I recently watched a fabulous documentary called Crip Camp. It provided compelling insight into the American civil rights movement as it relates to people with disabilities. The show was powerful, humbling and inspiring, and got me thinking about not only the work that has been done but how we can all play a role in achieving universal equity.

Crip Camp is set in the heady era, beginning in the 1960s, of rebellion. Dylan’s times a’changing, Woodstock, Black Panthers and eye-crossingly tight jeans, the time was a bubbling hot pot of radical societal transformations. And it was the time for Judith Huemann, a documentary subject, to pick up the momentum of the disability civil rights movement that she had been enacting on a personal level from a very young age.

Pre-election, Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison made his now infamous and controversial ‘blessed to have non-disabled children’ statement.

I’m a disabled woman. But I get it.

I might have said something similar 30 years ago as an able-bodied new mother of three neuro and physically normative children. I was ignorant and unaware of the attitudinal, structural and systemic barriers faced by disabled people and their carers in every facet of their lives.

Whether you are in retail or hospitality finance or construction, there are many compelling reasons why you should be actively hiring people with disability. And in these pandemic times, with unavailable Visa workers, this is more pertinent than ever. Anecdotally, many employers avoid what they see as a complicated employment scenario – they unreasonably foresee high costs, unreliability and integration difficulties. But with only 53% of our 4.6 million people with a disability in meaningful employment compared to 84% of non-disabled Australians, we have a significant problem to overcome.

Acquiring the symptoms of a progressive condition takes some getting used to but why do so many of us feel the need to cloak these changes in an ugly cape of lies (to ourselves and others), excuses and denial? Why do we cling to the old normalcy so frantically? And what harm are we doing to ourselves in the process?.