NING CREDITS

Welcome to the CDAH Peers Podcast. This is a space for peers to chat about what matters to us. You’ll meet peers from Community Disability Alliance Hunter or CDAH. Sharing lived experience with peers and allies. This series is all about human rights. Some of these topics are challenging. So we will make sure there is a clear warning for each episode. So you can make a decision that’s right for you. So come and join the conversation because there’s nothing about us without us.

INTRODUCTION

Hello I’m Cath Mahony and welcome to our very first episode talking about human rights. Each episode

I’ll be introducing you to peers who will be talking to other peers who’ll share their experiences of what human rights means to them. Human rights are rights inherent to all human beings, but are they something you think much about? Do you even know what your rights are as a person living in this complex world?

Maybe you feel that we need to fight for our rights to be upheld so that your choices can be respected. Over this series, we’re going to get into all of this and more. I myself am very passionate about the issue and because of my passion, I’m leading a discussion with CDAH peers here in Newcastle, Australia. But I wanted to share what we’re learning from the experience with you.

CDAH peer Az Cosgrove was interested in finding out where my passion for human rights comes from. For this very first episode, Az sat down with me to find

INTERVIEW

AZ: So Cath, let’s start big. Why are you passionate about human rights?

CATH: That is a big question Az. I think I grew up with a bit of a sense from my family and my education that justice was important and that human rights were connected with justice. And then, as I got older and I became aware of sort of the rights and the needs of people with disability, and actually before that other marginalised groups, I just became more and more passionate about the difference that knowing our human rights and having them upheld makes to individuals and I guess the society.

AZ: So where would you say that your passion for human rights started?

CATH: Do you know Az I think, I think I wouldn’t have used the word human rights for a long time, but I was probably aware of the importance of talking about experience. My parents were, always said yes, I was asked to do nothing huge but a few media interviews about my experience as a person with disability. And I certainly had a sense that if I could talk about my experience that that was a good thing to do. And probably only as an adult when I look back I realised that in some way that was about promoting human rights, promoting inclusion of people with disability. And then I…

I did some other work for a welfare agency, so I became aware of the challenges of people in out of home care and, you know, young people experiencing disadvantage, all sorts of different areas. And then I kind of went, well, as a person with a disability, I’m also part of a marginalised group within our society. And I started to become more aware of the importance of human rights, I guess, in my own life and in the lives of other people I came…I met with disability.

AZ: Has your view of human rights sort of changed sort of particularly as you began interacting with more people with disabilities?

CATH: Yeah, so certainly in my kind of, I don’t know, early 20s, I was really aware of the rights that people who were blind and have low vision often, you know, we were disadvantaged and discriminated against. I should probably say that I my lived experience of disability as a as a person who is blind. So I was aware of the work that the blindness community was doing around sort of lobbying for things like equal access to things like, you know, automatic like ATMs and EFTPOS terminals and that sort of thing. But then I met the mother of a person with disability and became really close to her and through her met other people with different disability. And then it kind of blew me away that actually there are a whole lot of needs that people with disability have that aren’t being met. And some of them are different and some of them were the same as the ones that I was aware of as a person who was blind. And then again, I probably wouldn’t have used the word human rights, but something was clicking, something was gelling within me that….hang on a sec, there’s like a collective experience happening here as well as my own personal experience.

AZ: So tell me a bit more about what it was like for you interacting with more people with disabilities. Was that challenging, empowering? Tell me a bit about that.

CATH: It certainly was, it was awareness raising.

It was a little challenging in that I became aware of my own lack of experience in communicating with and understanding the needs and the interests and the lived experience of people with different disability. So I hadn’t met people before who couldn’t use words to communicate. I hadn’t met people really who were D/deaf. I hadn’t even had a really good sense of the access that people with physical disability or the lack of access that people with physical disability experience and therefore the exclusion. And then I also spent time with some people with intellectual disability. And again, I had been unaware of the impact of accessing information differently, needing some support to make some was a really different experience and it really blew me away and made me think about a lot of my assumptions.

AZ: So on that, what do you think is some of the big assumptions that you had to overcome and think other people in the community need to overcome?

CATH: I think my assumptions were that everybody had the same issues and the same experiences as I did and I assumed that I knew therefore what people needed and what, I don’t know, what a difference I might be able to make but it was a bit of a sense that well everyone had the same issues as I had as a person who was blind and, you know, I hadn’t thought as much about people who might, we might need to think about, you know, the location that we have a meal, for example, so that there was food that was available for people to eat who had difficulty swallowing or difficulties, might need support, you know, to have their meal. So I kind of thought, I was probably a little bit arrogant Az probably thought I knew it all. And then I met people whose worlds and lives were so different from mine.

And I was always, I think my, I think the phrase that you would have heard me say a lot was, wow, I’ve never thought about that. That was probably, so assumptions that I knew more than I, more than I did about this whole disability thing.

AZ: And sort of from all those different life experiences, what have you learnt are some like small things that you or other people can put in place in their lives?

CATH: So I’ve learnt that human rights is a concept firstly, and then the more I’ve tried to understand it, the more I’ve realised it’s a big complicated thing. I’ve been sort of speaking to someone about it recently and we’ve been saying it’s like trying to eat an elephant, trying to think about human rights and how we might make it make sense to peers with disability. It’s huge. It can be overwhelming. But what I try and come back to is what can I do on a daily basis? I can’t change the system. I can’t challenge, you know, people’s rights to housing, people’s rights to health, people’s rights to education, people’s rights to freedom, people’s rights to information. Like, I cannot.

I need to move from that sense of overwhelm to the small things that I might be able to do to make change happen . So , to put you on the spot, What are some of the small things you could do to make change? I think firstly, it’s about doing some learning, just not in a huge way. You don’t have to get a uni degree, but just like have a chat with a person about human-rights. What does it mean to you? There’s lots of documents you can read on it. And then, so there’s a bit of education that you can do.

And then I’ve been thinking, it’s about the little things that happen on a daily basis in your life. And you kind of, as a person with disability, you walk away from a situation and you think that wasn’t right. Something happened there and it wasn’t okay. So for me at the moment it’s like, okay, what did just happen? Or maybe that’s actually about a human right. Maybe that taxi driver asking me who I live with and like if I live with anybody and you know, that’s a breach of my right to privacy. And so that’s a small thing, but I have a human right to privacy.

And so I have the right to say, actually, I don’t need to tell you that. I don’t need to give you that information. It’s also potentially a breach of my safety, because a taxi driver asking you where you live is a little bit creepy. Why does that driver, it’s usually a man, but I don’t want to be sexist about that, but why does he want to know that? So it’s kind of trusting myself to actually say, I don’t have to tell you that.

So I would have had a vague sense of like, I’m not comfortable. Now I kind of say, actually that’s about a right that I have. So I reckon what we can all do as people with disability, I think, is just notice. Just when something happens and it feels a bit wrong, just like what just happened there? And is it about a human right that’s not being upheld for me?

AZ: You’re pretty involved with Community, Disability Alliance Hunter or CDAH. Do you see those sort of changes getting put in place in the work you’re doing at CDAH?

CATH: Absolutely. Sometimes it can feel a bit slow, but yes, so CDAH got going.

I was kind of privileged to be part of CDAH’s being established and it was absolutely always about doing what we can to uphold the rights of people with disability. It’s why we exist. It’s kind of at our very core. And you know, we talk a lot about the peer movement.

So what happens when peers with disability all get together it might be within an organisation like CDAH and might be across you know, the state, the country. So I feel like we are joining our voices to what’s been quite an incredible movement with a lot of history. So there have been people before us and there will be people after us whose life work has been about upholding and working for the human rights of people with disability. So we often use that. We often say nothing about us without us and it’s like a, it’s a…

Well, it’s more than a slogan, it’s kind of a call to action, I guess, for people with disability. And so, yeah, we’re part of this bigger movement. We kind of stand on the shoulders of the people who have come before us when it comes to working to make the world better for people with disability. And at the heart of how we do that is knowing and working for our human rights to be upheld.

AZ: Can you tell me a bit more about why you think the peer movement specifically can support that change with human rights?

CATH: The peer movement can support the change because nobody knows our own life experience better than another person who’s living it. And if not identically, you know, similar, it’s a similar lived experience. And so peers with disability, like when we come together and when we say, yes, that’s an action that we need to take, yes, we need to do something about that unacceptable thing, like there’s a collective energy.

There’s a coming together of ideas and approaches. And I don’t know, there’s a determination. There’s a kind of an, the I get you factor. Like I share that this is really unfair, unreasonable, unjust, and I’m gonna sort of work on this with you. But Az like that all sounds really serious. Actually part of being a peer movement is about having fun and having some jokes and feeling a sense of belonging and not being judged. That’s what people say they love about being part of the peer movement.

So I don’t, it all seems a bit heavy and I don’t want to say that all we do is, is, you know, get stuck in this big stuff, but there is something around coming together and just, you know, like we can always do more together than we can as individuals.

AZ: Awesome. Power in numbers.

CATH: Power in numbers, right on.

AZ: All right, great. Is there anything else you wanted to talk about or add?

CATH: Just to say probably, you know, I learn as much as from every peer that I come in contact with and also allies. We have fabulous allies, people who don’t have disability, who are really committed to working for our human rights with us.

We need each other, we learn from each other. And so, yeah, I’m not in any way the expert on this stuff. In fact, I’m learning more and more all the time.

INTERVIEW ENDS

OUTRO

CATH: That was Az Cosgrove speaking to me Cath Mahony about my passion for human rights. I hope you join me next time on the CDAH Peers Podcast when Ashe speaks to Naomi about human rights and inclusion.

CLOSING CREDITS

Thank you for joining us on the CDAH Peers Podcast. This podcast has been made by peers at the Community Disability Alliance Hunter. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation, you can follow us and subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. We aspire to best practice and that’s why this podcast is made in many accessible formats. If you would like to learn more about this podcast and CDAH, head to cdah .org .au forward slash podcast.

Technical production by Tim.