Scott Avery – PhD Candidate, Health Services Management
Some of the issues that face people with disability are quite complex. It affects their education, it affects their transport, it affects their health. It’s not just about disability services. And when you have quite complex issues that can’t be dealt with with just sound bites, you really need robust policy and research to do that. I think a lot of people hold assumptions about what people with disability can and can’t do, and we would like this research to debunk a lot of those myths. What we’re doing now is we are actually starting to do that. We actually can see that Aboriginal people with disability can play a vital contribution to Australian society. They kind of need to be given a chance, and I think this research, it’s not just tackling the systemic barriers, but a lot of the attitudes that people might hold, both for Aboriginal people and people with disability.
Pairing up with our supervisor Joanne Travaglia, she’s just outstanding. She provides an intellectual framing to what we’re seeing on the ground. Because what we actually need, we actually need to have research interface with community, and community interfacing with policy. So policy - these are the people in government who can actually influence change and break down some of the system limitations that are holding people back.
So we need community, research and policy to work in harmony. And I think that’s why UTS, the Faculty of Health, is a good pairing for us. Health is not just about how many doctors and hospitals you have, it’s a right to health, and some of the attitudinal barriers that people face are as limiting as not being able to go to the doctor in the first place. So that’s what research is showing. And having that rigor behind it just makes it more palatable for policy people to go “Yeah, there has been a process through it”. This is not hearsay or anecdote or a case study, this is a robust process which is identifying the main themes and issues about what is important and what needs to be done.
