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Keywords: Ableism

  • AUSTRALIA

    From public good to private gain: The failure of employment services

    • John Falzon
    • 14 December 2023
    4 Comments

    No doubt there were some who genuinely believed that privatising  employment services would result in better services at a lower cost to the public purse. But the engineers of the socially destructive projects of the neoliberal era knew very well that they were more likely to result in the enrichment of some to the detriment of many.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    It's time we ended politically induced poverty

    • John Falzon
    • 23 March 2023
    11 Comments

    As jobseeker payments are indexed for inflation, increased payments are still well below the minimum wage and age pension. With successive neoliberal governments dismantling social infrastructure, people living in poverty have little means of escape. Poverty is not a personal choice but a political one.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2022: Does the 'Let it Rip' approach have a eugenics problem?

    • Justin Glyn
    • 05 January 2023

    In the early part of the twentieth century, Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) used the latter’s work to argue that human breeding stock could be improved. He would weed out the weakest and the less able and produce a sturdier race. Until recently, the crematoria of Hitler’s death camps were enough to remind most that this was not an idea consonant with actual human flourishing.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Does the 'Let it Rip' approach have a eugenics problem?

    • Justin Glyn
    • 27 January 2022
    10 Comments

    In the early part of the twentieth century, Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) used the latter’s work to argue that human breeding stock could be improved. He would weed out the weakest and the less able and produce a sturdier race. Until recently, the crematoria of Hitler’s death camps were enough to remind most that this was not an idea consonant with actual human flourishing.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Zoomkwondo and other lessons from the pandemic

    • Cristy Clark
    • 17 June 2021
    2 Comments

    About 1 in 6 Australians (18 per cent) live with disability, and many of these 4.4 million people face daily barriers to their full inclusion in education, work, services, activities, etc, not because of their disability, but because access has been structured around the needs, capacities and preferences of people who do not live with disability. Exclusion has always been a choice, but the pandemic has laid this reality bare.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Disability RC hears how criminal justice system fails people with disabilities

    • Justin Glyn
    • 02 March 2021

    Hearing 11 of the Commission has looked at how Australia’s justice system treats people with disabilities. The intersection between disability and the criminal justice system is, unfortunately, not a happy one.

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  • RELIGION

    St Francis Xavier, disability, and examining our limits

    • Justin Glyn
    • 02 December 2020
    10 Comments

    3 December has a couple of interesting resonances for this blind Jesuit. It is the feast day of St Francis Xavier — Jesuit missionary extraordinaire. It is also the International Day of Persons with a Disability. It seems to me that the two anniversaries have more than a little in common — both in what they tell us about the limits and the promise of human life in the image of God.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Actually, my illness does define me

    • Tim Hutton
    • 01 October 2020
    9 Comments

    For many people, illness has a narrative: a clear beginning, middle and end. If we’re lucky, the ending is actually a fresh start where the illness is gone and our hero is returned to normal life, changed but stronger because of their ordeals. In the lives of those with chronic illness, however, those lines are blurred; our descent into illness may have been gradual and there might be no end in sight.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Discussions about euthanasia

    • Justin Glyn
    • 10 September 2020
    9 Comments

    While the legislation was proposed as something of a measure of last resort, the numbers already tell a different story. Unfortunately, many of us with a disability look at these figures (and at the proposed legalisation of euthanasia in New Zealand, which will be voted on later this year) with a weary mix of familiarity and horror.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    COVID-19 shining a light on ableism

    • Justin Glyn
    • 25 August 2020
    7 Comments

    The pandemic has lit up the areas in which our neoliberal economies are basically unfit for the purpose of providing healthy and safe environments — whether it be privatised aged care homes and quarantine services or ‘the gig economy’, which forces sick people to ‘soldier on’ infecting people as they go. One area that has been rather less considered, however, is disability.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Emergence from ideology

    • John Falzon
    • 02 July 2020
    14 Comments

    Ideology is a powerful presence in our lives. It works its way into our consciousness through the dominant discourses of government, media, institutional religion, legal frameworks, popular culture, advertising, all the means at the disposal of the powerful. Once we learn to recognise it we see it everywhere. If it feels like we were born into it, it is because we were.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Solidarity in the face of a neoliberal inferno

    • John Falzon
    • 03 March 2020
    27 Comments

    The Morrison government despises the working class. There is no other explanation for its behaviour. For all the ‘lifters and leaners’ or ‘workers and shirkers’ guff that we’ve seen over the years from this and past governments, the truth is that, according to the neoliberal worldview, whether you’re in paid work or on social security, you’re despised unless you belong to its own big money elite.

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