Disability Rights
I think it's always good manners to make this acknowledgment. But at a Deaf community event it's also an important reminder that the rate of deafness and hearing impairment in some indigenous communities - over 30% - is even higher than it is throughout the community as a whole.
Disability Rights
Allow me to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we stand [the Nyoongar people] and pay my respects to their elders both past and present.
Disability Rights
In addition to this year's Human Rights Awards, to be announced later today, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission has decided to confer an award to mark ten years of achievements under the Disability Discrimination Act.
Disability Rights
I would like to thank ACROD for inviting me to deliver the Kenneth Jenkins Oration; both because I regard it as a privilege and because it gives me the opportunity to address a gathering of the key people in the disability field at an important time in the work of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.
Disability Rights
Attorney-General Ruddock; Michael Apps and representatives of the bus and coach industry; Margo Hodge and representatives of the disability community; ladies and gentlemen.
Disability Rights
I've always been fascinated by numbers. Although remembering some of my maths exam results, I'm not so sure that they have been as fascinated by me. If you ask a group of people to say the first number that comes into their heads, you'll get a lot of 7's. Perhaps it's because we all have an intuitive awareness that 7 is the smallest number of faces of a regular polygon that cannot be constructed with a ruler and compass.
Disability Rights
Australian summer holidays. The phrase evokes an image of sun, sand, slow days and late nights. But just imagine you and your mates are staying on the Gold Coast and it takes 20 phone calls for you to find a beachside unit with a shower you can use. Or the only wheelchair accessible restaurant in a 3km radius is fully booked so you have to eat take-away most nights.
Disability Rights
For thousands of years, Aboriginal groups, who might spend much of their time living far apart in the expanses of this land, pursuing separately the business of survival, would come together at times to meet, to trade, sometimes to resolve differences, but also to exchange knowledge for mutual benefit.
Disability Rights
Graeme Innes AM Deputy Disability Discrimination Commissioner Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Physical Disability Council of Australia 20 November 2000
Rights and Freedoms
Read a statement about the history of the Australian Human Rights Commission, which was presented at the Commission on Human Rights in Geneva in 2003.
Disability Rights
Take a piece of canvas, some chicken wire, paint and plastic, and put them together so that they resemble a potato cooked in its jacket. Mount the whole thing on a block of wood, add a label that says "baked potato with butter" and what have you got? You've got a famous example of Pop Art. The collector who bought it is alleged to have remarked, "pop is the art of today, tomorrow and all the future". Human nature being what it is, I imagine they said much the same thing after they'd put the final touches to those prehistoric cave paintings.
Disability Rights
Some of us here were sitting in a stuffy conference room in the UN headquarters in New York when the Working Group completed its drafting of the convention. It was only stuffy because - in true UN style - we had exceeded our time limit for the session, the interpreters had gone home, and the air-conditioning had been turned off. But for most of us, these disadvantages paled in the excitement of what we had achieved. And that excitement was amplified as we watched the General Assembly confirm our work.
Disability Rights
This launch comes a few days after the International Day of Disabled Persons which this year has electronic information access as its theme and the release last Monday of the Australian Bankers' Association progress report on Accessibility of Electronic Banking.
Disability Rights
Australian Public Service Commission one-day diversity conference 'Public Service Regeneration - Challenges and Opportunities for the Workforce' Brisbane, Wednesday 8 June 2005.
Disability Rights
I always like to begin my presentations with a humorous anecdote or joke of some kind. For one thing, it lets me know that someone is actually listening, and it also lulls the audience into a false sense of security for the dry parts to follow. So as part of my preparation for this morning's discussion of disability discrimination law in Australia, I decided to find an answer to the important question, "how many audiologists does it take to change a lightbulb". Fortunately there is a website devoted to lightbulb jokes, and so I duly consulted it.
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