Category: disability inclusion
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Raising the Flag for Disability Pride 2025

I spoke at Inner West Council’s Inclusion Festival, where we raised the flag for Disability Pride. The flag has a black background – for both mourning and resistance.. Green is for sensory disability Blue is for mental illness. White represents invisible and undiagnosed disability. Gold is for Neurodiversity. Red Is for physical disability. Thanks to…
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Vulnerable or Resilient? It’s all in how you talk about it

The language we use frames our thoughts and is shaped by them. Using different words to describe the same thing can urge us to consider it very differently. “Vulnerable” is a dangerous word when it is used, to create a category of people.
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What if everyone had to live in households of no less than 3?

Who do you live with? Is it your choice? What if the government said that, to solve the housing crisis, everyone had to live in households of no less than three?
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The rental crisis brings group-home style living to tenants in 2024

Affordable housing is on offer that pushes non-disabled people to experience some of the same dynamics as group-homes.
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Circumventing NSW Trains (A poem)

Travel gets complicated when the trains are out and you’re a power wheelchair user – but it inspired a poem.
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Why Australia’s unemployment rate will get stuck on the way down (& how to grease the track)

Australia is experiencing a job’s boom – or so we’re told. The official unemployment rate is lower than it’s been in years. That’s good, right? The trouble is, the government is only telling the parts of the story that make them look good as we hurtle towards the next federal election. There’s some sleight of…
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How a Guaranteed Liveable Income could unleash the talents of People with Disability

What did you dream of becoming when you were a child? A teacher? A fireman? An astronaut? Reaching goals isn’t always easy. As we get older, we learn that not many people have what it takes to be an astronaut. Sometimes we have to adjust our dreams to be a bit more realistic. I was…
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Disability pride is going to be big in Australia in 2022 – how much progress can we make?

Dylan Alcott is Australian of the year for 2022. Dylan is a gold medalist in wheelchair tennis and wheelchair basketball. He just won a Golden Slam in tennis (all four tennis majors and a gold medal in the same year). He’s a television personality. He’s also a disability advocate. It’s hard to know what the…
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5 Invisible Walls of Disability Discrimination and how to turn them into Yellow Brick Roads of Inclusion.

Have you ever walked into an invisible wall? There’s something in the way, but no one even knew it was there. That’s what it’s like when you hit an access barrier. It could be a small step, a locked door or a crowded aisle. With a bit of planning, an invisible wall can often be…
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7 welfare realities for disabled people that SBS’s “Could you Survive on the Breadline?” skated over.

How does job-seeking work in Australia if you are disabled? That’s the elephant in the room of the latest reality TV offering from SBS, with a social conscience twist, “Could you Survive on the Breadline?”. The show invited three Australians with public profile to dip their toes into the world of living on welfare for…