Thursday, 3 December 2009
Disability: coming soon to a person near you
Disability Discrimination Commissioner, Graeme Innes, said that people should pause today to consider that more than 20% of Australians experience some form of disability. That is one in five people. This means disability is something close to all of us.
“Today is the International Day of People with a Disability, and it provides us with a chance to focus on the barriers which our society places in the way of some of that 20% of our population,” said Commissioner Innes. “This takes on an even more personal significance when we consider that a great many of us will develop some form of disability as we age.”
Commissioner Innes said that many everyday activities, which most people would take for granted, present barriers to people with disability. For example:
- For some of us, trains and buses are crowded, or don't run frequently enough. But people with physical disabilities are only able to board around 25 to 30% of them to begin with.
- As the Christmas and holiday season kicks in, some of us will become frustrated as movie sessions fill with films that are really only suitable for kids and teenagers. But for people who are deaf, or have a hearing impairment, captioned movies are only shown on 24 of the 3000 screens in cinemas in Australia, and then, only twice a week.
- For some of us, consulting our local GP can be an unpleasant experience. But for people with physical disabilities, only 40% of GP surgeries have adjustable height examination couches, so many are either examined on the floor or not examined at all.
- For most of us, checking information on the internet is a task we complete dozens of times a day. But for people who are blind or have low vision, many websites - including some government websites - are either not accessible at all, or not as accessible as they could be.
- In our broader community, the unemployment rate is currently running at 5.8%. For people with mental illness, for example, it is around 19.5%.
- For some of us, it can be a little inconvenient to get to our suburban accountant or solicitor if their office is up a flight of stairs above local shops. But, for people with mobility disability, this means that they cannot get there at all.
Commissioner Innes said, with the very real likelihood that many of us, and the people we care about, will develop a disability as we grow older (whether it be a mobility, hearing, sight or psychiatric disability), the issues that face people with disability on an everyday basis, and threaten their level of social inclusion, should have a much higher public profile than they currently have.
Media contact: Brinsley Marlay 02 9284 9656 or 0430 366 529
