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.
The Australian Human Rights Commission has accepted a discrimination complaint against the National Disability Insurance Agency, challenging the age limit that restricts funding for service to those aged under 65.
The report said that police awareness of disability was an issue, where police could not identify nor did they understand the impacts of disability, adding that police rarely provided people with disabilities with a support person. It is not just alleged offenders with disabilities who are impacted, but also witnesses or victims of those with disabilities.
It would be an 18-month search with many setbacks. “It was such a patronising experience,” Ms Chong said. “My skills, profession and my dignity were trampled all over. I’d learnt an important lesson though: It’s never a good time to disclose [a disability], but any delay will just complicate things further because it’s detrimental to building trust.”
Disability advocates have long pushed to get more people with intellectual disability into mainstream employment, given the better wages and greater sense of community involvement. But to turn things around, it’s important to first understand why it’s so difficult for people with intellectual disability to land a job.
Despite many people with disability being highly skilled with incredible stories to tell, a lack of accessible career pathways, employment opportunities and commitment to authentic representation are creating significant blockages for those wanting to forge careers on or behind our screens – although there are signs things are changing.
“The NDIA should be a model employee for people with disability but many staff continue to experience added pressures, particularly in relation to assistive technology, and the NDIA refuses to make adjustments to KPIs to acknowledge the extra time it takes to use these technologies,” Ms Vincent-Pietsch said.
Commuters who use wheelchairs are taking legal action against the Victorian government and Melbourne’s tram operator over their failure to keep pace with federal standards for accessible public transport.
Doctors believed hours of auditory therapy a week and a cochlear implant would allow Oliver to learn to hear and speak. “We were told by the majority of our specialists we couldn’t sign with him because it would affect his ability to listen with his ears,” said Mrs Robertson.
Trenbath says the disability employment provider seemed to only see her cerebral palsy, not her academic achievements and job skills. “They thought that because I was disabled that I was on welfare, and they didn’t need to find me a job, that they could just take their time,” Trenbath said. “I’ve never been on welfare and I don’t get any NDIS funding, so I have to work. I not only want to work, I need to work to be financially independent … I don’t want to rely on government funding.”
Most of the suite of independent assessment tools haven’t been rigorously tested or evaluated for their application with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families. Assessment tools should be evaluated with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families to ensure they’re applicable for cultural and social norms before they are endorsed by governments.
The Migration Act is one of the few pieces of legislation in Australia where it’s OK to discriminate against people based on their disability. Exact data on how many children are ordered to leave because of their condition is not available, but advocacy groups say they come across about a dozen cases each year.
A relative of an Aboriginal man with a cognitive disability who has been held in indefinite detention for 15 years has told the Disability Royal Commission he was given “shut up medicine”, held in a restraint chair and given limited access to his community and culture.