Inclusion Matters
15/10/2010
Speech for: Gender and Disability in Local and Global Contexts Symposium
I am here to offer some opening remarks and wish to speak briefly about the importance of inclusion in the context of gender and disability.
So what is inclusion – well the dictionary will tell us that it is a noun which means the act of including, or the state of being included.
In the late 19th Century Mary Lee and her fellow suffragettes fought hard to gain women the right to vote. I imagine that these women wanted to play a fuller role in political life, to be included in civil life, and to participate in the process that determined how they lived their lives.
Despite making up approximately half of the population, women were disenfranchised, surely it wasn’t asking too much for women to have the vote, after all these men in dark suits sitting in our Parliament made the rules for men and women alike.
Of course , there were some objections from the floor of parliament –objectors who purportedly had the best interests of my fellow women at heart. Some proclaimed that women would not be able to vote and perform their daily duties, others said that women did not really want the vote. These objectors sought to defeat the Bill by proposing an amendment which would also allow for women to stand for election.. and wow did that backfire!
And despite these objectors, history was made on in 18 December 1894 with the passing of the Bill, making South Australia somewhat of a trailblazer, being the first Australian colony to give women the vote and the right to stand for parliament..
So why did Mary Lee think that it was important to be included alongside male counterparts? What drove her to fight for inclusion in the political sphere? Maybe the following quote sums it up –
“What do women want? Give them the vote and they will tell you what they want?”
Inclusion is important – in civil and political life, it is important for people to have a say in their own destiny, to choose their representatives, to tell them what they want.
Of course, adult suffrage did not magically result in real inclusion it wasn’t until 1959 that the first women sat in our parliament… and at that time women were still excluded from many male dominated professions and by enlarge received less pay even when they were lucky enough to perform the same work. Despite having the vote and a few seats in Parliament, it took another 25 years that is 1984, for us to enact legislation which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sex.
The 1980’s and 90’s proved to be a progressive time in the South Australian Parliament.. not only for women’s rights but also for people with disabilities. 1981 brought the ‘Handicapped Persons Equal Opportunity Act’ which prohibited discrimination against people with physical disabilities in areas such as employment, accommodation and education. This Act became the basis of the Equal Opportunity Act, which was amended in 1989 to prohibit discrimination against people with Intellectual disability.
Our State has come a long way from the times of Mary Lee, when people with disabilities were defined as idiots and incurables. But despite this great progress I hear stories every day about people with disabilities being excluded from all areas of life. So what is inclusion for people with disabilities?
Inclusion for people with disabilities is the same as social inclusion for all people. People with disabilities desire many of the same things that “regular” people want – a job, a family, friends and to be as much or as little a part of their communities as they choose.
When a group of “regular” people want to go out for dinner, they call a restaurant and make a booking. When you want to go to the theatre, you book online, and when you sign up for a yoga class, you make a quick call, or just show up at the door.
Life isn’t like that for most people with disabilities – just as women were once barred entrance to certain clubs and sporting organisations, people with disabilities are frequently “barred” from activities that the rest of us take for granted. There might only be two spaces available at a certain theatre for people who use a wheelchair, or the cinema might be completely inaccessible up a flight of stairs. A karate instructor might send away a child with an intellectual disability from his class for “taking up too much of my time” and a school might stop a child with disabilities from going on the class camp – and plenty of schools will guilt families into sending their kids elsewhere so that the “burden” doesn’t affect the other children.
I recently posed the question of exclusion to our Dignity for Disability Facebook community – a rich community of more than 4000 people with an interest in disability. I wasn’t surprised by the comments, but would like to share a few of them.
Some related to physical inclusion – one parent who uses a wheelchair wrote: “Excluded: The classrooms, office, and library are inaccessible at my child’s State primary school. The school oval is also inaccessible – no path or similar to go to sports carnivals (I can only watch from an elevated distance).”
Access to information is often horribly exclusionary: We rely on written material extensively in our day-to-day lives – everything from information on what time the buses/trains are running to how our mobile phones and iPods operate. It is important however when sharing information that we consider carefully how we present it – does your organisation offer materials in Plain English, large print and Braille, via Audio Cassette or via a speech synthesizer and do you use a Sign language interpreter or subtitles?
The most disabling barriers however are often not physical – but the negative attitudes expressed by others. Stereotyping and prejudice can have the most long-term and damaging effects.
One d4d Facebook member wrote about exclusionary attitudes: “It tends to be people who make me feel excluded… When they decide to not notice me first and when they decide I can not make my own decisions… Then the things they chose for me to do are things I can’t do… Peoples attitudes exclude me …”…
So despite the fact that we have come a long way in society by enacting laws, there is still a sense of exclusion felt by many people with disabilities. We need to work on changing attitudes.. and that is harder than changing the law.
So how do we set about to change attitudes? I think that Kim Peek, the man who was the inspiration for the film Rainman sums it up quite succinctly by saying
“Recognising and respecting differences in others, and treating everyone like you want them to treat you, will help make our world a better place for everyone. You don’t have to be disabled to be different. Everyone is different!”
