The mood was subdued at the gates of our small Catholic primary school at 3:30pm on Wednesday. Ten per cent of our school's students have an autism diagnosis, and for their parents who had read Pauline Hanson's comments to the Senate that afternoon, those familiar feelings — dismay at the ignorance and lack of empathy of some people, worry for the future, and defiant pride in their diverse children — had been activated yet again.
They have all heard similarly clueless opinions spouted before by blowhards in supermarket checkout queues and swimming pool changing rooms: autistic behaviours are just the result of poor parenting; parents seek out a diagnosis for their children because it's 'trendy', and irresponsible mothers induce their child's autism by eating, drinking, wearing, or sitting on the wrong thing while pregnant. And, of course, there is that longstanding fallacy that autism is caused by vaccinations (also briefly espoused by Hanson).
However, Hanson's statement, 'we need to get rid of' autistic children from mainstream classrooms, has a particularly insidious sting to it, given that it was made by a federal Senator in the context of the Gonski 2.0 school funding negotiations.
That teachers and parents of neurotypical kids have supposedly lobbied Hanson about the ill-effects of inclusive education reveals, at best, some resistance to the presence of differently-abled children in mainstream classrooms. At worst, it displays a yearning to return to the segregated systems of the past, whereby some children could be hidden, forgotten and granted a substandard education in contravention of their human rights.
It also limits and defines children to only one aspect of their identities. 'It makes me feel sad,' said Kelly*, the mother of one of my daughter's classmates, 'that people wouldn't see our kids are more than autistic. They are amazing people with so many gifts to share.'
Even if Hanson has not been approached by a single teacher or parent about this issue, at the expense of children with disabilities she has reprehensively sought (yet again) to have a divisive effect on the Australian community for her own political gain.
As the parent of a child with an intellectual disability wrote to Bill Shorten on Wednesday afternoon, such behaviour by an elected representative 'doesn't shock me — but it does break my heart all over again. It doesn't matter how many times it's happened before, I feel the knife twist again.'
The present system is imperfect, but Hanson's focus