The elimination of disability discrimination in Australia
Graeme Innes AM Deputy Disability Discrimination Commissioner Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Physical Disability Council of Australia 20 November 2000
Graeme Innes AM Deputy Disability Discrimination Commissioner Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Physical Disability Council of Australia 20 November 2000
I also want to thank the conference organisers for the opportunity to speak today. conferences such as this are great opportunities to discuss some of the pressing human rights issues in Australia. I'm particularly pleased to be talking about queer rights in the workplace, as fair employment conditions are some of the most fundamental of all human rights. Trade unions have a long history of fighting for justice in the workplace, and I encourage the unions here today to continue that fight for gay, lesbian, transsexual and intersex workers.
Keynote presentation delivered at the 8th National Conference of the Association for the Welfare of Child Health (AWCH) - "Children on the margin: addressing the health care needs of marginalised children and young people", 11 October 2001, Dr Sev Ozdowski
It is now 12 months since the introduction of WorkChoices radically restructured Australia’s industrial relations system. Today, I propose to reflect on the implications of WorkChoices for the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) and to outline reforms HREOC believes are necessary to safeguard fairness and equality in the workplace.
I would like to begin by thanking the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) for inviting me to address you today, and thank Margaret Boylan (Regional Director, APS Commission, SA/NT) for her warm welcome.
This page provides access to over 200 speeches and papers on disability issues from members (current and past) and senior staff of the Australian Human Rights Commission. All major speeches since 2000 are included, as well as a selection of earlier speeches and papers as far back as 1989.
To set the scene for my presentation this afternoon, I want to share two autobiographical fragments with you, both of them having to do with my experience at university.
I always enjoy receiving an invitation from Victoria to talk about Action Plans because I know that Victoria is a leader in the country in terms of organisational commitment to developing Action Plans.
I was around as head of the then Disability Advisory Council of Australia back in the late 80s and early 90s when ACROD and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission worked together on a discussion paper and consultation process to identify and pursue areas of increased need for human rights protection for people with disabilities.
There is substantial attention in the international community being directed at present to the human rights of people with disabilities. An international convention on human rights and disability is being actively considered through the United Nations system. I would have been attending a regional meeting in Beijing in April this year as part of this process but this was cancelled because of the SARS outbreak.
Almost every day there seems to be some new development in information and communications technology. Technologies which did not exist a few years ago are now worth many billions of dollars each year in economic activity.
Paper delivered by Elizabeth Hastings Disability Discrimination Commissioner 1993-97 at the Creating Accessible Communities Conference Fremantle, 12 November 1996
In the contemporary world, and particularly amongst developed economies, many of us believed that the culture of civil liberties, freedoms and non-discrimination are reasonably well established and these precepts have clear links to innovation, creativity and the broader concepts of economic productivity and a well functioning civil society. Indeed, I believe that many of us had come to accept and expect this to be the situation, and that conferences like the one we attend here today could be built on this very premise.
This paper deals with two aspects of the bill: the preventative detention orders and the new sedition offence. It does not touch on the problematic control orders.
When I was invited to give this address, my first thought was to talk about unlawful discrimination in the context of higher education and, in particular, disability discrimination.
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