Humanity Platform

 Heartbreaking testimony from the South Australian hearings of the Disability Royal Commission keep circling in my mind and requires an urgent response. The Royal Commission heard from a mother of a teenage girl who choked to death on a rubber glove after being left unsupervised by support workers and to make matters worse the mother arrived at the same time as the ambulance and saw her daughter's body on the kitchen floor.  When are we going to learn that complacency kills? It should not take a Royal Commission into abuse, neglect, and exploitation for these events to come to light and get fixed.  It could take years for the Royal Commission recommendations to be handed down and acted upon. That's even if the government chooses to act on all of them.  The disability community cannot afford to wait that long. Each year more and more staff to client assaults and unexplained injuries are being investigated. How long do people with disabilities and their families have t...

 I have been advocating for better accessibility in the community professionally since 2004. So I was very happy to help spread the petition that the Building Better Homes Campaign developed. The campaign called for mandatory accessibility standards to be legislated in the National Building and Construction Code.  The current accessibility guidelines are voluntary and recommended in the code.  This has led to inconsistency in building practices across Australia despite the construction industry claiming that the voluntary guidelines work and to change them would place unnecessary burden on the industry.  From a business point of view I understand the economics of their statement but as a person with a lived experience I know how much the real world is inaccessible to me.  When I have delivered lectures on Universal Design and accessibility to architecture students, the disconnect between the Disability Discrimination Act and the building code causes confusion. C...