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UNPAID, UNSEEN, UNSUSTAINABLE: Caring from Beyond the Margins. A Longitudinal Analysis of Australia’s Rural Carers and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (Abstract and Citation only)
Thesis

UNPAID, UNSEEN, UNSUSTAINABLE: Caring from Beyond the Margins. A Longitudinal Analysis of Australia’s Rural Carers and the National Disability Insurance Scheme (Abstract and Citation only)

Jana-Jade Loadsman
Southern Cross University
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2025
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25918/thesis.600
Appears in  Recent Southern Cross PhD Theses

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Abstract

National Disability Insurance Scheme NDIS Family Wellbeing Carer Wellbeing Intersectionality Regional Australia Rural Australia
The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) was established as a flagship reform to advance equity, autonomy, and support for Australians with disability. However, this thesis demonstrates that the NDIS, in both design and implementation, structurally excludes and exploits the unpaid caregiving families on which it silently depends. Drawing on four rounds of longitudinal, idiographic data and underpinned by Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) and Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA), this research presents the first known study to examine rural caregiving families’ experiences with the NDIS through the dual frameworks of the Social Determinants of Health and Intersectionality. In doing so, it demonstrates how disability, caregiving, rurality, and policy intersect to produce cumulative and unequal experiences of health and wellbeing over time. This thesis reveals how administrative burden, geographic inequity, and institutional omission have normalised caregiver harm as a function of national policy. Carer wellbeing emerges not as a personal vulnerability, but as a systemic casualty, produced through funding exclusion, policy erasure, chronic under-recognition, and institutional omission. Rather than alleviating caregiving demands, the findings demonstrate how the NDIS progressively redistributes responsibility from formal systems onto unpaid families, embedding additional labour, advocacy, and administrative obligations within everyday care. The findings challenge dominant policy narratives, reframing the NDIS as a mechanism of legislated extraction that is inconsistent with Australia’s obligations under the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and the Constitution of the World Health Organization. What emerges is a direct empirical indictment of a system that relies upon, but fails to recognise, the labour, expertise, and exhaustion of unpaid carers. This research culminates in a rights-based legislative blueprint for structural reform, demanding that carer wellbeing be enshrined in law, embedded in policy, and restored as a matter of ethical governance. Until unpaid carers are recognised as indispensable to the operation and sustainability of the NDIS, rather than remaining its invisible scaffolding, Australia’s flagship disability reform cannot deliver the equity it was established to achieve.

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