Closing date: October 14, 2022
When I was younger, I didn’t hide away, and would shout back at this public repudiation of my body. But I am tired now, and don’t have as much energy to continue to fight. I don’t work in public any more, or in an office. I rarely swim in a public pool. I limit my public activity and have to brace myself for the comments that come when I do go out.
Mr Bradley has been dealing with the AAT for two years and said his battle demonstrated the NDIA, through its legal teams which include in-house lawyers, corporate law firms and the Australian Government Solicitor, weren’t upholding this obligation.
“They made the restriction not whether you had your disability before the age of 65, but what age you were when you applied,” Mr Freckleton said. “There are various forms of equipment and so on that you need, but once you have those … you can carry on living quite well and contributing, but to deprive people of that just randomly because of their birthday is what I call a calendar crime.”
“The treatment I received effectively means only people who are physically able to move themselves between wheelchairs or obtain assistance from an accompanying passenger can be confident they will be able to get on a Jetstar flight,” he said. “That’s a major barrier for many people.”
Forms are innocuous, dry, and often boring pieces of bureaucratic technology that most people consider as an inconvenience. But despite their relatively innocuous nature, forms play a critical role in the collection of information and often represent a filtering mechanism in gaining access to programs or support in the modern welfare state.
“I travel a lot, but never without fear,” she says. “It sounds awful, but I just expect the worst, then I plan what I’ll do if the worst happens – if I wet myself, if I’m stranded, if I’m dropped, if my chair is damaged. I’m always kind of in a state of distress.”
Snaking queues, cancelled flights and lost suitcases have been the story of air travel this year, but passengers with disabilities say they are falling through the cracks of the current wave of chaos at Australian airports, with some saying they feel humiliated as they’re forced to stand or sit on the floor waiting for wheelchairs.
Factors drawn from the data that could contribute to a person with disability’s lower level of satisfaction in life include health, wellbeing, financial stress, social isolation and lack of employment opportunities. Long wait times, cost, inaccessible buildings, discrimination by health professionals and a lack of communication between treating health professionals were all seen as barriers to people with disability accessing health care.
Emily Dash is an emerging writer, actor, producer and speaker who works across theatre and screen. Her acclaimed and wide ranging work emphasises social justice issues, community engagement, intersectionality, and expanding perceptions of disability. Watch her spoken word performance about owning your power and taking up space as a person with disability which was presented at the ‘Where To From Here Conference 2022’.
Kerriene Minjoot never felt like her blindness was a barrier to her succeeding at work, until she joined the very government agency tasked with improving the lives of Australians with disabilities. “I did not expect to go into working at the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) and ending up feeling more disabled than I ever have before,” she said.
Almost one in three students expelled from Victorian government schools during the first year of the pandemic had a disability, up from one in seven the previous year, in a pattern of exclusion that youth disability advocates warn is merely “the tip of the iceberg”.
Joshua and Nicole’s case highlights a problem in the NDIS system where recipients of services end up taking on legal liability in the case of a dispute over payment. Jo Evans, a senior solicitor in the Consumer Law team at Legal Aid NSW, says she’s more and more concerned about the number of cases she’s seeing of NDIS recipients being sued or facing action from debt collectors over unpaid invoices.
We all enjoy legal rights, including the right to live free from discrimination. But how easy is it to use the law to uphold those rights? Could ‘chatbots’, a form of artificial intelligence technology, help make the legal system more accessible for people living with disabilities?
You understand this is a sensitive topic but as a provider of disability supports, you know further punishing people in prison will disproportionately disadvantage people you work with.
“My disability is the reason that I’m not on a number of boards that I could have been on,” Innes told Pro Bono News. He said that while there had been moves in recent years to create more diverse boards, (particularly in the NFP sector), people with disabilities had been left out of the equation.