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The meaning of impairment is often Janus-faced. On the one hand, it is associated with defect, deformity, monstrosity and other tropes that carry the weight of ontological ruin, haunting narratives of physical, mental or sensory catastrophe that disturb the normate sense of being human. Impairment is invested with the debilitating social and moral consequences that symbolise disability. Disavowed and repudiated by the non-disabled community, disability represents the murky, shadow side of existence that separates normal embodiment from its benighted, abject 'other'. Disgust – on the part of non-disabled, 'clean and proper' subjects – is the likely emotional response to the pollution and impropriety that disability represents. The emotional relation between the two parties may be mired in normate repulsion.

In this article I argue that disabled people in the United Kingdom have been tipped into an abyss of counterfeit citizenship. They have been smeared as 'false mendicants' – an old trick well documented in the historical archives of ableism. Neoliberalism has used this repertoire of invalidation – its noxious taint of cunning and fraud – as the 'moral justification' for welfare reform and for the pillory and notoriety into which the entire disabled community has been placed. Austerity – through the neoliberal politics of resentment – has made disabled people its scapegoat. I argue that a historical precedent for the contemporary demonisation of disabled people as counterfeit citizens can be found in the early modern period in the mythology of the 'sturdy beggar'.

Social Policy and the Ethic of Care, Olena Hankivsky,
Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004, pp. 178.In this tightly argued text, Olena Hankivsky examines "the
potential of an ethic of care to transform the assumptions, content,
concepts and meaning of social justice" (30). This is a big task for
a small book but the author not only makes a persuasive theoretical case
for an ethic of care but also manages to demonstrate the practical
efficacy of her argument by showing how an ethic of care can inspire a
reformation of social policy. The liberal case for social justice, the
author contends, falls flat and remains abstract unless it is
fundamentally transformed by the normative assumptions that arise from a
moral landscape fully informed by the ubiquity of human interdependence.
The liberal conception of social justice is shackled by its emphasis on
the autonomous citizen and an abstract conception of humanity. It fails to
recognize that rights arise from needs.

Abstract: The Family Law Council was established in November 1976 with the responsibility of advising the Attorney‐General on the operation of the Family Law Act 1975. This paper examines the role, membership and operation of the Family Law Council and its performance as a body providing policy advice to government. Statistical data is included on a number of matters. Although the paper draws mainly on the experience of the Family Law Council, some of the comments and suggestions made are possibly appropriate, in varying degrees, to other advisory bodies of a similar type. The paper suggests that such bodies are capable of offering inexpensive and representative advice to government and, if certain disadvantages can be overcome, more use of some existing advisory bodies may be desirable and this may even result in economies. It also suggests that there is a need to examine the whole advisory body field and that it is also desirable that the need for some ground rules for the creation and the operation of advisory bodies should be looked into.