Our new govt could do with a dose of crip-magination

I was dazed and disoriented by the first series of lockdowns. While Aotearoa gained an international reputation for the caring and kindness in our response, my concern was about how long kindness would last without a clear grounding in disability rights. Even if Aotearoa’s response to Covid was better than other countries, I was wary of the way its success relied on good will, and good will is a tide that can go out. It is possible the election results were at least in part a response to that. A tide, a tiredness, a change. 

At the moment in between the election and the incoming government there is a similar sense that our wellbeing is conditional on what those in power choose to do. How we are thought about, discussed or dismissed as disabled people is important. The way our lives are described in political debate and policy-making shapes how they play out. Ableism, as the American author and disabled community advocate Rebekah Taussig puts it, limits our imaginations of what disabled people can be. 

This feeling is familiar to me. Wanting to write about kindness and finding myself writing about its fragility. Putting together a lecture on pleasure as a critical dimension of disabled people’s lives and finding myself discussing the limitations of education and disability support systems. Wanting to write about our inclusion, our participation in the world and instead writing about our exclusion from it. I now want to write about disabled joy and I find myself writing about disabled fears. It feels urgent, for example, to point out that our incoming government is interested in implementing policies that could have a detrimental effect on disabled people. Some of the things that have us rightly concerned are a tax plan that might take away from those on disability benefits, a rejection of free prescriptions and subsidised transport that will see the already stretched incomes of incomes of disabled people stretched still thinner. These things are combined with uncertainty over how this government will approach the crisis in health and disability support work many of us rely on.

It feels important to specifically highlight how our material wellbeing might be adversely affected. This is because our material wellbeing and security has an impact on our ability to live lives that have meaning for us. A baseline level of security allows us to both expect and then to access any of this joy that I would prefer to be writing and talking about it, dreaming about and making it real. 

In my crip-magination there is a world where our value as disabled people is unconditional. This is evident in the way we make policy and legislate and the change is palpable. 

The care professions, such as support work and healthcare, are strengthened in workforce numbers. The professions are viewed as highly skilled and remunerated in line with the actual value they add to our lives. This kind of work becomes desirable because incomes are liveable and the work is respected. Continuity of support and stability of accessible housing, where the power legally cannot be cut off, builds disabled people’s quality of relationships and quality of life and with it their ability to be in the world. The assumption that disabled people will be living “in the community” is so ubiquitous that this phrase disappears from our vocabulary. We are people with places to be and transport systems are designed to reflect this. From a place of security we can work or contribute in other ways and neither is seen as a reflection of our worth, neither choice limits our access to disability, income support or healthcare. We can be in relationships without risking these things. We live longer. 

This is the world beyond ableism. Where we can grow our imaginations further still. The world I recommit to as I live here under any government, no matter the turn of the tide. 

* Henrietta is a member of the Disabled Persons Assembly National Executive Committee but the opinions expressed here are their own.