SILosophy - Episode 30: SIL reform from a participants perspective

Yeah.

So do you think that there's enough communication to participants directly about the changes and what they mean and what's happening and what that might look like?

no no way um i think it really just hits them like from an email you know okay you're being cut off from this part of your funding or it could be your whole funding you know your disability doesn't um give you an ndis funding anymore so um unless you're like really media trained you know you're always doing your research um it always just comes out of the blue you know it just might be on the news one day and like oh crap you know my funding's just been cut in half because you know they don't they don't support this disability anymore or this sort of funding isn't provided anymore.

So there isn't much, I guess, there isn't much time involved before the cut.

So I think unless you're doing like a lot of research, hard research, especially from a participant who doesn't really think of it too much.

Yeah, it just comes out of the blue and I guess you just have to be ready for it.

Yeah.

Are there things that you're doing to try and put things in place before funding's cut more to meet some of your goals, work towards some of your goals, so if your funding got cut, it wouldn't be such a big deal for you? It's

a hard question.

Yeah, so, you know, I'm

always working to achieve my goals, but I'm not sure

if...

there would be too much for myself or others to be able to do to, like, prepare for all the cuts because they're very random.

You never know what's coming.

So I guess it's just...

Oh, it's a hard question to answer.

But yeah, I guess for myself to prepare for it, I guess, you know, I've just been trying to, you know, one, being able to achieve all my goals.

So if that just might be, you know, learning, you know, cooking for myself five times a week, you know, ordering takeaway every day.

These are just examples out of the blue.

I guess I would just be trying to better myself to make myself more independent so that if I was to be cut off by the funding, at least I have independent skills put in place so that if a certain part of funding is cut off, I'm independent enough to be able to at least one um do that for i guess for my life you know i'd be able to cook for the rest of my life i've got those skills in place but also just i guess prepare so at least i can have some temporary skills until there's a solution in place

Yeah, because we're told that anything that comes off the NJS, there'll be other supports that are there to fill those gaps.

Just those services don't yet exist.

So it's hard to get information about what that might look like before they're developed.

But at least... hopefully there will be something that replaces some of those things.

So if there are disabilities that are removed from NDIS, we're being told that they will be funded at a state level instead of a federal level, and they'll be called something different, but they will still kind of be there.