Sue O’Reilly, who has guest written today’s column on The Angry Cripple is a freelance journalist and the mother of a 21-year-old son with cerebral palsy. She co-founded Australians Mad as Hell last year with Fiona Porter to campaign for an NDIS and established a charity called Fighting Chance to help people with disabilities pay for essential therapy services.
Q: What do disability reform campaigners have to do to persuade Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott to spend some time talking to actual people with severe disabilities and family carers, prior to making a landmark decision on disability reform later this year that will directly affect the lives of several million Australians every day for decades to come?
A: Raise at least $31,200, obtain tickets for the federal parliamentary press gallery’s exclusive annual mid-winter ball, and then bid at an auction for a few hours of our political leaders’ precious time.
Yes indeed. Seems if you’ve got enough money, then getting Julia Gillard’s or Tony Abbott’s attention is not that seemingly impossible a task.
Recently, the right-on campaigning group GetUp successfully bid $31,100 for a dinner date for six with the PM, then promptly announced the diners would be three same-sex couples keen to upbraid Gillard on her refusal to countenance gay marriage.
GetUp won last year’s auction as well, shelling out $16,100 to secure a surfing lesson for an Afghan refugee with Tony Abbott in a bid to change the Opposition leader’s tough stance on boat people. (Hopefully the refugee at least learnt how to stay on a surfboard, but otherwise GetUp should probably be requesting a refund.)
The auction for face-to-face time with the PM - with all proceeds going to charity - was billed as “a unique opportunity for corporate Australia”. But, said GetUp director Simon Sheikh, “rather than dining with business leaders, Julia Gillard will be forced to make the case as to why same-sex couples cannot have their relationships recognised in the same way other Australians do.”
If only the lifelong suffering of a couple of million Australians – people with severe dependent disabilities, along with their mothers, fathers, wives, husbands and/or children was as achingly trendy as the same-sex marriage issue!
Because then GetUp! (as it styles itself) might actually have shown some interest in campaigning on this issue too, as many thousands of people have been begging it for at least the last 18 months to do! (Sorry, this exclamation mark thing is a bit contagious.) As for Gillard and Abbott…
Two months ago, I wrote to both leaders, requesting they spend some time with a person with a severe disability prior to deciding whether Australia could “afford” to dump its deeply dysfunctional, crisis-driven, wasteful, inequitable and inefficient disability support system, currently run by nine State/Territory and federal departments, and replace it with one transformational National Disability Insurance Scheme.
This invitation was entirely open-ended: any place and date convenient to them, at any time in the next several months.
Gillard’s appointments secretary promptly replied with the stock answer that “unfortunately, it is simply not possible for the Prime Minister to accept all of the requests she receives, and on this occasion, we regret she is unable to participate.”
Tony Abbott’s office, meanwhile, politely advised he would give the invitation “consideration”. Two months later, after numerous follow-up emails and phone calls, his office finally broke the bad news that Tony wasn’t interested either; not that they put it so bluntly of course, but that was the take-home message.
Just one day later his deputy, Julie Bishop, burst into print on The National Times website, opining that “Australia is among the world’s leading nations when it comes to disability support” – a view presumably based on comparing Australia with Ethiopia, Cambodia, Tibet and The Democratic Republic of the Congo.
It could be argued, I suppose, that our national political leaders do not actually need to witness at first hand the daily anguish, desperation and poverty in which some two million Australians live – hundreds of thousands of people with severe disabilities, along with parents, spouses, siblings and/or children.
Perhaps there are more than enough parliamentary and other official reports floating around (or gathering dust) to enable the Gillard government to decide whether or not to introduce an NDIS or, in the Opposition’s case, support its introduction.
But, as the recent homelessness sleep-out by hundreds of corporate executives demonstrated - not to mention GetUp’s auction spend – the best single way for anyone to get a handle on the suffering of others is to experience it at first hand, up close and personal.
In the case of severely disabled Australians, it would be ideal if Julia could spend three years waiting for a wheelchair, or Tony could try applying for essential therapy for a severely disabled son or daughter.
Failing that though, a few hours of their time would be an acceptable substitute. But no – too busy even for a few hours. Too busy even for a decent, thoughtful reply.
I thought for a brief moment of suggesting that all of us who care about disability reform start a fund prior to next year’s auction, contributing 50 cents a week out of our pensions, so we might at least have a chance of paying for some face time with our political leaders.
But then I realised that by this time next year, the decision on an NDIS will have been made. And by then, chances are, it will simply be too late.
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