Translating rhetoric - consumer rights from a CALD perspective
Diana Qian
Cultural Competency in Disability Conference
29 July 2015
Thank you for the introduction. First I want to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we gathered on today and pay my respects to elders past and present.
Thank you to the conference organisers for inviting me. I represent an organisation called Diversity and Disability Alliance (DDAlliance). It’s a new disability support organisation run by and for people with disability from diverse backgrounds with the support of families and allies. We believe in diversity, full inclusion and the power of a collective voice. We are here to support people to live the lives they choose by developing their knowledge, skills and capacity. We want to build the capacity of all communities to include people with disability. DDAlliance is unfunded and it’s run by a voluntary board with diverse expertise. One way you can support our vision is to sign up as a member. There is a brochure about DDAlliance in your conference bag which provides further information.
The title of my presentation is Translating rhetoric - consumer rights from a CALD perspective. In the next 18 minutes or so I want to unpack the title and do a bit of translating. So first I’m going to look at the rhetoric. In NSW the Disability Services Act had been in place since 1993. It spelt out what people with disability can expect from the services funded to support us. The DSA was recently replaced by the Disability Inclusion Act which contains a stronger emphasis on human rights and meeting obligations under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. There are Disability service standards under the Act which services have to meet. These standards are not meant to be aspirational or wishful thinking, they form part of the conditions of funding. Standard 1 is on rights and it says:
Each person with disability receives a service that promotes and respects the person’s legal and human rights and enables them to exercise choice like everyone else in the community.
Sounds good to me. However, we know the reality is different for people from non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB) with disability, or we wouldn’t be here. People from NESB with disabilitymake up 25% of the disability population. This means either ourselves or at least one of our parents were born in a Non- English speaking country. Yet only 6% of the people accessing funded services are people from NESB. This suggests that three in four people from NESB with disability miss out on receiving disability support because of our language and culture. I’ve being looking at the data for the last 17 years and the low access rate hasn’t changed. People from NESB with disability don’t even get to access the services that are funded to support us. How are we going to exercise choice like everyone else in the community?
With the National Disability Insurance Scheme happening just up the road one might say things will change for the better. NDIS is all about giving people with disability more choice and control, not like the traditional service system. However, the rhetoric of choice and control will not be a reality for people from NESB with disability if the attitudinal and structural barriers we encounter are allowed to continue without making a conscious effort to build cultural competence into the Scheme from the very start. Evidence from the trial sites has shown that history is repeating itself with only 1.5% NESB access rate in the Hunter.
Australia tends to look to the UK for lessons learnt on implementing direct funding. One of those lessons we should pay attention to is equity. Research commissioned by the Social Care Institute for Excellence shows that local authorities implementing the direct payment scheme consistently fail to provide people from minority communities’ equal access. There is evidence that service users from minority communities are under-represented in direct payments schemes. Instead, they’ve been channeled into traditional service settings such as centre based care because local authorities see them as ‘unsuitable’. The research has also found that the experience of people from minority communities who do access the scheme has been poor when compared with their white-Anglo counterparts.
So clearly it’s more pressing than ever that we understand why there is such disparity between rhetoric and reality and do what is needed, not what is easy, to stop history repeating. Otherwise, we will be here in ten years’ time still talking about the same thing, while people from NESB with disability continue to be excluded, left behind or get what other people don’t want and are still expected to be grateful. To perpetuate such loss of life opportunities and potential is unconscionable.
To understand and address the disparity I want to go back to the title of my presentation and talk about consumer rights. The traditional disability service system is based on a welfare model where people with disability are treated as passive service recipients. With the marketization of disability supports people with disability are seen as consumers with dollar signs attached. Whatever rights afforded to people with disability are limited to a consumer or welfare context and are not about us having equaland full participation in all aspects of society. The UN Convention which Australia is a signatory to provides a human rights framework which should be the foundation of disability policy and practice in this country, including the discussions we have at this conference.
Human rights areuniversal. They apply to us all regardless of language spoken or cultural background. They are not special rights for special people. We need to be mindful that when we talk about the exclusion of people from NESB with disability, we are talking about a human rights issue, no different to gender equality or constitutional recognition of Aboriginal people.
Now I want to unpack CALD perspective although I’m not quite sure what that is. I think there is a tendency to group people and attribute certain characteristics to every member of the group as if they all think and behave the same way. Culturally and linguistically diverse in Australia currently refers to people who are not Aboriginal or from a white Anglo background. So CALD includes people from more than 200 cultural backgrounds. I haven’t met all of them but I know for sure that there is no CALD perspective simply because I constantly disagree with my mother, on most things, so there goes the idea of a single perspective.
The grouping of people and assumption they are homogenous is a simplistic way of understanding our human environment. It’s also a dangerous one. It can lead to stereotypes, discrimination and exclusion. It’s counter-productive to developing cultural competency as an individual, an organisation or a system. Unfortunately, the simplicity remains attractive to people when it comes to cultural awareness. I’ve lost count the number of times I’ve been asked why I don’t produce a fact sheet on what the Asians are like. It saddens me that there are such so called resources out there. I came across one recently which says many Asians are taught to demonstrate humility andremove their shoes before entering a home. I note that Australia won the Asian Cup earlier this year. So if you identify as an Australian, you are an Asian. If you don’t feel those descriptions reflect who you are, why do we expect the other 4 billion people do.
To move beyond stereotypes we need a shared understanding of diversity that encompasses the full range of human expression, such as gender, ethnicity, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, locality, sense of place and belonging, etc. Labelling people based on a single identity such as cultural background takes awayour universal human right to choose our individual identitiesand expressions, and to respect each other as equals. The system to come as a result of the disability reform, and the people working within the system, must be able to support a human rights approach to diversity.
It also concerns me that people doing the labelling remain invisible while all attention is focused on stereotyping people “CALD” backgrounds as the other. There needs to be a space for everyone, including people from Anglo cultural backgrounds, to acknowledge and reflect on their cultural values and practices.
The final point I would like to make moving forward is that the opportunity to close the disparity is never far away. It lies with the decisions we all make in our everyday work regardless of whether you are the Minister or a frontline worker. It’s a choice we can make to support, participate and create an inclusive environment for not only people from NESB with disability but for all people. I hope you make that choice today.
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