Dr. Amy Hassett:

From a psychology perspective, a huge problem we have had for a long time is that the care and support of disabled people have been outsourced to charity and treated as a charitable endeavour. We can trace our history back to hundreds of years of allowing, with the greatest of respect, the church to take care of our undesirables, as people are perceived to be. That has meant the State has chronically underfunded and under-resourced its support of disabled people and has essentially shipped the problem off to charities. Challenging the charity model of disability - the idea that we are people who are benevolently looked after - is something we are contending with day by day, particularly as we currently live in a situation where a lot of services that should be provided by the State are still provided by charitable organisations, which is not appropriate. Those services should be organised and supported by the State. The corollary is that we also have a situation where we are still struggling to embed a human rights model of disability into our perception of how we take care of, support and facilitate the involvement of disabled people.

On the outlook, we have a new disability strategy, which includes much more extensive engagement structures with disabled people. Now is the time we are looking to see how disabled people will be supported and resourced to engage with those structures. It is easy to put structures in place. It is much more difficult to put in place the systems and supports needed to help disabled people to fully participate in those systems. We hope to be involved in those structures as much we can. We are not funded at all. We are not supported by any entity. We do this on the back of our members' time and energy. I am hopeful that situation will change because we need to get disabled people into those stakeholder structures to influence policy, but they need to be supported to do so. I am cautiously optimistic that those structures are in place and I am hopeful, but vigilant, that the supports will be put in place to facilitate it.