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Showing posts from January, 2017

Integration

All those people who rightly condemn the nationalist fools shouting about integration. Integration, which happens when people are forced to give up their identity and culture and language in order to adopt a country or culture not of their own. The same condemning people who tut tut over seventy years of the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families. Those stolen children were sent to missions and institutions where they were taught to reject their heritage and their language and become 'assimilated' into white society. And yet those people are the same people who approve of ABA, the practice of training autistic children to be as non-autistic as we can possibly make them. Eye contact, no stimming, it's weird and abhorrent otherwise, our native practices. What our neurology dictates to them is wrong, because our neurology is not like theirs. They approve of the idea that 'some disabled people are too disabled to live in the comm

Administrative Error - An Open Letter to the Greens on Euthanasia Safeguards

An Open Letter to the Greens on Euthanasia Safeguards  Dear Greens As I write this, the Greens are proposing euthanasia legislation in both South Australia and Western Australia.   Although Greens have not consulted with the disability community – the population most at risk - they say that they’re putting ‘safeguards’ in place, including a panel of doctors who will make the final decision about our lives.  Last year, disabled people lobbied against proposed euthanasia legislation in South Australia.   I wrote about it here , and there are links to our testimony.   The Bill failed by one vote.   And then today, this story broke.   I’m writing this not just for my fellow disabled people, but for all the members of my community who have woken up with DNR tags around their wrists.   For activist Stella Young, who was once told pre-surgery by a nurse that at 32, she’d had a good innings.   For the people who are switched off by your ‘safeguards’ every day.  They’re n