Lorna Hallahan: For Sale in a Market: What protects my dignity?

Lorna Hallahan’s presentation at CRU’s 2-day event Building Capacity for Lifelong Inclusion invited deep reflection on what it means to for people with disability to be ‘customers’ in an NDIS marketplace.

Lorna’s presentation, For Sale in a Market: What protects my dignity? draws on her professional and personal experiences as a disabled woman with long involvement in the disability movement. She challenges the idea that choice of service provider is enough to overcome the indignity, disrespect and exclusion experienced by people with disabilities, and makes her own commitments to be ‘half a shade braver’.

You can also read Lorna’s presentation paper here.

Associate Professor Lorna Hallahan has been a leader in social work education for almost 2 decades and is South Australian Discipline Lead at ACAP University College.

Originally from Queensland, Lorna was founding community worker at QAI (Queensland Advocacy for Inclusion), and as a disabled woman and worker has been involved in the disability movement from the early 1980s, focusing on advocacy development and evaluation, and policy development and analysis.

Lorna is currently a member of the Independent Advisory Council for the NDIS. She was a Chief Investigator on the Evaluation of the Trial of the NDIS having been a member of the National NDIS Advisory Group. Lorna was Senior Research Advisor to the Disability Royal Commission where she produced a socio-cultural history of disability in Australia.