Inclusion as Promise, Inclusion as Performance:
Gladstone Regional Council’s Access and Inclusion Action Plan (2024–2027) emerges as a document of promise - articulating a vision of “a thriving and inclusive community where diversity is celebrated”. It positions itself as community-informed, organisation-wide, and transformative. Yet, beneath this language lies a more complex reality: inclusion is not dismantled as a structural condition, but managed as an administrative project. This tension - between being (the lived experience of disability) and belonging (institutionally sanctioned participation) - reveals the plan not as a site of transformation, but of negotiation.
This is the Political Economy of Inclusion: At its core, the plan is structurally bounded. Its scope explicitly limits responsibility to: Council-owned facilities. Council-delivered services. Council as an employer. Excluding: Private industry. Broader service systems. Structural inequality. This reflects what Marx would recognise as institutional containment - where systemic inequities are reframed into manageable, localised issues. Disability is not positioned as a product of social relations (labour, capital, exclusion), but as a problem of access to services. In this sense, the plan performs a familiar neoliberal manoeuvre: It redistributes experience (access improvements), but not power (structural change).
This is consultation Without Power: The Council asserts that community voices were “central in shaping the plan”. Engagement included: Surveys (Feb–March 2024). Workshops and submissions (May 2024). However, what is absent is more revealing than what is present. There is: No demographic transparency. No participation data. No explanation of how input altered decisions. Foucault reminds us that power operates not merely through exclusion, but through structured participation - where voices are invited, but only within pre-defined discursive limits. Here, consultation becomes: A technology of governance, not a redistribution of authority. The community is permitted to speak - but not to decide.
The DCN Effect - Mediated Voice and Gatekeeping:
The Gladstone Disability Community Network (DCN) is repeatedly credited with: Facilitating connections. Advocating for the plan. Participating in implementation events. While this signals partnership, it also reveals a critical dependency. The problem is not just DCN - it is singular reliance. This produces three structural risks:
1. Representational compression. One network cannot hold: Expansive Neurodivergent experiences. High, complex and nuanced support needs. Unaffiliated individuals. Culturally diverse disability perspectives.
2. Networked participation. Only those already connected to advocacy structures are heard.
3. Institutional filtering. Community voice is mediated through: Organisational priorities. Opportunity and cross-promotional dependencies. Established relationships. In Foucauldian terms: DCN becomes both conduit and constraint - circulating curated voices while shaping their limits.
Outsourcing Inclusion - The Get Skilled Access Model:
Council engaged Get Skilled Access (GSA) to: Facilitate engagement. Produce the plan This introduces a critical contradiction. Inclusion - ostensibly grounded in lived experience - is: Outsourced to external expertise. From a Marxist lens: Knowledge becomes commodified. Inclusion becomes a service. From a Foucauldian lens: Expertise produces legitimacy. Local knowledge is subordinated. From a disability justice perspective: Lived experience is displaced by consultancy frameworks in the hierarchy of professionalism. The result is a plan that feels: Technically competent. Structurally generic. Locally under-rooted
The Missing Subjects of Inclusion:
Despite claims of broad engagement, the plan demonstrates significant absences. Absent or underdeveloped voices: People with complex or high support needs. Neurodivergent individuals (minimal autism/sensory consideration, Neurodivergence is not contained to these two descriptors). First Nations disabled people (no Indigenous disability framework). Women and gender-diverse disabled people. Rural and isolated populations. While Council states targeted engagement occurred, there is no evidence of how these perspectives shaped outcomes. This absence is not accidental - it reflects what disability justice scholars identify as: Selective inclusion, where certain identities are acknowledged but not structurally centred.
Training the Individual, Not the System:
Early implementation includes: “Welcoming People Well” training (46 staff). Basic Auslan awareness. These interventions focus on: Attitudes. Awareness. Behaviour. Nietzsche would identify this as a form of moral reframing: The “good worker” becomes inclusive. The institution remains unchanged. The burden shifts from system to individual. What is absent: Anti-ableism frameworks. Structural bias analysis. Institutional accountability mechanisms. Thus, inclusion becomes: A moral expectation, not a structural obligation.
Accountability Without Consequence:
The plan commits to: Six-monthly reporting. Internal working groups. Yet it lacks: Independent evaluation. Community-led oversight. Measurable outcome indicators. This produces what can be termed: Performative accountability - visibility without enforceability.
Inclusion Without Justice. The plan defines inclusion through: Access. Participation. Belonging. But omits: Power redistribution. Structural inequality. Rights-based frameworks. This reflects a broader ideological shift: From disability as a political condition to disability as a user experience.
Between Being and Belonging - Within GRANN's theoretical framing, the tension becomes clear:
Being: the lived, embodied reality of disability - complex, intersectional, often marginalised. Belonging (when not self-directed): institutionally sanctioned inclusion - conditional, structured, and managed. Gladstone’s plan offers belonging - but only within: Defined spaces. Approved channels. Mediated voices. It does not transform the conditions of being.
Reimagining Inclusion: A Justice-Oriented Alternative. To move beyond symbolic inclusion, Council must shift: From consultation to co-governance. Paid disability advisory bodies. Decision-making power embedded in governance. From DCN reliance to plural engagement. Grassroots, unaffiliated, and marginalised voices. From consultants to community knowledge. Invest in local lived-experience leadership. From awareness to structural change. Anti-ableism training. Institutional redesign. From access to justice. Address systemic exclusion across health, education, employment.
The Limits of Institutional Inclusion: Gladstone Regional Council’s Access and Inclusion Action Plan is not without merit. It signals intent, initiates conversation, and introduces organisational change. But it ultimately remains: Administratively bounded. Epistemologically mediated. Politically cautious. It does not dismantle exclusion - it manages it. Inclusion, here, is not a redistribution of power, but a reorganisation of access. And so we return to the central tension: We are invited to belong -but only in ways that do not disrupt the structures that exclude us.