The Govt budget targets the POOR, the sick, disabled and the marginalised!

My speech at Melb Bust the Budget Rally in May on how people with disability are going to be impacted by this government's budget.

Ok so today I am going to talk to you about how this budget and this government is effecting people with disability.

This is a collaborative speech worked on by a number of disability activist and I am just their mouthpiece with a good shirt really.

So I’m going to start off with the good news because it is the only thing which doesn’t seek to disadvantage people with disability further then we already are- the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and that, is still going ahead but it has been delayed and this will obviously hurt a lot of people with disabilities and their carers.

This budget essentially, targets the POOR, the sick, disabled and the marginalized. It further reintranches the disadvantages we are already subject to, when right now almost 50% of people with disability live near or below the poverty line.

There will be a decrease in the DSP over time. And interestingly, and I will allow you to take a guess at why, there will soon no longer be a disability discrimination commissioner.

Programs that promote the human rights of people with disabilities are being de-funded.

There will be cuts to legal services and violence services, which is particularly worrying because we know that women with disabilities are more likely to experience forms of violence then non-disabled women.

There are changes to health care, which will hit the people with disability particularly hard, with an increase in medicines and a $7 GP fee, as well as cuts public health spending of around 80 billion and Public Hospital funding is also being slashed.  

An estimated 28,000 people who were granted the DSP between 2008-2011, are under 35 who have been assessed as being able to work more than 8 hours a week will have to take part in compulsory work programs, and will face sanctions if they do not comply.

People with disability will be subject to "independent" assessments by doctors and as we know from the UK, it can, and will result in deaths for those with little or no to capacity to work. These doctors are not specialists in a number of disabilities and they also are being hired by Centerlink to save the government money.

The ABC’S Ramp up, a disability website, which provides a national platform for disability issues is no longer going to be funded, meaning that all the issues which will harm and further disadvantage people with disability will no longer have a voice.

There is no additional help with employment and with the changes already made to the DSP eligibility, there are a lot of people with disability on Newstart. so the new rules relating to Newstart, having to wait six months fif your under  30...will also apply to all those people who are sick/disabled and in need of health care and medicines which they now have absolutely NO INCOME to afford.

There will be an increase in household bills for people on pensions as we are no longer eligible for discounts and the few tax deductions which we could receive have been abolished.

And there is no getting away from all of this cos if you are receiving the DSP, and want to go overseas, you will have only four weeks to do that in before you get cut off and you will have to wait another 12 months before you can travel again. I guess they are expecting us to be too poor to be able to travel anywhere, ever.

So basically its fucked.  But we can march, we can raise our voices and we can try and do 10 things a day which would make Abbott very, very, uncomfortable, as a queer I aim to do that each and every day to the very fucking best of my ability!

(For more info see http://www.disabilitydirectory.net.au/articles/budget-lowdown/)

Angry feet

"My feet could hold up a plane’’, I tell her as she squashes my toes as hard as she can with her fingers, pressing down with all her substantial weight on top of my boots. 

She wants me to take them off, to investigate them for drugs. She has to she says, its procedure.  Ive never been one to follow procedure and nether have my feet. 

She’s bent down in front of me and shes breathing a little fast and hard.

I can’t tell if it’s from the force of pushing down on my toes or if she has a secerate foot fetish, this would be the job for it right, getting to watch people take on and off their shoes all day. I had a lover one who liked to get spegitti sucked through her toes, does she? or maybe she’s a lesbian and she knows these boots scream sex or the chair really does do it for her…

She looks up at me, like I annoy her more than excite her, we are treading that fine-line of annoyance turned into passion

that would work for us if we were lovers.

She thinks she holds the power here but I know my feet do. 

She says it again, ‘’you going to have to take your boots off, we 

need to drug test them, we cant give you special treatment you know’’. 

I say: ‘’well if you want them off you’re going to have to help me and help me get them back on, that could take a while cos when my feet get emotional they get uncooperative and you’re making them upset touching them like that’’ I almost add a honey at the end but that would be pushing it. 

She looks at me like either I must have taken all the drugs she was thinking are hidden in my boots smuggled from hills of Nimbin or that im a bit special in the head. I am wearing my new favourite shirt, which I now think may have been a bad idea and part of what set her off. 

It says im so hornet with a cartoon hornet on it, and my hair is dyed newly bright red and dishevelled from having to get up far too early and skip my morning essential coffee to struggle to get my cranky feet into these boots. She stands up and calls a guy over to come and swab boots, and looks like she’s come to the conclusion that either I am high or crazy or both but defently capable of having feet which could hold up a plane. 

She says; ‘’you can go, but I hope your mother knows what you did to your hair’’ I want to say honey, my mother did my hair but that might make her think I come from a family eccentric werdos  and we would end up locked in the foot battle again.

Unrequited love poem from my wheelchair to a shopping trolley

So I’m not alone on the stage 

I’m here with 

pervis 

my wheelchair 

and he’s a bit wrong 

and a little bit dirty really

this is an

Unrequited love poem from him to a shopping trolley

There were sparks between us

(literally)

I ran into her

as i rounded the corner

to fast

and we collided

my metal grinded against her metal

and well I don’t know weather it was consensual

It all happened in a flash

like I was being driven

by some unknown hands

propelled

forward 

She, she was empty

The kind of empty.

Only shopping can fill.

Damn she looked good 

carrying a load

She was shining under the fluro lights

Pushed up agaist the baked-beans

I wanted to say you make can-goods 

Look so good babe

You 

you 

make my wheels wobbly 

and my bearings loose

I wanna pop a trier for u 

let my air out 

Ever so slowly

You

you immobilise me 

I wanna liberate u from this monotony 

Take u on a joy ride 

Use you in ways u weren't intended

I want to have u 

to go down 

A hill  

with me 

I wanna stop servicing others 

and service each other 

I wanna slide a coin into ur slot 

I wanna rub tires with you 

Grind rims with u

touch ur small frount wheels to mine 

Oh who am I kidding I wanna 

Ram u so hard that we will both carry the marks on our frames forever  

But Coles is no place for such rimanctic gestures 

And I am being driven my a dyke with a burning desire for

Chocolate milk

As I get wheeled away from u 

I can only hope some picks u up

Fills u up

And drives u the way u deserve to be driven 

Feminism & disability panel

Podcast of CHERCHEZ LA FEMME-Feminism-and-Disability panel with me and Jess, Karen & Shakria May 2014 Link

Disability & Sex

My article on Disability-and-Sex for the Feminist Observer

Image of my wrist tattoo 

Dis-lex-see-a

Dis-lex-ea

Dyslex-see-a

Dyslexcia

Words, have always been trickstas on the page. Letters moving under my gaze could be saying something far diffentent to my intended meaning. There is a fog, a frog, between me and them, a haze, a shifting, these letters everyone else seems to write so confidently into words, well they could be doing anything down there under my fingers/flinders tapping them out, hoping they’ll stay/say what I want them do/to.

How do I describe it to you so you

can see how shifty,

how unstable lan-u-age really is. Made up images in people’s minds form into something they can see joining together in their minds eye. Up there. In here.

Letters for me, dift in for a second as I try to hold on to them, like smoke drifting through my fingers they are gone. Ive lost count of how many times ive ask my love ones, how do you spell…? And hoped I could hold on to the word long enough to get it down, see it forming/foaming knowing its right because they know, they just know how to make these words appear and convay what they want them to. Like that. *snap* magic.

Me, I am filled with doubt. There is no pinning words/worlds down.

The 1^st and last letters often are ‘right’ but eveything in the middle of the word gets jumbled and I look for context to find the hidden meaning eveyone else seems to be able to see so easy, so clearly.

And there in lies homour and the horror this, another disability, another thing allowing me to see the world from a different angle/angel.

My brain is as delightly bent as my body and it screws with meaninng and comes up with the most absurd, absorb, things.

I used to feel fooish, feel like they were right, those specilist and teaches at my special school who were always so quick to asmume I was stupid, below agerave in-tell-e-gent-ce.

I used to try and choose the simpleist/sample words to use when I was writing so I didn’t have to let anyone see that I cant pin these these works/worlds/words down.

but that just made them asuume I didn’t have an advanced verbal vo-cab-uarry-that I couldn’t grabs/gasp lan-u-age with my tounge, when speaking has for me never been a problem, its knowing when it shut up. Maybe its my way of over-com-pen-sat-ing, maybe it reempowers me.

I talk-too much and in a rush, with big beatiful words, the bigger the better, with no hesitenty no doubt,

sure that when im speaking at least I can prove my inteligence.

I have been confrounted by my dislexcia recently and the frustration it can bring

as I have started dating a woman who is non-verbal, she cant talk, at all. She has dispraca- a dyslexia of the tounge. She can think the words but she cant make her tounge form them. so she uses her own unique form of sign lanuage to spell out words, slowly and always correctly, her mastory over spelling her tool to show others her intelegence. It is frustraging to have my mind hold us back from talking about ideas with a speed and an intencey I have up until now taken for granted.

Somehow, however, we are muddling through

after all there are always other more experimental ways to communicate..if you really put your mind to it.

Writing used to terrify me. I wasn’t dignosed with dyslexcia till I was 23. I didn’t take the dignosees well. I didn’t want something esle in my brain to be broken, something unknowable inside there, limiting me-keeping my dreams of ever getting stats and being a psycholgist out of my reach.

The report said ‘’further/farther teasting is suggested as there may be other learning disabilities’’. I was terrifyed that this confermed I was stupid, that the high grades I’d worked so hard for at uni and the top marks I managed to get at the equliennt of the hsc where somehow a fluke and I really was dumb.

It has taken until im 30 to come out as dyslexic and say ‘I don’t know how to spell’ and I attribute this accpance to my social media addiction and my group of friends/feends who find my querky spelling funny and can read beween the letters and puzzle out my intended meaning.

Words, the even the littlest of them are out of my control, cripitic and troubling. Unstabe, shifting, as though always on the run, getting away from me. Words like little beasts/breasts stalking about the page refusing to do what I want, to be tamed. Launage you are a effermeral misery/mystery to me.