Dina Bassile and her business Tibi have moved to Melbourne to continue her services to provide education and access consulting to festivals, venues and artists on accessibility in venues.
Many tertiary institutions employ own disability liaison officers. Other DLOs are employed regionally and shared across campuses, especially in the TAFE sector.
One of the biggest barriers, when it came to employing people with disability, was hiring managers that believed employing someone with a disability would make their life too hard.
“We’ve got a lot of HR, diversity and inclusion professionals who are trying to implement unconscious bias training and diversity policies, but until hiring managers get themselves past this point of thinking a person with a disability is only going to make more work for them, we aren’t getting anywhere,” Kelly Schultz said.
Deafblind woman booked Jetstar flight from Perth, telling airline she had special needs. As she tried to board Jetstar told her she could not fly alone. Jetstar said an administrative error meant only one of her disabilities had been recorded.
Commissioned by the Centre for Inclusive Design in partnership with Adobe and Microsoft, the report shows designing products and services with the needs of people experiencing the effects of ageing, poverty and disability in mind can reach four times as many consumers as opposed to not doing so.
There’s a common assumption that people with disabilities all have a desire to or need to be cured. The idea of needing to “fix” or “cure” disability communities automatically assumes a negative relationship between people and their disabilities. It also perpetuates the misconception that disability is something to be ashamed of.
We live in a society where the rights of women are more openly being discussed. From marches on the steps of parliament, to seeing women finally rise to higher ranks – it’s a beautiful thing to behold. Nicole Lee discusses the intersectionality of disability women’s rights.
“I am blind and there is no electronic application form. How can I be independent? This is debilitating … I don’t have a support person, family member, or a friend who can help me out with my paperwork. I can’t see to sign a form.”
Those with disability experience more discrimination than any other group within society. Of all discrimination cases lodged with the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2016-17, 37 per cent were on the grounds of disability. Only 48 per cent of working-age people with a disability have a job, compared with 79 per cent of those without disability, according to 2015 ABS data.
Advocacy groups representing migrants and refugees in Australia have sent a letter to Immigration Minister David Coleman questioning the legitimacy of the decision to refuse a Bhutanese family permanent residency on the basis of their son’s disability.
Hours after Scott Morrison gave an emotional speech saying people with disabilities deserve respect, protesters gathered outside Parliament House to voice their concerns over the decision to deport a deaf teenager from Australia.
A disability advocate says event organisers must do more to meet the access needs of people with disability, arguing a little thought can go a long way to stop attendees feeling excluded. “I don’t think it’s that difficult to build ramps, or a wider gate, or a special lane rather than turnstiles. It’s not that hard. It’s just something that needs a little bit more thought put into it.”
Carers say health procedures are made more difficult because of doctors’ lack of understanding. The issue, said the council’s senior advocate, Jim Simpson, is primarily a lack of training among doctors, who receive only 2.5 hours of specific training in the average six-year degree, and nurses, who receive none.
This body of evidence indicates that effective policy implementation requires strong recognition of the importance of relationships to achieve policy outcomes – even in a system focused on individual choice and control. In other words, relationships matter, particularly for the success of a scheme like the NDIS.
The National Disability Strategy (NDS) has important goals but it isn’t addressing the issue of violence and it is being overshadowed by the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), a report by UNSW Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) has found.