It is comforting to see the recent influx of books by Autistic people and the more complex fictional portrayals of Autistic people in programmes such as Everything’s Gonna Be Okay and As We See It. Hopefully, this indicates an increased understanding and acceptance of the community. The next step would be to let ordinary Autistic people of all genders, cultures, ages and speech abilities have a say in the institutions that so often attempt to silence us.

‘You cost too much. You're not welcome here.’ That's the message that many migrants and families receive when we try to settle in Aotearoa/New Zealand or Australia. If you have a disability, health condition, high BMI (in New Zealand), or other potential health needs, immigration rules in both country will likely judge you not as a contributing human being who should be treated with dignity, but as an economic burden.

But why should disabled people be forced to accept being planned for as an afterthought in a society designed for able-bodiedm neurotypical Australians, while the opposite is not just possible, but would dramatically improve the quality of life for everyone? Why does the onus fall upon disabled people to prove, to the satisfaction of our ableist society, the accommodations that we need are ‘reasonable’, and why does it not fall upon the businesses and governments with vastly greater resources to prove that they’re not?

What it means is that this pandemic, and the near universal inability to properly contain and manage its spread, are a function of the particular material form that disability takes under capitalism. We must understand disability, itself a category historically located within capitalism before we can understand the pandemic. To avert another such global catastrophe in the future, we must confront the structures within which this most recent catastrophe is comprised.

Modelling has shown that over 25,000 Australian citizens will most likely die from COVID and COVID-related illnesses if the government proceeds with opening the country once 80 per cent of the Australian population has been vaccinated. It might therefore sound crazy for a group of people most statistically likely to die due to their ‘underlying health conditions’ to refuse a free, potentially life-saving, and scientifically well-grounded medication promising to protect them from the worst of its risks.

A sitting disability is a severe and legitimate physical disability, comparable to a mobility impairment. It is time for anti-discrimination principles to be applied to us, rather than sarcasm, humour or ill-informed advice, so that we may enjoy full participation and inclusion in society.

We, members of the Disability Justice Network of Australia, want to express our anger, sorrow, and solidarity with the Palestinian people. As both Indigenous and non-Indigenous disabled people living in so-called Australia, we recognise and understand the violent and disabling nature of settler-colonialism, an ongoing structure that relies on the othering, dehumanisation, and disposal of our bodies and lives.

This week it’s exactly eighty years since my great-grandmother, Emilie Rau, was murdered in a gas chamber built into the cellar of an asylum in Hadamar, a small town close to Frankfurt. She was forty-nine and had four children, of which my grandmother was the eldest.

Stephen Hsu’s removal from the position of research VP at Michigan State University is not only a step forward in the context of Black Lives Matter. It can also be seen as a step toward a deeper understanding and valuing of people with Down syndrome and intellectual disability.

‘The worst thing about making a will’, my partner said to me, ‘is that you never get to find out if it worked out the way you wanted it to.’ And we laughed, genuinely laughed because – as disabled people – we both know that dying as a result of this pandemic would be the […]

This World Hearing Day, as well as thinking about the ten thousand people whose first language is Auslan, or the half a million people who will be buying hearing aids this year, I’ll also be thinking of those thousands of Australians around my age who are unable to afford to get help. The Hearing Awareness Week slogan in 2020 is ‘Don’t let hearing loss limit you’. I only wonder if the Government is listening at all.

I am writing to you because I know in my bones there will come a moment when I will feel vulnerable again. In that moment, I want someone to reassure me that we all forget useful things like phone chargers sometimes, and to tell me, only partly joking, that one hasn't truly been exploring till they've stood alone at night in an unfamiliar, deserted town path with no back-up plan.

Where self-care began as the radical notion of self-love, it has since been reappropriated to function as a marketing tool, advertising individualistic acts of respite from the pressures of late capitalism.

We must not fail to acknowledge how the demands of the neoliberal university fall disproportionately on disabled academics and students and how this perpetuates deep inequalities, of which ableism is just one expression.

I worry that Australian society is not ready or willing to look deep within itself and begin to reconcile why disabled bodies are locked away. Why, for so many, the torture, beatings and rape of disabled people are acceptable. How, beyond our own ideas of ‘fairness’ and ‘dignity,’ the humanity of so many disabled people in this country can still be denied.

When access to public transport is stymied, so too is access to public life. Something as basic as getting from one destination to another becomes unpredictable and stressful. Since isolation and depression already disproportionately affect disabled and chronically ill people, and one in ten suicides are linked to chronic illness, access issues need to stir up more than a passionless afterthought.