Recent media coverage of the disabled - Graeme Innes, Disability Commissioner

Graeme Innes is the departing Disability Commissioner, and has a rather lot of choice words to say about the Abbott gov and the way the disabled have been demonised.

I think they’re tapping into the classic us and them psyche, and trying to play on that whole syndrome of people, not just Australian people, any people, being scared of what’s sometimes described in the literature as ‘the other’. So, you know, the issue of white people and Aboriginal people, the issue of men and women, the issue of people with disabilities and people without disabilities. I think they’re just tapping into and trying to reinforce that psyche, and I find it, frankly, and I have to think about the right words to use in this sense, pretty appalling that a newspaper with a readership that The Daily Telegraph has, would think that it’s okay to trash the disability brand in the way that they do, because it’s okay for them, it might be all right for them to do it, but it’s people with disabilities who are suffering the results and the damage of that trashing. And we experience the damage of that trashing every day in our public transport, in our taxis, in the fact that we can’t get jobs. That demonising and negativising limits us in so many ways. more