International Day of People with Disability | AusIndustry
02/12/2013
In March 2010, I was appointed to an eight-year term in the Legislative Council of the South Australian Parliament, representing political party Dignity for Disability. My foci since coming into office include: advocating for increased funding for disability services, and funding modes which empower consumers to make choices about their own needs; working to create a justice system in which people with disabilities can fairly participate; pushing for adequate funding, accountability and inclusion for the incoming National Disability Insurance Scheme, increased employment opportunities for people with disabilities, and introducing legislation to uphold the rights of South Australians with disabilities, including bills to amend the Disability Services Act, and instate mandatory reporting of abuse of people with certain disabilities.
I am also passionate about the Arts, and have a longstanding relationship with No Strings Attached Theatre of Disability, of which I am now patron. When not discussing disability issues in Parliament, I am a spokesperson on many other issues close to my heart, including women’s rights, animal rights, and the need for increased legal protection of same sex attracted people, and the need to create a society in which young people are fairly represented, respected, and offered the cultural and occupational opportunities they need to flourish.
In the Parliament of South Australia I am a member of the Legislative Council. This means that I do not have a particular geographical seat, but represent all of the people of the state. I am, to date, the only member of Dignity for Disability to be elected to the Parliament. This means that I am my party’s spokesperson on every area of policy.
While my responsibilities extend across all portfolios I take a particular interest in human rights issues and in issues that affect people with disabilities. I have been a strong advocate for an overhaul of disability services legislation in a range of areas, in order to give people with disabilities protection from the unwarranted use of restrictive practices, access to the Community Visitors Scheme, and the protection afforded by mandatory notification.
I have also pressed hard for reforms of the state’s justice system, which in a number of respects is currently not accessible to people with disabilities. This has been a substantial task as it involves proposing a large range of often quite significant changes to an area where the dominant profession tends to take conservative view. These changes range from practical concerns such as improvements to buildings and the increased use of modern technology to legal reform to change evidence laws and court procedures.
Transport is another area of huge importance, both in terms of access and the less often identified but also very important area of safety. While the state is gradually progressing towards having an accessible public transport network, there is still a great deal of work to be done and accessibility is not consistent across the network, and often strikes me as being quite narrowly defined. I have in the past few months raised the issue of the lack of audio announcements on bus services, which the national standards appear to suggest should be in place, with the Minister for Transport Services.
I have for some time been concerned about safety at level crossings. I have campaigned for a number of years for improvements such as automated gates at key crossing points, and have long sought to clarify the responsibility for line painting at crossings and to ensure that this important work is carried out. It is of great concern to me that, despite a number of accidents, this work is not taken more seriously and that a number of my questions in this area have long gone unanswered.
Education has always been an area of huge concern to me, and over the course of the last 12 months those concerns have only increased. The revelations regarding governance within the department of education have served to underline the concerns that I hold regarding the quality of education and the safety of young people with disabilities in our education system.
These concerns exist alongside other educational issues. I have been a strong advocate for greater use of live captioning technology in the classroom, for Deaf and hearing impaired students, and have also argued that Auslan, Australian Sign Language, should be made available at high school as a Language Other Than English, to help increase the number of fluent signers and, perhaps, interpreters.
My office, consisting of myself, two full time staff, and a trainee, strives to be fully and accurately informed on every piece of legislation, while advocating for a large number of constituents from right across the state. At last check my office has around 700 constituent files, dealing with a range of issues that are about as diverse as one could possibly imagine. This, rather than any issue caused by my disability, is probably the biggest challenge I face in my work.
This is a big part of what the International Day of People with Disability means to me, and what I hope it will come to mean to others. With the provision of a few pieces of physical infrastructure; a ramp, a parking space, a bathroom; I am just as able to fulfil this role as any other Member of Parliament. This is a fact that I think is sometimes lost when we consider the achievements of people with disabilities.
No person is an island; we can do nothing without the support of a vast cast of characters, many of whom we will never meet. None of you would have been able to attend today but for the efforts those that paved the roads, drove the buses, serviced the cars, and none of you would be able to do your jobs without an assortment of essential equipment; a desk, a computer, a chair. The fact that a person might need an adjustable desk, or different software on their computer, or a chair like mine does not impact in the slightest on their ability to do the job.
Once we come to understand this, the artificiality of so many of the barriers people with disabilities face becomes much more immediately apparent. The inspirational quality society often applies to people with disabilities overcoming life’s obstacles seems decidedly odd if those obstacles are a product of that society’s arbitrary and unexamined decisions.
All of these decisions apply a standard that is assumed to be universal despite the very obvious existence of a world of almost unlimited variety. We are not all the same height, we cannot all climb stairs, we cannot all read very small type. Perhaps the greatest single step we could take as a society to improve the lives of people with disabilities would be turn away from universal standards and make our decisions instead based on the flesh and blood person in front of us.
The remarkable thing about my time in Parliament has been how easy this has been. A desk was made to allow me to participate in sitting days, an accessible vehicle was acquired by Fleet SA, an accessible bathroom was created on the floor where my office is. On some occasions issues I have had regarding accessibility have been able to be remedied on the same day when they were raised.
This is not an issue of budget. I feel that a huge part of it comes down to the fact that my workplace really has no choice. The electorate has spoken and I am here; the adjustments required to accommodate me simply must be made. When the needs of the person in front of you are the only standard that matters, difficult questions suddenly have easy answers. This simple change in our approach, from asking whether someone can do something to asking what someone would need in order to perform that task, makes an enormous difference.
If these facts were to be more widely recognised, if this approach were to become the new norm, I think we as a society would have made an enormous achievement. I feel that the International Day of People with Disabilities is something of a sign post, a way of marking another year of work towards this goal. I am very much looking forward to a future where I feel that on this day we are celebrating the achievement of that goal, rather the fact that we, as a society, hold it.
On that note I think I will open this up to questions and discussion, I have been asked to leave ample time for questions and I am keen to discuss your views and perspectives.
