Over the past couple of decades, disabled people in much of the Western world have often sought, or agreed to, more individualised funding schemes in order to gain greater “choice and control” over the support we receive. But the autonomy, dignity and flexibility we were promised seems constantly under threat or out of reach, largely because of the perception that allowing us such “luxuries” is too expensive.

Increasingly, I refer to myself as disabled rather than autistic and disabled. Not because I am ashamed of being autistic, but rather, because I am troubled by what autism has come to represent. Autism is increasingly being located as separate from disability, a trendy quirk, and I worry that disability is yet again rendered “other” in order to serve autism’s “inclusion”.

Since October 2023, I have gotten to know members of the Palestinian Deaf community across the Gaza Strip. In sharing their accounts, it is my hope that readers will begin to understand their uniquely horrific experiences of the genocide, and how their Deaf and Palestinian identities are inextricably embedded within them. 

Autistic women and genderqueer people are historically underrecognised and underrepresented. Fortunately, this is starting to change, at least in the literary sphere. In the past two years, readers have been blessed by books from Clem Bastow, Hannah Gadsby, Emma A. Jane, Grace Tame, Dr. Sandra Thom-Jones and Chloé Hayden, to name a few — autistic women and genderqueer people who have written memoirs that either reference or centre their experiences of their intersecting gender and neurological identities.

The elevator doors opened like the top being peeled away on a can of sardines, and at least half a dozen squirming pink bodies blinked out at us, crammed shoulder to shoulder in the absurdly small elevator. They shuffled their feet and pretended not to see me, not to see my wheelchair or the flight of stairs visible through the glass walls. No one got out, but the doors remained open, ignorantly optimistic. After a few awkward seconds, a hand darted out from somewhere in the middle of the group and jabbed the Close button.

NDIS plans are sometimes drafted by a local area coordinator, but always formalised within the National Disability Insurance Agency. They are finalised by a planner and approved by a supervisor, and neither of those people meet the participant whose life they are planning for the next two years. We do not even know their names.

Passed in 2002, Federal Disability Discrimination Act requires public transport across Australia to be fully accessible by the end of 2022. Our trams, trains and buses are running late. At the current rate of progress, public transport will not be fully accessible until 2066 - over 40 years out of time.

Disability justice is linked to prison and police abolitionism, to racial justice, to poverty, to employment and opportunities, to all kinds of social equity issues. We need so much more than awareness, acceptance and appreciation alone.

Much has been written about how Australia’s welfare system operates as a way of punishing marginalised, disabled and poor people simply for being poor, creating what is effectively a system of eugenics. However, the aspect of the welfare system that most deserves this label is one of the least talked about. Let’s discuss Centrelink's relationship-testing.

It is comforting to see the recent influx of books by Autistic people and the more complex fictional portrayals of Autistic people in programmes such as Everything’s Gonna Be Okay and As We See It. Hopefully, this indicates an increased understanding and acceptance of the community. The next step would be to let ordinary Autistic people of all genders, cultures, ages and speech abilities have a say in the institutions that so often attempt to silence us.

‘You cost too much. You're not welcome here.’ That's the message that many migrants and families receive when we try to settle in Aotearoa/New Zealand or Australia. If you have a disability, health condition, high BMI (in New Zealand), or other potential health needs, immigration rules in both country will likely judge you not as a contributing human being who should be treated with dignity, but as an economic burden.

But why should disabled people be forced to accept being planned for as an afterthought in a society designed for able-bodiedm neurotypical Australians, while the opposite is not just possible, but would dramatically improve the quality of life for everyone? Why does the onus fall upon disabled people to prove, to the satisfaction of our ableist society, the accommodations that we need are ‘reasonable’, and why does it not fall upon the businesses and governments with vastly greater resources to prove that they’re not?

What it means is that this pandemic, and the near universal inability to properly contain and manage its spread, are a function of the particular material form that disability takes under capitalism. We must understand disability, itself a category historically located within capitalism before we can understand the pandemic. To avert another such global catastrophe in the future, we must confront the structures within which this most recent catastrophe is comprised.

Modelling has shown that over 25,000 Australian citizens will most likely die from COVID and COVID-related illnesses if the government proceeds with opening the country once 80 per cent of the Australian population has been vaccinated. It might therefore sound crazy for a group of people most statistically likely to die due to their ‘underlying health conditions’ to refuse a free, potentially life-saving, and scientifically well-grounded medication promising to protect them from the worst of its risks.

A sitting disability is a severe and legitimate physical disability, comparable to a mobility impairment. It is time for anti-discrimination principles to be applied to us, rather than sarcasm, humour or ill-informed advice, so that we may enjoy full participation and inclusion in society.

We, members of the Disability Justice Network of Australia, want to express our anger, sorrow, and solidarity with the Palestinian people. As both Indigenous and non-Indigenous disabled people living in so-called Australia, we recognise and understand the violent and disabling nature of settler-colonialism, an ongoing structure that relies on the othering, dehumanisation, and disposal of our bodies and lives.