The Rights Retrospective set the stage for this year’s Strengthening Disability Advocacy Conference by paying homage to those advocates and campaigns who have fought over three decades to put human rights centre stage in Victoria. And it all came with a brilliant soundtrack from The Rights Tough, the ‘in-house’ conference band who opened the show with ‘walk A Mile In My Shoes’.

Welcome presented by Natasha Brake from DARU.

The RightsRetrospective  launched a beautiful new video where people with disability express their rights under the UN Convention.

We also had a sneak preview of Defiant Lies, the long-awaited documentary from filmmaker Sarah Barton, who was MC on the day. Unfortunately, we can’t show you the snippet from Defiant Lives, due to copyright, however Sarah shared her production journey with us.

The story board

Powerful stories were shared of how change was won and laid bare the challenges still to come.

Deinstitutionalisation

SARU Coordinator Sue Smith told the retrospective  that when she talks to the broader community about the conditions experienced by people with disability in many of Victoria’s institutions, like the infamous Sunbury Asylum, many think she’s got to be exaggerating.

She found a typed report in the Victorian Government archives from Labor Senators who visited Sunbury in 1969.

“What they saw, they said, was beyond belief. They went to the M8 locked unit, saw people herded naked, in the cold, down to the showers. In some, there would be groups of men, with one (toilet) pot in the middle of the floor’. This isn’t exaggerated, this isn’t something we’ve made bigger over the years, here it is, from 1969, which is relatively recent.”

Sue pointed to some photos in the self advocacy exhibition at the back of the room that talked to the bravery of Sunbury ‘patients/inmates’, who would go out and publicly protest for deinstitutionalisation, risking often being hauled back there by police. Sue talked about Terry who had been held in the notorious locked unit at Sunbury but got out one day by grabbing the key and locking a staff member in. He found the key again recently.

Pauline Williams, Program Manager, AMIDA talked about the constant setbacks in the campaign for deinstitutionalisation, including the election of the Liberal Government in Victoria in the 1990s. “They didn’t think about the human right of everyone to be able to live in the community and have inclusion,” she said.

Instead, they saw the campaign as an issue about conditions, so announced they were building a new modern institution, which remains in operation today. Advocates eventually won the argument in the courts using anti-discrimination laws, but people with disability still lost out because they couldn’t get on public housing lists while they were still regarded as having somewhere to live – the institutions.

Reinforce self advocate Colin Hiscoe urged people in the room to keep up the campaign until all remaining institutions are closed. He said: “Let’s all try to band together and get the rest of them closed.” And he said there are many other fronts where we need to keep fighting: “the right to get married, the right to have a family, the right to live with whoever you want to live with…..that’s still not there.”

Quote from Pauline on the recent announcement that  the NDIS will withdraw funding for them over the coming five years.

Transport

Activists have chained themselves to trams, blockaded Ministers’ offices and stripped naked to campaign for accessible transport in Victoria, often inspired by campaigns run by the environmental, gay, civil and other rights movements. The Rights Tough gave us an overview with their version of Ozzy Osbourne’s, Crazy Train.

Jeanette Lee, from Yooralla, remembered setting up the DARE (Disability Action Rights and Equality) coalition to work together on access issues and trigger implementation of the Disability Discrimination Act “We got united, really worked on things.”

More recently, and more quietly, she was involved in a critical campaign on the myki public transport card through the Public Transport Access Committee. “They were trying to get us to rubber-stamp myki and say it was accessible.”

Independent disability advocate David Brant starred in a campaign to protest the Bracks Labor Government withdrawing the M40 taxi cards. It was, he said, a long and complex campaign, and it started to get a bit stale towards the end of the year. Acknowledging that “you can’t chain yourself to a taxi card’, they made thousands of postcards of him dressed in a Santa suit, declaring ‘Bracksy, give us back our taxis’. “The campaign worked. There were some other elements to it, but I was told privately that every third desk in the Premier’s Department had a copy of the card on it. That year he sent me a Christmas card!”

“The Disability Discrimination Act might be the foundation of all these things, but it’s the action that gets things up. It’s getting to speak to Ministers, causing a stir, so that people do something. It’s the threat of the DDA by people with powerful voices” said David Brant.

Education

Esther Harris, Executive Officer, STAR Victoria and Diane McCarthy, Manager Support, Association for Children with a Disability, talked about the ongoing battle to win the right for children with disability to receive a mainstream education.

Esther told us how groups like STAR emerged in the 1970s, at a time when children with disability weren’t offered any education in institutions or their homes: “it was determined they were unable to be educated and, if they were, what would they do (with it)”. Powerful change came with a review commissioned in 1984 by the Cain Labor Government, Integration In Victorian Education- Report of the Ministerial Review of  Education Services for students with  disabilities, which identified five guiding principles which she said are still not adopted in Victoria but should underpin everything that we do. These are:

1. Every child has a right to be educated in a regular school.
2. Non categorisation – service delivery should be organised conceptually and administratively   and should be determined by  the individual’s educational needs , rather than being categorised as a person with a specific qualifying disability
3. Resources and services should be to the greatest extent possible be school based
4. Collaborative decision  making processes – equal participation of all those  concerned  in decisions with a child’s educational progress-
5. All children can learn  and be taught.

Esther said change has been won in mainstream schools but not for everyone – while there was acceptance now of the need to build ramps and provide visual aids and other supports, there is “still a long way to go for kids with intellectual disability”. Inclusive education, she said, is about will, skill and capacity and often comes down to the leadership of an individual principal. “You can have the skill and you can have all the resourcing, but if you don’t have the will, nothing happens.”

Diane McCarthy thanked past activists who brought positive change, “My son has a wheelchair and scooter pass to go on the tram. I take that for granted. I want to thank everybody who was chaining themselves to a train or tram, to be out there for children like mine. I think that’s the nature of the rights movement and that there should be stronger numbers behind those protests in the future if they happen”, she said.

The rights Tough covered Billy Bragg’s ‘To Have And To Have NOt’ which was a seamless transition from education to employment.

Employment

Kairsty Wilson, Legal Manager, AED Legal Centre, talked about the battle to improve wages and working conditions for people with disability working in what are now known as disability enterprises. When the case was first launched, some workers were being paid 5 cents a day. Related cases have run on since, including a complex campaign for 10,000 people with disability to receive backpay for wages lost in the past and challenges to wages based not just on productivity but ‘competency’.

Kairsty says she gets a lot of hate mail, but she believes strongly that ‘every single person in Australia, with a disability or not, is entitled to an education and employment.”

Steve Hurd, Boroondarra City Council, wants to challenge the long-held mentality that a disability charity organisation must, by its very nature, be good, and that the people who work there are also good. “It’s an error of logic,” he said. “A lot of people who work in the disability sector are the biggest scum you’ll ever meet!” Many disability charity managers were, he said, threatened by people with disability who could do their job, and there was a failure in many organisations to provide mentoring and career pathways for people with disability.

Steve remembers hearing Columnist Terry McCrann ask, “Why do taxpayers have to fund this ‘huge free lunch’ that is the NDIS?” Steve’s response:

“Mate, yuu can have my free lunch if you’ll have my disability. If we can improve the employment of people with disability by 10 per cent, we would save the economy $43billion a year. We’d pay for the NDIS if they just did what the bloody hell we ask them to.”

Thank You

It’s great to have the opportunity to acknowledge people here despite the forgotten thank you on the day.

Thanks to VCOSS and Disability Advocacy Victoria who auspice DARU and are very supportive of this event generally but have been particularly encouraging with the unique Rights retrospective presentation.

A huge thanks to Sarah for doing an amazing job as MC to get in depth informative interviews with such tight time limits and also for her wonderful production of the new “Rights under the UN Convention” that premiered at this conference.

Thanks also to the other movie makers who were involved with putting together the music video clips.  Sophie Siegl was responsible for the “Crazy Train” footage and Jason Stacy, the Rights Tough drummer did the others. Jason’s gentle persistence and enthusiasm for the project kept things ticking along and it was a pleasure working with him on this.

Thanks to the planning committee who didn’t stymie any ideas and particularly the SARU team who handed themselves over as slaves, working away in the background.  Great expo too!

NAB, we couldn’t have done it without you.  The facilities team couldn’t do enough for us and NAB Alliance Catering were a delight to work with.