Jordon Steele-John (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Disabled people should be able to live free from violence, free from abuse and free from exploitation and neglect, with the access and supports that we need to live a good life. This is not a radical proposition. However, there is a radical gap between this aspiration and the day-to-day experiences of disabled people across the country. For decades it has been the case that the reality of the lived experience of disability has been shut out of this place or pushed to the bottom of the pile of its agenda, perhaps—sadly, often—in favour of the agenda of corporate donors to both sides of this place.

In this country a disabled person is two times as likely to experience violence and four times as likely to experience psychological distress. We have significantly poorer health outcomes and we die much younger, often from preventable causes. For decades we have been hidden away in institutions and in group homes out of sight and out of mind. Token gestures of access and inclusion have been introduced throughout community spaces both in this parliament and far, far beyond. We have seen more significant reforms, reforms like the NDIS, thanks to the continual tireless advocacy of disabled people and our families. But the reality—the hard, indisputable, often disturbing truth—is that disabled people still face many barriers in our community today and often struggle against horrendous forms of discrimination. This discrimination bleeds throughout our entire community. This corrosive ableist thought that a disabled person is lesser, that a disabled person is to be ignored, that a disabled person's voice is to be disregarded and that their rights are considered to be optional—these thought processes and the policies that they have supported, empowered and seen put into place—have shaped our lives. They have often been the shadows in which we have struggled.

Against this backdrop, there grew a deep desire for justice, for freedom from oppression, persecution and discrimination, and that desire for justice, that need to be heard, culminated in the campaign for a royal commission into the violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of disabled people in this country, a campaign that lasted for the best part of 10 years. I'm very proud to say that the Greens were intimately involved with that campaign. I'm very proud to say that its terms of reference were a direct result of the Senate inquiry work done by Senator Rachel Siewert. I am extraordinarily proud to say that our role in this place enabled disabled people to enter this place; to sit in the galleries; to sit on the chamber floor; to demand the justice, the process and the space; to talk of our experiences; to share our stories; and to be supported to call out and to name those individuals and institutions that have been so intimately involved in our oppression, and who have profited so egregiously from the harms we have come to.

Next week, this royal commission will hold the first hearings of 2020 in New South Wales. For a two-week period it will focus upon the experience of disabled people within the healthcare system, with a particular focus on disabled folks with intellectual and cognitive disability. We disabled people know that this particular intersection in this setting is the scene of horrendous abuses and failures in our system. I want to put to the chamber really clearly, and upon the record, some of the statistics that form the context of our experience with the healthcare system—particularly the experience of folks with intellectual and cognitive disability.

Two and a half times is the level of health problems that are experienced by this part of our community—2½ times the proportion of the general community. As many as half of all the deaths of people with intellectual disability are avoidable, compared with only 17 per cent of the general population. People with intellectual disability die at 27 years younger than the rest of the population—27 years! That's in modern-day Australia. Significantly, they journey with higher rates of psychiatric disorder, are underdiagnosed for acute and chronic health conditions and are regarded as being highly underrepresented in relation to effective consultations with general practitioners over preventable health issues. And on and on it goes.

The reality is that intellectually disabled folks are disregarded when it comes to their health care. Their voices are often found to be put aside when they enter an emergency department room. Their symptoms, if they express them, are often put down to something in relation to their disability and so they go unaddressed. Therefore, they develop into something more serious and therefore lives are lost.

Over this two-week period, the commission will delve deeply, I hope, into these issues and look hard truths in the face. It will confront without flinching the reality that we do not train our medical professionals adequately to work with intellectually disabled folk or disabled people generally in terms of our health care. It will confront, I hope, without flinching the systemic discrimination that does exist within some elements of the medical community. And it will confront without flinching the reality that we are failing people, that folk are dying and they should not. There are families, partners, mums, dads, brothers and sisters who are currently grieving and who would not bear that heavy burden or be looking for a way to fill that ever-present hole in the day had the medical community and the community at large listened to the voices of disabled people and found ways to make sure that we are heard when we interact with the health system.

I hope that they will do these things in the name of all who have been lost and of all the grief that has been caused; that out of this process of hearing we come to a new understanding of the challenges that intellectually and cognitively disabled folks experience, and that we recommit to listening with authenticity and acting when we are called to do so. I thank the chamber for its time.