By Mike Steketee | The Australian
Voters are being asked to back only parties that promise a national disability insurance scheme
IN the 1976 movie Network, Peter Finch in his role as a television broadcaster urges people to go to their windows, stick their heads out and shout: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not gonna take this any more.” Windows are thrown open and the words echo around the country.
Australians with disability and their supporters are hoping for something similar from the campaign they are launching via their “australiansmadashell” website. As it says, “we are not going to take it any more — and there are millions of us”.
They are asking people to take a pledge to vote in state and federal elections only for parties that promise to introduce a national disability insurance scheme. The responses will be compiled and candidates, particularly in marginal seats, will be told of the number of pledges in their electorate.
An insurance scheme, rather than paying a welfare benefit or damages, as with motor vehicle or workers’ compensation schemes, would provide the essential services and facilities to the disabled and increase their prospects of a meaningful life, including a job. It would constitute a landmark economic and social reform and, while costly in the short term, would pay for itself in the long run, according to its proponents.
The insurance concept is based on the fact that all Australians are at risk in life’s lottery, whether they are among the one in 160 born with autism, one in 400 with cerebral palsy, are blind or deaf, have Down syndrome, suffer severe intellectual disability, fall from a skateboard and suffer brain damage, or dive into the surf and end up as a quadriplegic. As Sue O’Reilly, one of the campaign organisers, puts it: “This is not something that happens to Martians on another planet.”
People decide how to vote for all sorts of different reasons and there are any number of issues jostling for a place on the political agenda. But grey power helped elevate the concerns of older Australians up the scale of political priorities and the Women’s Electoral Lobby succeeded in putting issues such as child care on the agenda.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare estimates there are 1.5 million people with a severe disability and that will grow to 2.3 million by 2030. Including parents and other primary carers, extended family members, disability support workers, health professionals and specialist teachers, organisers say their campaign could influence more than 2 million voters, people for whom disability is not just one of many issues but central to their lives.
For years, the disabled and those supporting them mostly have accepted their lot, often consumed by the daily struggle to survive. Now, something is definitely stirring. O’Reilly says they hit on their theme because they kept hearing people saying, “I’m just so angry, just so fed up.” Under her maiden name, Corrigan, she wrote an article last year for The Weekend Australian Magazine that told of parents who, at the point of collapse, resorted to abandoning their children in emergency respite centres. She wrote of her experiences raising a son with cerebral palsy, how the lack of support drove her family to live in England, where there is a legal right to vital equipment and services, including a residential secondary school.
The death of her husband prompted her to return to Australia, to be confronted all the more starkly with the lack of services here. Her article prompted one of the biggest reader responses the magazine has received. (more…)
