I meet Jackie via Teams for an individual interview. She is with her support worker and close friend, Belle, who helps her with activities of daily living and communication. They both live in WA. Jackie prefers to prepare her responses ahead of time and sends through additional documents responding to the interview prompts. I listen to Jackie, as well as Belle, who at times elaborates on what Jackie says, adding her own understandings in places. This is possible because Jackie and Belle have been friends for decades and know each other very well. Taken together, written information, two workshops and the interview allow her to tell me the story of her life. As she requires assistance to take photos, she has instead chosen personal photos from her family album, some from the internet, and other media, including a poem and a YouTube video. Jackie lives alone in her own home, with a ‘naughty puppy dog’. She works part-time in a clerical role near the city and has support workers come to her home during the weeks, they help her to live her best life. Jackie has Cerebral Palsy, which impacts her speech and movement. She takes time to communicate through speech; it appears to require great patience and intention on her part. Everything she does say is purposeful and oftentimes, a deep remark about operations of power (and disempowerment). Jackie experienced family and domestic violence perpetrated by her son’s father. There relationship went for around eight months before Jackie ended it. While this is part of her story, as well as being a mother, it does not feature heavily. Rather, throughout our time together, Jackie highlights personal life experiences as they relate to wider issues of ableism and sexism, in the workplace, personal relationships, and society at large. Her story centres on the experience of being a single, working mother with disability. Jackie always felt people would judge her on how well she brought up her child. She had to work hard to meet and exceed their expectations, despite living under systems that did not work for her and her son. One such system is Centrelink, the federal agency tasked with providing welfare payments. As Jackie notes in one of our workshops, it is a system designed to keep people with disability in poverty. While she has always worked, this is disincentivised by the Disability Support Pension (DSP) which will reduce the payment amount if a person earns above $204 per fortnight, with the rate of reduction calculated at 50 cents for each dollar earnt over $212 dollars (Services Australia, 2024). At the time of writing this, DSP recipients took home a maximum of $1 144 per fortnight, or 62% of the Australian minimum wage (Fair Work Ombudsmen, 2024).
Unfortunately, the experience of employment for Jackie did not prove much fairer than the welfare system. Since the early 2000s, Jackie had been working at a legal firm in an administrative role. She was employed through an agency which assists Centrelink recipients to find work. She reports that despite having greater productivity than her colleagues at the time, she was asked by the employment agency to enter into an agreement where she worked for a lesser rate than her co-workers. This was allowed due to the (incongruously named) supported wage system, which allowed people with disability to be paid at a rate below minimum wage (ref). ‘My weekly pay began at $56. It did go up over the period that I worked [there]. However, I was never paid at the same rate as [my co-worker].’ After Jackie had resigned she was informed by the employment agency that she had been underpaid by the employer, however, there was no recourse to reimbursement for the wages owed to Jackie. ‘…after I resigned [the manager at the employment agency stated to me that “[the legal firm] should have given me a Level 2 position but, [the employment agency] had no say over this.” This means [they] are aware that their disabled clients are being under-paid by their employers.’ In additional to wages theft, Jackie also experienced disability discrimination and workplace sexual harassment from a co-worker during her time at the law firm. This included sexual advances from a male colleague who Jackie noted also experienced disability. While Jackie had reported this to the employment agency, they did not provide any option to move roles. She left the agency and was subsequently bounced between others which were less than helpful, she reports.
Accessibility is key issue for Jackie, and she highlights this using a picture of an ‘accessible’ toilet, the path to which is obstructed by boxes and equipment. She notes a friend had sent her the photo. You can barely see the sign. As Jackie notes with the assistance of Belle, there is a lack of empathy which could assist people to consider the needs of people with disability. Jackie and Belle note: ‘Because they've not got that problem, so they don't see it, they don't understand it. And a lot of people, if they don't understand it, then it doesn't affect them, doesn't affect their world. And that's why it's easy for them to push those boxes up there because to them, they would go to another toilet or use the other one, you know what I mean? They're not needing to use the one with the wheelchair access so it's not affecting them.’ Belle offers her own reflection of assisting Jackie’s friend while at a disability conference. She notes there is a lack of awareness of the needs of people with disability. Even access to a necessity like going to the toilet is made difficult. ‘…she's blind and I had to assist her to the toilet. And that was really confronting for me to see how difficult it was to be able to manoeuvre your way through the crowd to get to the toilet, to open doors. It was just really confronting because I never really had to think about it before.’ All this speaks to Jackie’s experiences of ableism in work and in society generally. Jackie adds ‘yes, but it’s so hard it is for us in everyday life [to] fight the barriers’. It is through her understanding of the challenges brought by the design of our environments, social and otherwise, that Jackie comes to understand the oppression of other groups in society. She notes the rate of Aboriginal incarceration and deaths in custody. She notes of ableism, ‘It’s like that. We don’t admit that we are racist, but we are. There’s still inequality.’ Current police and justice responses to violence and abuse against women with disability currently bare out this inequality. Jackie notes that police and court systems do not allow the statements of women with disability as ‘credible evidence’. ‘… the police, healthcare workers and social workers need to be more proactive in seeking out and helping vulnerable women and women with disabilities.’ This echoes the sentiments of other participants, each of whom in their own unique ways, and some in very similar ways have experienced discrediting, disbelief, and denial in the eyes of the law. Jackie sees the way systems discourage and stifle the experience of difference. She notes this of the education system, which did not work firstly for her and then for her son. She shows me a poem which was displayed in her 1970s school classroom. Her mum loved it and bought a copy of the poem. To the average reader, Jackie notes, it may seem sweet but to her it highlights how popular culture sets low expectations for children for with disability. In particular, she highlights the stanzas: Her progress may seem very slow Accomplishments she may not show And she will require extra care From the folks she meets way down there She may not run or laugh or play Her thoughts may seem quite far away In many ways, she won’t adapt And she will be known as handicapped
For Jackie, ableism colours the fabric of daily life. Consistently low expectations, patronising attitudes, failures to recognise the needs of people with disability, and make systems which acknowledge and celebrate difference go to the core of how ableism continues to pervade the lives of women with disability. In the face of this, Jackie has continued to provide for her son, maintain meaningful employment, and enjoys social connections with the odd glass of wine. She has a wicked sense of humour, despite, or perhaps due, to all the challenges she has met. Jackie’s physical voice can be harder to hear at times. A short while into our first meeting, I start to get a sense of how she communicates, the structure of words, and Belle jumps in to bridge understanding where necessary. All it takes to understand Jackie is a willingness and patience on my part. It costs me nothing. But I find myself wondering, how many listeners – throughout a lifetime – did not make the effort.
Fair Work Ombudsmen. (2024). Minimum Wage. https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages Services Australia. (2024). Income test. https://www.servicesaustralia.gov.au/income-test-for-disability-support-payment?context=22276
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