Australia may now be the only country in the world seriously debating whether the taxpayer should subsidise prostitution as a matter of "human rights." Not free speech. Not bodily security. Not legal equality. But sex, purchased on the public dime, framed as a disability entitlement. If Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) were alive, he would not bother with satire. He'd just quote the policy briefing.

The story, filtered through advocacy groups and behind various paywalls, is that some disability organisations argue access to sex work should be funded through the NDIS because intimacy is a human right. The government, in a rare outbreak of sanity, has moved to clarify that the national disability insurance scheme will not pay for brothel visits or escort services. This has triggered outrage, grief-laden testimonials, and a familiar moral escalation: opposition is now said to deny disabled people their dignity, sexuality, and personhood itself.

In the modern rhetorical economy, everything eventually becomes a "human right," provided you repeat it solemnly enough and add the word "access."

Once upon a time, human rights were protections against torture, enslavement, imprisonment without trial, and state murder. Now they include broadband, air-conditioning, aesthetic fulfilment, emotional validation — and apparently commercial intercourse funded by strangers who have never met you and did not consent to participate in your intimacy.

This is what happens when rights discourse detaches from limits. It does not elevate human dignity. It dissolves it into consumer demand with moral garnish.

Let's clear the fog. No one serious is claiming disabled people should be celibate, lonely, or barred from relationships. The issue is whether the state should purchase other people's bodies as a therapeutic intervention and call it inclusion. Those are not the same proposition. One is civil equality. The other is public procurement of sex.

This is not compassion. It is bureaucratised intimacy — the welfare state rebranded as Tinder with receipts.

Advocates frame the issue around isolation, despair, and exclusion, and those experiences are real. Disability can be socially brutal. Loneliness kills. Touch matters. Desire matters. But none of this answers the central question: why does compassion now require converting prostitution into a medical benefit administered by a government agency whose core competencies include disability ramps and invoicing errors?

There is something exquisitely modern about solving existential loneliness with line items.

The claim that subsidised sex is a "human right" is not merely wrong — it is category error of Olympic proportions. Rights constrain state power. They do not compel the state to arrange sex. The right not to be tortured does not imply the right to be massaged. The right to free speech does not imply the right to a government-funded podcast audience. The right to bodily autonomy does not imply the right to rent someone else's body with public money.

At some point, rights talk becomes parody.

But the deeper problem here is not legal. It is moral inversion. The old welfare model aimed to restore independence, agency, and social participation. The new one increasingly treats desire itself as entitlement and the market as therapy. Where once we tried to integrate people into shared civic life, we now offer them private transactions subsidised by institutions that increasingly function as lifestyle management platforms.

This is not inclusion. It is commodified consolation.

And there is something grotesque about a society that responds to disability-related loneliness not by rebuilding social structures — families, communities, churches, civic organisations — but by contracting sex workers and calling it progress. The old village at least pretended to care. The modern state sends an invoice.

The exploitation problem is not incidental here. It is structural. Introducing public money into intimate transactions does not reduce vulnerability, it relocates it. Who consents when someone with cognitive impairment is involved? Who assesses capacity? Who decides therapeutic necessity? Who protects workers from coercion disguised as care? Who audits the encounters, and how, exactly, does one conduct compliance checks on state-funded intercourse?

Every attempt to answer these questions becomes either grotesque or authoritarian.

Yet advocates assure us this is empowerment. It always is. The vocabulary of empowerment now functions as a solvent that dissolves every boundary. If something feels affirming, it must be liberating. If it alleviates suffering, it must be moral. If someone wants it badly enough, opposing it becomes cruelty. Desire replaces deliberation. Emotion replaces ethics.

And the taxpayer becomes the silent third party in an arrangement he neither chose nor approved — financing not healthcare, not rehabilitation, not assistive technologies, but commercial intimacy between two strangers underwritten by government funds.

This is not disability rights. This is welfare state eroticism.

The real tragedy here is not prudishness. It is poverty of imagination. A civilisation that cannot imagine ways of addressing isolation other than commodified sex has already abandoned the deeper work of building social belonging. Instead of restoring relational ecosystems, we monetise intimacy and call it inclusion. Instead of rebuilding culture, we outsource touch.

Once upon a time, progress meant fewer people selling their bodies out of economic necessity. Now it means more people doing so — but with better paperwork and a diversity framework.

And naturally, anyone who hesitates is accused of cruelty. "You would deny disabled people intimacy," they say, as if refusing to subsidise prostitution were equivalent to issuing chastity belts. This is rhetorical blackmail. No one has a right to another person's body. No one has a right to state-financed desire fulfilment. And no society that confuses compassion with procurement will remain morally coherent for long.

The real question is not whether disabled people deserve love, intimacy, dignity, and sexual agency. Of course they do. The question is whether the role of the state is to purchase sex as a therapeutic intervention and pretend this constitutes justice.

That's not inclusion. That's despair with a budget line.

There was a time when progress meant lifting people into the shared moral life of the community. Now it means constructing bespoke transactions to manage individual loneliness privately while the public realm quietly collapses. The state no longer builds culture. It compensates for its absence.

And when prostitution becomes disability policy, it is no longer liberation that has failed: It is civilisation.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-07-22/ndis-participant-sex-work-ban-fears-isolation/104085898