Andrew Richards June 15, 2014 at 4:45 pm

Dan, whoever wrote the following ” because race is the thoughtless person’s proxy for socioeconomic status, casual racism goes unchecked, and stereotypes about “22 inch rims” and “low profile tires” seem appropriate. ” is utterly blinded by able-bodied privilege. The worst type of bigotry, marginalisation and disadvantage in this community lies with the disabled.

Let’s starts with employment rates:

– In 2009, 54.3% of people with a disability participated in the labour force compared to 83% of people without a disability.

– Australia ranks 21out of 29 OECD countries for labour force participation of people with disability[1].

– Graduates with disability take longer to gain full-time work than other graduates[2].

– People with disability have an employment rate of 39.8%, compared to 79.4% for people without a disability[3].

– Two-thirds of people with disability earn less than $320 per week, compared with one-third of the general population[4].

– 15% of Australians of working age (15-64 years) have a disability.

[http://www.and.org.au/pages/disability-statistics.html]

Also to extrapolate out the real empolyment rate of people with a disability (multiplying 54.3% by 39.8%), the actual disabled employment rate of 21.6%; conversely the actual unemployment rate of 78.4% or almost 4 in 5.

Indigenous activists rail in horror at figures of 1 in 12 suicides amongst them and call it a blight on the nation. The official figures for the disabled as of 2010 were at 18% -or nearly 1 in 5, with 42% or over 2 in 5 having been found to have ben suicidal. [http://www.aihw.gov.au/publication-detail/?id=6442472401]

However such bigotry shouldn’t surprise anyone when, and I say this without any level of hyperbole, we are quite literally a nation of Nazis where the disabled are concerned.

As people may or may not be aware, it was the disabled who were first specifically targeted for extermination and exterminated by the Nazis. The first genocidal think tank, the Wilhelm Kaiser Institute, was formd in 1927 with the exclusive purpose of deteriming the best method of wiping out the disabled. In 1933, one of Hitler’s first acts, more than a year before the Nuremberg Laws were passed, was to pass “The Law for The Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring”, which resulted in the mandatory sterilisation and forced abortions of the disabled and women pregnant with disabled children. In that time, they also passed laws equatring disability with criminality and closed every possible “loophole” they could find with them – resulting the vast majority of the disabled in Germany being unjustly incarcerated.

Between 1935-1938, Hitler developed the propaganda later used to justify and sanitise the “Final Solution” through propaganda which thoroughly convinced the Nazis that the disabled were a worthless burden- parasites on the system – or “worthless eaters” and through the usage of 2 child murder cases where children were disabled, set the precedent for the butchering of those deemed “undesireable”.

From 1939-1942, the disabled were rounded up and used as guinea pigs in detrmining the best methods possible to wipe out a group deemed “undesirable” through the programs AKTIONT4 and AKTION14. They started with children under the age of 3 (although primary sources claim children up to the age of 5 were among them) – rounding them up in “research hospitals” and slowly torturing them to death through starvation and exposure. The “stubborn ones” got a lethal injection to the heart. They then expanded the program to include adolescents up to the age of 17.

From there they rounded up the rest of the disabled and used them as guinea pigs in determining optimal approaches to extermination. Their initial attempts involved tying 30-40 disabled people together and blowing them up with dynamite- a method soon abandoned after being deemed “too messy”. Soon the mehtod of gas chambers were developed anbd perfected and the disabled were systematically and continuously put through the gas chambers at these “research hospitals”. By the time the first cattle car ful of Jews arrived at the first death camp, more than 1 million disabled people had been either murdered or sterilised against their will.

We say “never again” to the Holocaust as a nation, yet our track record shows that we are no better than the Nazis. Up until 1992 we were still mandatorily sterilising the disabled and even now the practice largely goes on hidden. Furthermore draft legislation was put before the Western Australian Parliament in the past couple of years which would have resulted in the forced sterilisation, psychosurgery, institutionalisation and psychotherapy of minors as young as 12, without parental knowledge or consent.

A report released earlier this year stated that 20-30 disabled people were found to be behind bars because they were deemed unfit to give a plea to a crime they were accused of.

Our record on child abuse where the disabled are concerned is equally as shocking. The standard school experience for a disabled child is to be denied the services they need, while being persecued, bullied and abused by the teachers and students alike. Many disabled children, in place of love and compassion from their families, instead are forced to endure a broken childhood filled with abuse as the family attempts to “discipline the disability out of them”.

Of course that is only dealing with those disabled children who are “given permission to be” born. The disabled are the only group in society who are subjected to legalised pre-birth screenings for the specific purpose of child murder when they are detected.

Of course such attitudes are hardly surprising. When Adam Goods was sledged as “a gorilla” Australia was rightly outraged, yet the disabled equivalent of that revolting slur, namely “retard/ed” and “spaz/spasdtic” get a free pass in our society – the truth of those terms often being met with laughter.

Of course this ignores things like “the little things” like the blind being allowed on taxis when they have assistence dogs, or the wheelchair bound being allowed to board planes.

Yet all of the above, just as with the Nazis, is driven by the barbaric and revolting belief that having a disability makes you a “worthless burden” and that if we’re murdered, it’s “a kindness”, because “would you want to live if you were like that?”

Things appear to be set to only worsen. It would seem that now that assylum seekers can no longer be used as a bogeyman, we the disabled are the next in line to be targetted.

The Abbott government has made it apparent that they are determined to remove the only major avenues to justice and having a voice for the disabled in the community. Despite it being incredibly difficult to qualify for a Disability Support Pension, even when you are a genuine case (as I discovered firsthand a few years back), the governemnt has decided to demonise the disabled by claiming that those on DSP, despite having leapt through countless hoops, are being demonised as “rorters”. The Murdoch Press has even crossed over to the rhetoric of the Nazis by literally describing the disabled as “a burden” in an editorial in the Daily Telegraph, while running a front page article describing us as “slackers” [read “parasites”].

In addition at 37%, we are axing the position of federal Disability Discrimination Comissioner and Ramp Up which uniquely provides a voice for the disabled – the only Federal Disability Discrimination Commissioner to be axed. This is despite the fact that the largest number of discrimination cases received by the Human Rights Commission is 37%- almost double the 19% of all claims which are sex discrimination based and more than double the 36% of all claims which are racial discrimination based. Apparently we don’t have $1.7 Million over four years to give the most vulnerable and marginalised in our society a voice, but we do have $4 Million over 4 years to spend on ballet classes.

The current state of play means that those who are dissabled but deemed “not disabled to receive the DSP”, lose our one safeguard against the rampant anti-discrimination Nazi bigotry in this country- in a situation where for 6 month periods we will be without income, making us unable to feed or shelter ourselves, or provide ourselves with health care due to the Medicare copayment. As such, the policy ammounts to genocide against the disabled via starvation and exposure- making it akin to a repeat of AKTIONT4. Anyone who argues that such policies are nowhere near as bad as the Holocaust because the governments isn’t going about this by openly rounding up the disabled by force (as someone I spoke to from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry tried to claim) is engaging in Holocaust denial by way of engaging in methodology based semantics.

Disability has already proven to be criminalised in many cases. Hitler’s anti-disability abortion policies are the defacto state policies. Mandatory sterilisation still goes on behind closed doors and there are moves afoot by bureaucrats in some states to make it openly the official line. Those deemed “unfit to plead” to a crime face mandatory incarceration for even minor offences. Now the propaganda sets in where we’re treated like “worthless eaters” – just like under Hitler in the 1930s. What’s next – people like myself being rounded up and forcibly sterilised, along with our wives? Where to after that, cases where the government intervenes and legalises the murder of the disabled as a pretext to rounding us up and massacring us in gas chambers?

And you want to claim that racism is the biggest cause of socio economic oppression in this country? Get real!