these informal strategies can help in the short term, they, however, operate as workarounds rather than solutions, leaving underlying implementation structures unchanged.
My presentation will show how dominant frames of disability can impede rights frameworks, and why recognising and supporting the disability community’s informal implementation strategies is essential to progress implementation.
