You can do the full consultation on the Attorney-General’s website. I started out trying to do this but I just couldn’t, it’s too long and therefore not accessible. I was going to say that’s ironic but really it’s par for the course.
Instead, I decided to contribute by filling out the survey designed by People With Disability Australia. It was shorter and much easier. You can find their survey here and it is available until 4th September. NOW CLOSED.
Women With Disabilities Australia also has a survey open – I have not filled it in so do not know how replicable the information below is for their survey. I’m sure you can still use the info below as a general basis for their survey – or at worst dump some info in any free-text “anything else” type section which is usually in surveys. The WWDA survey is open until 21st September.
I am not a member of or affiliated with PWDA, but I generally try to contribute via their advocacy avenues because they’re asynchronous and they make it overall accessible to me. My answers are below. Please feel free to use/adapt/whatever suits your accessibility needs to have your say. I have skipped parts that I either didn’t answer or are quick easy tick boxes.
Please tell us more about the discrimination you have experienced.
I have experienced discrimination by being housebound (medical + employment), access needs (clear air and a waiting room inclusive of horizontal needs), and marginalised conditions (“invisible” illnesses that the government claims aren’t disabilities).
If yes, what happened after you complained? Please include any barriers you faced in accessing justice.
Employment:
I had a job offer rescinded after they learned I was disabled. I lodged a complaint and was told a) that they are an equal opportunity employer and b) they wouldn’t look outside their policy for my human rights – accommodations / adjustments are not meant to be limited by policy designed for able bodied employees. I tried to take it further with state human rights support but they wouldn’t communicate asynchronously so they made the human rights aspect inaccessible.
Trying to access supports:
State government would only “capacity build” which is not a relevant support type for my disabilities. I lodged a complaint and they told me that their disability support isn’t for disabilities (bastardising universal design concepts).
Local government referred me to a charity who won’t speak to me because I’m a) housebound b) need asynchronous communication. They only want people who can come in for a chat.
Please tell us more about your experience trying to make a complaint about discrimination.
It’s too hard. Expecting us to relive trauma when most aspects of life are traumatising when disabled fails the ‘reasonable’ test. Expecting us to participate in systems that are inaccessible (eg state human rights branch not communicating asynchronously) is ridiculous. Expecting us to do it in a reasonable aka able boded time frame is impractical. The burden of paperwork is on us and live in this state constantly. We need a real system eg we tell our story once ever and someone else takes over.
Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about how the DDA can be made better?
This is where I added my notes from when I tried to do the full AG consultation questions.
- We need a unified definition of disability for Australia to ensure consistent rights and responsibilities across the country.
- We need a non medical model approach – not a social or charity model either. Human rights model of disability must underpin a new DDA.
- Intersectionality must be recognised as we cannot separate human experiences into robotic parts.
- There are issues that non disabled people have an effective level of zero when it comes to disability literacy, so why are they treated as an equal party? In my experience, they play up ignorance and lack of nuance of the impact of our experiences. That needs to be tackled somehow to stop the burden of reasonable being defined by someone who is clueless.
- Burden of proof considerations: Needs respect and consideration to: our cumulative trauma in having to do this often, our often negative experiences with bureaucracy, our usually negative experiences with non disabled people speaking over us, with paid support for someone to do the burden of proof work for us (especially important for people with energy limiting conditions).
- Reasonable should be removed because reasonable sits with power, which tends to not sit with disabled people. Reasonable is all too often “I don’t want to” on the part of the duty holder/person with power. As I’ve written about, reasonable fails because simply learning about disability is unreasonable to many in a position of power. Legitimate and proportionate seems to have more validity in its approach but needs more rigidity behind it – for an example of where this fails due to change over time, simply look at the failure of “reasonable and necessary” in the NDIS.
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