Two Years On From the Disability Royal Commission: Lived experience, intersectionality and systemic harm
Thursday 19 February
During PWDA’s national online forum ‘Two Years On From the Disability Royal Commission’, Tahlia-Rose Vanissum (Woppaburra Woman, First Nations Disability and Gender Justice Advocate and PWDA Board Director) spoke about the ongoing harm experienced by First Nations people with disability and stressed that reform cannot succeed without First Nations leadership, lived experience and real power in decision-making.
Systems designed without us will continue to harm us.
Tahlia-Rose Vanissum
The Royal Commission did not reveal harm, it confirmed what people with disability, our families, our communities have been saying for decades.
Watch the full video or read the full transcript below.
Read full transcript
The Royal Commission did not reveal harm. The Royal Commission did not reveal harm, it confirmed what people with disability, our families, our communities have been saying for decades. What it gave us was not new stories, it gave us irrefutable evidence on the public record that violence, neglect, segregation and systemic exclusion are not failures of individuals but failures of systems by design.
Two years on when we should be recognising the power of our communities collective of testimony, we’re instead still mourning those taken from us too soon as a direct result of ongoing systemic failure. Too much of the government’s response to the Royal Commission to date has been slow, fragmented or conditional.
Too many basic recommendations are being treated as optional best practice rather than what they are, basic compliance with our human rights. We’re seeing announcements made, if we’re lucky enough to get invited, about key areas of reform that our communities have had no real input into and that we already know won’t work.
But unlike governments we don’t see those consequences through economic forecasts or budget lines and savings targets. We see them through the funerals we attend, the media reports, the running tallies that continue to rise counting the people that we have lost. For my community, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People in this country, learning of another death from a preventable or systemic cause is not new.
Governments deliberate major policy decisions that change every aspects of our lives and roll them out without seemingly any evidence, without place based trials and without our leadership, our people, Aboriginal and disabled continue to die.
Since the Disability Royal Commission around 60 Aboriginal people have died in custody alone. Most of our mob that are dying in custody have disability. Most commonly intellectual, psychosocial with increasing occurrences of acquired brain injury through the disproportionate rates our mob face experiencing family, domestic and sexual violence. They’re a stark living reminder that when racism and ableism and punitive systems intersect the outcomes are predictable.
We know where these paths lead and we’ve known for a very long time, that this is what happens when disability, care or support needs are left unmet and are, instead, met with punishment. This is what happens when racism and ableism operate together without accountability. And yet, in the space of disability reform, we continue to see the same problem.
Governments have not held organisations entrusted to ensure that Aboriginal communities have the ongoing training, support, resources and platform to tell our own stories to account, meaning that First Nations people with disability aren’t able to shape the solutions that affect our lives.
Recommendations for a First Nations disability forum have been left idle due to a disability leadership gap in our communities and in that gap harm and misinformation flows. When diverse First Nations disability leadership is missing, and by diverse there I mean diversity of experience, of location, of gender, of sexuality, other organisations are stepping in making supportive statements or backing programs that we, as disabled First Nations people, already know will not work. But those organisations trying to fill that gap often well meaning, haven’t bothered to ask us and diversity of disabled First Nations voices has not been resourced to lead, to critique or to shape or define those responses.
Too often we’re seeing First Nations experiences of disability and care treated as add ons. This is why First Nations leadership, lived experience and intersectional accountability is so important and must remain central to all reforms, not symbolic but structural. Because we know that systems designed without us will continue to harm us.
We know that mainstream solutions will continue to fail in our communities because they do not understand and respond to our collective responsibilities, to culture, country and kin. Nor do they respond to the intersectional unique challenges that we have as an indigenous Peoples in this country.
First Nations people with disability are not a subgroup to be consulted at the margins. We are rights holders, we are knowledge holders and we’re already doing the work of reform, often without resourcing recognition or power and the Royal Commission gave those governments a roadmap on how to get there for our people, resourcing to match rhetoric including sustained funding and investment in building disability leadership at the local level through open grant rounds to individuals and community groups, alongside funding for community controlled organisations, for local and jurisdictional advocacy, as well as our national voices.
We should be expected to co design in a way that actually shares power with us, not a consultation process where decisions have already been made. We should expect governments to understand that safety, dignity and inclusion are not optional extras. They are human rights obligations.
And for those of us in community advocacy, our role remains what it has always been, to keep pressure where it belongs, to stand together across movements, rather than undercutting each other, and insist that reform is measured by whether people in all of my communities, both disabled, queer and my mob, are safer and able to live lives shaped by dignity and self determination. Thanks, everyone.