3 - Disability Rights and Carers’ Advocacy

Summary

This chapter discusses a second source of care and support policy tension – the tension between supporting the claims of carers and supporting those of people with disabilities. Organized carer movements in Australia, the UK and other liberal welfare states have argued successfully for policy support on the basis of the burden of providing intensive care to older persons and/or children and adults with disabilities. Disability studies scholars and activists have challenged this characterization of disability as an individual deficit and source of burden, arguing instead that disability is a consequence of a failure to accommodate difference and recognize the rights of people with disabilities. They have advocated instead for policies that enable people with disabilities to be independent and choose how they live. Each approach has some benefits for one constituency at the expense of others. Support for carers to ‘care’ can produce disempowering arrangements for people with disabilities, while independent living arrangements sought by people with disabilities may disempower support workers if they do not have appropriate pay and conditions. Calls for choice and independent living have also coincided with the neoliberal marketization of care and support, resulting in a narrowing of choice that is only available to some.