After yet another cut to his support coordination funding, Terry from Richmond has taken an outside the box (or rather, an outside the mortal coil) approach to navigating his SDA experience. Like many people with disabilities, Terry is in a bureaucratic war of attrition with the system to get into a home that’s suitable for him.
Everything is paperwork in SDA and by now Terry has amassed a small rainforest’s worth of documentation on his desk. The burden of proof for the most banal things falls on his lap. It’s as if the Government is aware of the problems for people with disabilities but is largely indifferent to it.
He could think of only one person who’d be able to help him navigate the SDA environment. For a nominal fee, a psychic in Brunswick helped him solicit the spirit of Franz Kafka for assistance.
Terry thought that Kafka, the Czech author famous for writing stories that capture the feeling of being in a system you can’t understand or escape, was the perfect person to help with the bureaucratic harms he’s currently dealing with.
We were able to get a statement from Kafka about his new role by way of Ouija board:
“It’s definitely challenging. The adversarial and trauma-uninformed system we have to navigate reminds me of my novel ‘The Trial’, so I’ve been trying to reverse engineer it. However, if this is ‘The Trial’, Terry’s only crime is having a disability.” He is being dealt with in the usual manner and he’s been told that he will be advised of the next step in the process as soon as the system determines how it will respond.
When asked about the 3:1 sharing ratio his client was being forced into, Kafka stated:
I’ve written about this before, “It’s almost like Terry woke up as an insect, the way he seems to be getting dehumanized. He’s a problem now and has to be told where to live as a way to cut costs.”
Even if he manages to get the funding in Terry’s plan, Kafka seems nervous about the SDA industry itself:
“The system I wrote in my novel was meant to be unusable and unable to be navigated; it’s essentially a maze with no exit. Even if we smash our heads through a wall, I shudder to think of what lies beyond.”
When asked to elaborate, Kafka replied:
“While getting an SDA package for Terry is my goal, I’m fully aware that Terry will be cursed to navigate the SDA as his reward. There are some very unsafe living arrangements Terry may encounter that transform him into a profit centre. That’s not really my area though, its something for Milton Friedman, the father of neoliberalism who is around here somewhere.
We also learnt that Ayn Rand, the Russian novelist known for her love of the free market and distaste for social safety nets is doing consultancy work for SDA and SIL organisations from the otherworld. When contacted via Ouija phone, she refused to leave a comment.
All the hallmarks of capitalism, arcane bureaucracy and ableism are clearly at play across the community and in the disability services market. Although our contact with notorious people from the otherworld are an illustration that these things have been in play for some time, the reality is that people with disability have to deal with a frustratingly complicated legal framework that often produces results that are dangerous and demeaning.
Strong support coordination is one of our few ways to deal with this, and yet it somehow always happens to be one of the first things to be cut from people’s plans… often creating an additional admin load for us.
The system has grown into something few can understand or defend, even those inside government. People with disability shouldn’t have to take on such an intense burden to simply live a life in the community on top of all of their other commitments and managing their disability.
There’s a reason that these impenetrable systems are often called Kafka-esque. Kafka said that something to be proud of, even though it’s not.
