This article examines the emerging challenges and opportunities presented by self-management options in Australia's National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). We examine the three different ways in which NDIS participants can opt to self-manage their funding and services, including direct employment and emerging Uber-style online platforms, and explore the potential implications of these options for NDIS participants, service providers and the disability support workforce. In particular, we focus on these options in relation to the transition to a marketised services landscape being developed alongside the NDIS, and examine both the risks and opportunities for each stakeholder group. Through this analysis, we identify implications for policy and practice, in particular around regulatory mechanisms and the role of government within this emerging market economy and transforming service landscape. K E Y W O R D Sdisability support workforce, individualised funding, marketisation, NDIS, self-management, Uber

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The need for all people with disability to have access to reliable information before they can make informed choices in individualised funding programmes is well documented. However, little guidance exists on how information can be provided to ensure it reaches its target audience. While information provision is important everywhere, there is a pressing need in the Australian context to ensure all people have access to information as the National Disability Insurance Scheme is designed and introduced. The authors identified key principles of information provision documented in the literature and used these to analyse their data from Australian studies of individualised funding programmes. The data came from 143 transcripts and records of interview in five studies conducted from 2011 to 2013. The analysis confirmed the importance of the principles previously documented and identified two additional principles, these being related to gender and 'hard to reach' groups. This analysis informs a new framework to increase equity and improve people's access to information in individualised funding programmes. Information needs to be: (i) accessible and diverse in format, mode, source and location; (ii) personalised and targeted; (iii) accurate, consistent and timely; (iv) from a trusted source; (v) independent; (vi) culturally appropriate; (vii) actively promoted to 'hard to reach' groups and (viii) gender appropriate. This paper provides a new framework to guide information in individualised funding programmes for professionals in roles ranging from policy makers to service delivery.

We show how policy discourses construct consumer choice, performance measurement and quality standards as key technologies in the marketisation of disability services and aged care in Australia. The emergence of performance outcome measurement and increased consumer access to these through diverse consumer facing and interactive platforms enables the state to “govern at a distance” through the management and shaping of outcome indicators rather than delivery of services. The state does this by creating market competition and establishing outcomes which reflect the construction people using services as informed and rational consumers rather than citizens. This construction and operationalisation frame marketisation as a rational solution to broken systems, assume choice is unproblematic and ignore diverse capacities to access and use information, resource differentials and contextual variables such as market maturity and service availability. The benign marketisation of human services thus discriminates against those who are already marginalised and disadvantaged unless equity strategies are clearly in place.

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