"The way you make me feel” : shame and the neoliberal governance of disability welfare subjectivities in Australia and the UK

<p>There has been a growing global statistical panic surrounding ‘disability’ over recent years. This disability anxiety has been couched around a discourse of unsustainability as governments use a particular set of disability statistics to argue that they can no longer afford disability welfare that is, one of fiscal doom and gloom, “looming in the horizon”(Woodward, 2009, p. 197). Such concerns have been occurring across most OECD countries, and these statistical discourses of disability fiscal panic have become normalised with the onset of austerity measures since the financial crash in late 2007. Global policy institutionssuch as the OECD, World Bank and the IMF have situated disability within economic discourses of global restructuring (Grover & Soldatic, 2013). Disability is thus now central to eco-nomic debates pertaining to the future ‘health’ of the nation that dominates debates of welfare retraction that aim to move people off welfare and into the world of work (Soldatic, 2013).</p>