Humanity Platform

 The Victorian Disability Worker Registration is now open and is the culmination of many recommendations of the 2016 Victorian Government Inquiry into disability care and standards.  The Disability Worker Registration will work in tandem with the Victorian Workers Commission to uphold standards and ensure quality of care for all Victorians with a disability.  The Disability Worker Registration Board of Victoria will enforce a code of conduct for all registered disability support workers to help create trusted and safe workers for people with disabilities.  "The new registration will allow support workers to enhance and prove their professionalism." Said Paul Healy, Branch Secretary for the Health and Community Services Union of Victoria.  As a person with a disability, listening to the speakers at the launch was very comforting because I have to admit the recent high profile cases of abuse and neglect has created a significant amount of anxiety for me around di...

 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...

 Thousands of Australians with disabilities fought for decades to get NDIS put in place. The difference the scheme has made in people's lives over the past few years is almost immeasurable. People who couldn't get funding now can and participants like myself have the opportunity to go to different providers or even different states much easier.  Growing up with funding models that made me rank my disability I missed out on the appropriate funding level because I scored highly on the physical disability components yet did not have the accompanying cognitive and intellectual disabilities.  When the Morrison Government announced the new independent assessments, a chill went down my spine. I immediately heard echoes of my past. The way the new independent assessment tools were explained to me it sounded like a tick and flick way of getting participants less funding.  Architects of the NDIS Scheme have said that the new approach is a way for the government to save up to 7...

 After writing several blog posts on International Women's Day, I decided to stop writing on this topic because I didn't want to be mansplaining women's issues. A conversation I had recently with a female work colleague changed my opinion on this however.  We were talking about a male colleague who had disrespected her and I naively responded, "Really? He was always so nice to me!".  My colleague then looked at me and said, "I know you have experienced prejudice because of your disability but think about it for a second. You are a white middle class man with a disability. He was hardly going to treat you the same way he was going to treat me." This short conversation I had with her made me stop and think. In 2021, gender stereotypes should not exist yet the conversations that the March 4 Justice and the Me Too movement have sparked show society that we need to work harder for true gender equality.  Men, including myself, need to work with women to make g...

 From the age of three I have used an electric wheelchair. When I got my first wheelchair all I could do was go round and round in circles but now my wheelchair is my independence.  Over the years I have had a total of five electric wheelchairs and each time the process for getting a new chair is slightly different. Before the NDIS, the amount I was allocated for a new chair depended heavily on the report writing skills of the occupational therapist.  Each time I tried out a new range of chairs I always felt a bit uncomfortable because in my opinion I do not think that enough time for trialling new chairs is allowed. Once the selection process has been made, you then have to fit the chair to my individual needs. In years gone past this meant literally carving and sculpting the chair to my body type but in 2021 wheelchair providers prefer to use off the shelf mix and match components to supposedly cut down on costs. In my experience this means the final product is not as c...

 In 2020 the newsXpress website organised a national writing competition.  The competition had two categories, poetry and short stories.  At the urging of my brother I decided to enter the competition and to my big surprise my poem Breaking News Agency won the open age category. The newsXpress judges said "Chris' poem,  Breaking News Agency, was inspiring and heartwarming, connecting with hopes and dreams, which can become a reality." Those words about something I wrote mean a lot to me because one of the reasons I love creative writing is to make people feel.  In life I am an extremely competitive person. When I play a game, I don't just play for fun. I have to win.  When I am creating though the only person I am competing with is myself. The only reason I ever enter writing or film competitions is in the hope that my work will be highlighted. The fact that Breaking News Agency won a prize, to me, means it was worth highlighting not that I am better than...