That Australia establishes a national children’s commissioner and office to specifically promote, advocate and enquire into the rights of all children in Australia, including the rights of children with disability.
That Australia explicitly incorporates CRPD rights, including the principle of the best interest of the child into legislation, policies and programs and service standards, operational procedures and compliance frameworks that apply to children and young people in general.
That Australia develops comprehensive strategies and mechanisms to ensure that children and young people with disability can fully and equitably participate in consultations, decision-making processes and policy development that affect the lives of children and young people.
That Australia works with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and representative organisations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children with disability to establish adequately resourced and culturally appropriate, community owned and located responses and support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children with disability.
That Australia commissions and funds a comprehensive assessment of the situation of children with disability, in order to establish a baseline of disaggregated data against which future progress towards the Convention on the Rights of the Child and CRPD rights can be measured.
There are a number of initiatives that have been taken by Australian governments to provide disability awareness, training and resources. For example, the Federal Government has provided funding for ‘Ramp Up’, a portal on the ABC website specifically dedicated to disability issues;49 and introduced the ‘Mindframe National Media Strategy’ involving several projects aimed at reducing stigma in the media against people with psychosocial disability.50 In New South Wales, media guidelines assist the industry in how to use appropriate language, avoid common stereotypes as well as report on, communicate with and interview people with disability.51
Australian governments celebrate International Day of People with Disability through organising or sponsoring a variety of activities and events at the national, State and local level.
However, there is no national targeted strategy to raise awareness of people with disability in all their diversity. In particular, there has been a lack of focus on awareness raising in the wider community of the specific cultural understanding, meaning and experience of disability in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities; and a lack of awareness raising within Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities of the rights and entitlements of people with disability.52
Whilst there are some industry codes of practice and guidelines that contain provisions relating to disability, such as the Commercial Television Industry Code of Practice 2010, people with disability are rarely featured in the Australian mass media and if featured, are often portrayed negatively.53. The media negatively portrays people with disability by:54
focusing on the impairment of the individual rather than external disabling barriers;
In particular, the media regularly depicts persons with psychosocial disability as violent and dangerous despite the fact 80 to 90 percent of persons with psychosocial disability never commit a violent offence.55 An Australian study56 on 12,000 media items relating to psychosocial disability indicated 20 percent of news items used inappropriate language, 14.4 percent were stigmatising, 16.6 percent treated people as similar in personality, nearly one third of headlines were sensationalised and only 6.6 percent of news items contained contact details for readers to get further information on psychosocial disability.
Another study of a major daily newspaper in South Australia into portrayals of people with disability across 29 articles found 13 were negative in tone, 6 were positive, 4 were neutral and 6 were mixed.57 A link between crime and psychosocial disability was also reinforced and there were references to the heroism of particular people with disability.58 The reporting did not emphasis the individual but their disability and accentuated stereotypes of victimisation or disempowerment.59 Further, the articles tended to use phrases with a negative tone such as ‘suffers from’ or ‘confined to a wheelchair’ and the emotive content of disability was regularly highlighted.
Case Study
A newspaper published sensationalist articles about a Queensland forensic unit with headlines such as ‘Gates of Hell’ and ‘Door prone to unlocking as mentally ill walk past’. The language used included ‘criminally insane’ and ‘asylums’.60
Case Study
An Australian television program called ‘Domestic Blitz’ ran an episode on doing a ‘home makeover’ for a ‘very deserving’ woman in a wheelchair. The program’s formula portrays the stereotypical view that people with disability are in need of sympathy and charity.
There is a lack of disability awareness training in the workplace resulting in continuing stigma regarding the work capabilities of people with disability.61 The skills of mainstream recruitment and employment agency personnel are often insufficient for addressing the needs of people with disability as a result of minimal personal contact with people with disability, limited disability awareness training and little knowledge of anti-discrimination legislation.62
In Australia, people with disability experience prejudice and discrimination within the justice system due to inadequate knowledge and awareness of disability by judicial and non-judicial staff. (See also Article 13) Police officers receive only minimal disability awareness training and there are only a limited number of specialist online courses containing information on issues concerning, for example, persons with intellectual disability.63
The negative experiences of parents with disability in relation to child protection matters before the courts demonstrates a lack of awareness training on the human rights of parents with disability and their capacity to be effective parents.64
Disability awareness training is not compulsory in health and medical courses at university or in the workplace, and there is a lack of trained staff to meet the disability-related requirements of people with disability.
The large numbers of people with disability who are unable to have their support needs met in the disability service system often results in lobbying for additional government funding that is based on strong negative messages and portrayals of people with disability. Rather than portraying people with disability as individuals unable to enjoy full inclusion, participation and independence because of the lack of supports, the focus is on the ‘burden’ on carers and family members.
The presentation of people with disability as an unbearable burden of care perpetuates a strong image of disability as being about personal incapacity at the individual level and a social and economic impediment at the societal level.
