Ms Claire Kenny:

First, I echo everything that Fiona has said. Second, yes, Senator Flynn, we are intersectional human beings. We are sisters, brothers, daughters, mothers and fathers. We have work life and all the daily stresses and rhythms of life, the same as our non-disabled peers. Accessibility is often thought about as wheelchair accessibility and physical environment impacting those who are wheelchair users, for example. However, it is much broader than that. The lack of accessible communication of information impacts members of the disability community, such as deaf people, people hard of hearing and people with impairments like that. Accessibility impacts on being spontaneous as a disabled person. There is a huge rural-urban divide in terms of accessible transport, services and broadband. There is a complete lack of joined-up thinking in how systems are developed in terms of accessibility, on the whole. The national strategy for disabled people is organised by the national Housing Agency but each local authority has a HDSG and they feed back information to the national strategy. There are also barriers and a lack of joined-up thinking in that a disabled person cannot move into a house if there are not supports available at the same time, such as PAs, assistive technology and devices like that. I hope that covers the Senator's question.