President speech: Settlement services through the looking glass of human rights
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Ngunnawal peoples, and pay my respect to their elders past and present.
I would like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we meet, the Ngunnawal peoples, and pay my respect to their elders past and present.
I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal people of the Eora people, the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, and pay my respects to their elders.
In the second century AD, Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, thanked one of his brothers for teaching him to value "the conception of the state with one law for all, based upon individual equality and freedom of speech, and of a sovereignty which prizes above all things the liberty of the subject."1
I would like to begin by acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, the traditional owners of the land where we meet today, and pay my respects to their elders both past and present.
I begin today by paying my respects to the Wurundjeri peoples, the traditional owners of the land where we gather today. I pay my respects to your elders, to the ancestors and to those who have come before us.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner and National Race Discrimination Commissioner, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.
I would like to thank Professor Larissa Behrendt, Professor Martin Nakata, the Jumbunna Indigenous House of Learning, and the Reconciliation Working Party at the UTS, for hosting this event. And I acknowledge my distinguished fellow speakers.
There are many influences on government when it comes to Indigenous policy creation. Many have contrasting opinions, some are for pecuniary or self interest, some because they feel Indigenous people get too much, others because it is a power trip, others because of an academic interest and for others because they want to see an improvement in the quality of life of Indigenous people. This speech considers:
Both are written by Dr William Jonas, who is here today. As you would know he is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner.
I don't care how hard it is. You build Aboriginality or you get nothing. There's no choice about it. If our Aboriginal people cannot change how it is among themselves, then the Aboriginal people will never climb back out of hell. 1
I congratulate EOPHEA for organising this discussion. Although, of course, your focus is primarily on employment in the university environment, the conference program is clearly designed to address equal opportunity issues of much more general significance. I have approached my own paper in the same spirit: I hope it will be particularly relevant in your own context as equity practitioners in higher education, but I have taken the opportunity to raise issues of wider relevance.
But people with disability for the most part were either invisible within mainstream education, or invisible because they were excluded and segregated off somewhere else.
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.
Can I also acknowledge Blake Dawson Waldron lawyers for providing the venue and facilities, and the NSW Disability Discrimination Legal Service for their initiative in organising this forum.
I am here today representing, firstly, the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), and, second, I'm here to represent at least 20% of the population, and 20% of your customers and users if you are a web developer or web content manager: of course, I'm referring to people who have a disability.
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