Diversity Festival 2025

Professor Michael Salter  0:03  

Good evening, everyone. My name is Professor Michael Salter, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this incredibly important discussion tonight where we are grappling with, I think, the critical national priority of our age, and we're really lucky to be joined by some excellent speakers tonight who are really at the cutting edge of this issue. First, I'd like to acknowledge the Bidjigal people who are the traditional custodians of the lands on which we meet tonight. I would also like to pay my respects to their elders past and present, and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who are here with us. So thank you also for coming to join us for this discussion, to acknowledge in the audience, we have UNSW staff, we have students, we have alumni, and we have the broader UNSW community. This event is being held tonight as part of UNSW Sydney's Diversity Festival, and each year UNSW hosts a flagship event as part of the festival. The Diversity Festival is now in its seventh year. It is UNSW's Equity, Diversity and Inclusion flagship event, bringing together students, staff and the wider community to uplift voices from diverse backgrounds and ignite conversations for a more inclusive society.

And one of the forces that really pushes people to the margins and outside of our society is, of course, gender based violence. I first came to UNSW 20 years ago, where I worked in public health and the prevention of blood borne viruses. And graduated from UNSW with a PhD in public health in 2010 and it was around that time, in 2010 that Australia, as a country, began to think about gender based violence as a preventable epidemic, as a problem, a grand social problem that we could tackle collectively through strategic investment and action at all levels of community, business and society and so really, over the last 15 years, I've been watching as Australia, at a Commonwealth level, at a state level and community level, has been looking to build that architecture in order to bring gender based violence to an end. And I'm now the director of the East Asia and Pacific Hub of Childlight, the Global Child Safety Institute based in the School of Social Sciences here at the University of New South Wales, where we apply public health principles to end child sexual abuse in particular. But here in UNSW, we have other flagship institutes, the Australian Human Rights Institute, which works with scholars here in Australia and around the world to address gender equality and gender based violence. We also, in the School of Social Sciences, have the Gendered Violence Research Network, the largest network of its kind, which really specializes in practice and policy focused research and knowledge translation to bring violence to an end. So I think UNSW is a very suitable host for our discussion tonight. It's my great pleasure to introduce today's guests. Your host for tonight is award winning journalist Sarah Malik. Sarah is a Walkley award winning Australian investigative journalist, author and TV broadcaster. Her work explores asylum, surveillance, technology and their intersection with gender and race with a focus on domestic violence, gender inequality and migration. Sarah graduated from the University of Technology Sydney with degrees in Law and Journalism, and she has taught journalism at Monash University. She's now a PhD student with us at the University of New South Wales. Our keynote speaker is Professor Jess Hill. Jess is a journalist, an author, a speaker, an academic who focuses primarily on social issues and gendered violence. Jess started her career almost 15 years ago as a producer for ABC Radio, and she went on to become a Middle East correspondent for The Global Mail and then an investigative journalist for Background Briefing. Her reporting has won two Walkley Awards, an Amnesty International Award, and three Our Watch Awards. Jess' first book, See What You Made Me Do, on the phenomenon of domestic abuse and coercive control was released in 2019 and was awarded the 2020 Stella Prize. And I think we cannot underestimate the impact that Jess' work, and particularly her book, has had on the national and international discussion on domestic violence and really pushing us to consider in a much more mature and sophisticated way, the controlling dynamics that enmesh women within experiences and relationships of violence and abuse. In 2021, the book was adapted into a series on SBS. And recent projects include a podcast series on coercive control and patriarchy called The Trap, and a quarterly essay this year on how Me Too has changed Australia, titled The Reckoning. And I would also commend Jess' more recent quarterly essay in 2025, really examining some of the missed opportunities for prevention and primary prevention that I'm sure Jess will be touching on tonight. Since the book was released, Jess has spoken at almost 300 public events, I am sure that is an underestimate, 300 public events about coercive control, and she regularly conducts training and education for groups as diverse as magistrates, high school students, workplaces and local councils. Those of us who know Jess well, know that there's a lot of her work that's public facing, but there's so much of her work that is private and it's unknown, and I know that she works tirelessly for this cause in ways that people often don't see. Luckily, we will have the benefit of some of her more visible presentation tonight. Following the event, both Sarah and Jess will be signing books in the foyer. At the Diversity Festival, we like to surprise and delight. So now is now is the time to look under your seats. You will not be getting a free car, but there are 10 vouchers for free books, which can be exchanged tonight at the Bookshop. [Laughs] If we don't get all 10, there are some spare seats, so you might want to just keep looking. [Laughs] I'm hearing some murmurings of surprise. So now without any further ado, please join me in welcoming Jess to the stage. Thank you. 

Professor Jess Hill  7:23  

Thank you. Oh my God, saying to Sarah, that was the long bio. I didn't know people send them out anymore. Anyway, thank you so much, Mike, that was a really gorgeous and thorough introduction. And thank you, all of you for being here, I too, want to acknowledge the Bidjigal people. This is lands that I also live on, and the traditional custodians of this land, pay my respects to the elders past and present, their stolen lands, and they were never ceded. And in this work, you are immersed in the facts of what happens to Aboriginal women and kids every day. And Aboriginal women and kids are disproportionately targeted by offenders, and systemic racism and misogyny makes them even more vulnerable. Their resilience and resistance strategies can be extraordinary, but they shouldn't actually have to live like that. And ending gender based violence means providing real safety, culturally safe services, and actually resourcing systems and communities to properly support victim survivor mothers to heal with their children wherever possible, not simply removing those children and subjecting them to the trauma of living in out of home care, because, as we know, too often, that's leading to exploitation, abuse and for too many, a crossover into incarceration. Now tonight, I'm here to talk about Australia's incredibly bold promise to end gender based violence in a single generation. Anyone old enough to remember Bob Hawke will remember his promise that no child would be living in poverty. He actually put some good infrastructure around that promise. He did try. Didn't quite pan out, but I like to think of it as net zero violence by 2050 and every government has signed up to this, but I suspect that few policy makers have truly grasped what that commitment will take. So right up the top, I'm just going to plot spoil and say I'm actually not going to lay out a 20 minute road map for how to end gender based violence, because this is violence that has taken root over generations, much of it fed by social dynamics that landed with the tall ships over 240 years ago. It spread like an invasive weed. There's no simple way to eradicate this, and anyone who's had to deal with lantana, will know that, but I think we can get closer to understanding how to go about ending it if we make a radical change in the way that we think about solving it. And I'm fairly confident, as a chronic self doubter, at least on this day, and that is the 24th of September 2025 that if we did some of this, I think we could make this country a safer and happier place. So before I begin, and I am using PowerPoint for like, the fourth time in my life, so just apologies if the slides actually don't change when they're supposed to. It's not their technology. It's my brain, but I just want to recap briefly. So over the last couple of years, Professor Mike Salter and I, we've been trying to raise the alarm on what the data shows is, there's no nice way to put it. It feels like a failing approach, not failing in every area, but failing in too many areas. So we presented on this and made a lot of friends in 2023 and then last year, we released a paper called rethinking primary prevention, which attracted enormous media attention and was quite a ride for us. It was also quite persuasive for the Albanese government, and contributed to this decision to commission a rapid review into prevention, which I sat on and today, actually, quite coincidentally, our six member panel had a briefing from ministers, Tanya Plibersek and Katy Gallagher, on what progress is being made on those recommendations. And sort of like a duck in a pond like looks very placid on top, but there is actually quite a lot going on under the surface. I'm happy to talk more about that in the conversation if we get there. But essentially that Mike myself the rapid review and others, we're really urging policy makers to grapple with hard truths about what is working and what is not working. And I think there's certainly some alarming data. So just a brief snapshot. Thank you for that auditory assistance that was really dramatic. So we've got police call outs for domestic and family violence. They've doubled in a decade, from a call every two minutes to one every minute. So domestic and family violence is consuming around 40 to 60% of New South Wales Police time, and in some areas, that percentage is much higher as to whether that's because there are more a higher rate of reports, or whether there's more severe and complex domestic violence that is requiring police intervention. Is hard to say. We actually don't have clear data on that, but what we can say is that sexual violence reports, they are at a 31 year high, and yet, the rate of victims who are reporting their most recent sexual assault has fallen by a third. So we can't say that it's at a 31 year high, because there is an increased rate of reporting. There is no increased rate of reporting in sexual violence, but there is an increase in the sexual violence crime rate, coercive control is becoming more common and sophisticated, especially tech facilitated abuse. Could spend 20 minutes talking about all of the various ways that that happens, but just one example is that the number of women who told the Personal Safety Survey that they were being tracked in some way by an ex partner jumped from 455,000 to 641,000 in just five years, and then in 2023 after a long period of steady decline from like the late 80s, apparently largely due to improvements in medical interventions and ambulance response times, domestic homicides spiked by 28% which unfortunately for the government, and I do not mean to sound crass, but that is literally the target that they had for reducing intimate partner homicides each year. So it went in the exact reverse. And the data on young people, which I'll come to shortly, is, I think, even more alarming. And I think when we see results stagnating or going backwards in areas of public health, we actually have a responsibility to re examine our assumptions and ask what we're missing, and we should do that regularly no matter what, because, like, imagine, you know, neuroscientists who say, Well, we released a framework in 2014 and we're sticking with it. We don't care what was released in the brain research since then. It's a good framework. That would be an error. So evidence evolves and changes, and as does the social environment that we're working in. And I don't think we should be afraid to interrogate the evidence that's informed our positions, even if we have to change our position, which is actually a sign of maturity, we should bring a healthy amount of doubt to this work. Make sure we're asking the right questions and always be willing to challenge both accepted wisdom and anything that becomes a sacred cow. This, I think, applies to pretty much any area, and I'm sure. Any of the areas that you all work in tonight. So we've seen Australia demonstrate this kind of courage in other areas. Some examples of harm reduction in drugs, you know, going from this like clear abstinence approach to actually having injecting rooms in some areas, still very spotty, bold regulations on tobacco. But I think most persuasively, and this is something that I learned from Mike, is it was done in HIV prevention, that we had this pivot from one strategy to another that was really courageous and showed incredible results. And Mike told me about this, we were actually, I'm probably bitching about prevention, as we commonly did years ago, and he just casually mentioned this in passing, and I just never forgot it. And it was always in the back of my mind. What was that thing that happened in HIV prevention? Something happened, and I feel like it says something about where we're at now. And so when we were talking about this in 2023 I said, Can you, like, take me through what happened? And then even he told me, I'm like, Oh my God, that's such a great analogy. So I'm just going to repeat the bare bones of that today. Mike does a much more thorough going over given his background, but I just want to help set the scene for how we're trying to rethink things. So essentially, back in the 1990s HIV prevention messaging was really simple. It was like, wear a condom, save your life, save your partner's life. And it worked for a while, but from the late 90s onwards, that message started to lose its power. And as Mike explained, it's you know, HIV medication was getting better, so it wasn't such a death sentence. But also, people were kind of tired of hearing just wear a condom all the time. So when infection rates started to rise again, the HIV prevention sector did something really bold, and they pivoted dramatically to take a simple message on condoms and replace it with a new and much more complex message, and that is, if you're negative, get tested and get tested often. If you're negative, go on PREP, and one pill will dramatically reduce your chances of infection. If you're positive, take medication, drop your viral load, and then you won't transmit. And the messaging on testing and treatment was delivered directly to the community most affected, and then backed with resources. And it worked like literally within a single generation. Sydney, which is one of the global epicenters of this epidemic, it's now on the brink of eliminating HIV altogether. And of course, the results have been uneven. Unsurprisingly, in some of the outer suburbs, there's been less access to testing and treatment. Infection rates have only dropped by around a third, and cold and indigenous communities have been hit hardest. So you know, resourcing and consistency matters, but within a generation, HIV has all but been eliminated in Sydney. And I think, you know, imagine if the sector had refused to pivot and just dug its heels in on the condoms approach, because too much has been invested in that approach, and we can't risk losing that. Where would we be now? So every government in Australia has also promised to end violence against women and children within a generation, and that might make you scratch your head. It might maybe you think it sounds absurd, and that would be fair for many reasons. But you know, as Mike reminded us, you know, when we're first doing this, back in 1999 no one in the HIV prevention sector would have imagined that within just 25 years would be on the brink of elimination. So they made what seemed impossible possible, and we always have to keep that in mind, that what seems impossible now we have to imagine as possible, and then we have to create pathways to get there. But the HIV pivot didn't just tweak the system. It actually upended the fundamental assumptions about prevention and reframed the entire response, and it showed us that every part of the system can and must feed into prevention. So I want to bring this back to gender based violence, because actually what I'm here to talk about so let's look at the four pillars of a public health response. Now, generally speaking, three pillars are the usual in public health, usually recovery's not there. That's I think. And I could be wrong, but I think gender based violence is a little unique in having introduced that and quite recently as a pillar. So these are, give or take, the same pillars that informed their HIV prevention strategy, and are the same pillars that underpin the national plan to end violence against women and children, prevention, early intervention, response and in the latest national plan, launched in 2022, recovery. So the first national plan ran from 2010 to 2022 second national plan runs from 2022 to 2032 each state and territory is guided by that second national plan. They have to come up with action that fit within these four categories. So to illustrate this, the national prevention agency Our Watch uses the river of prevention analogy. So picture a river, and I will assist you. There is a river upstream on dry land we see actually faceless, but I'm imagining them smiling, people who have never been touched by violence. So this is the area of primary prevention, where education, cultural change and awareness can stop violence before it begins. Then further downstream, you have people who are in the water and they're waving for help, or I think they're waving. They don't seem to be waving, but anyway, they've got rafts around them. They probably should be waving further downstream. You have people who are in the water, they are definitely waving, and that's where we've parked the ambulance for crisis response. So this is known as like that early intervention is secondary prevention. Down here is tertiary prevention, and it's to help those who've been harmed and reduce the risk of it occurring again. And the point of the image is really that if you concentrate more resources upstream with the faceless but I think smiling people standing on dry land, you won't end up with a river full of drowning people. And it reinforces that sort of linear progress of a hygienic before space and a very sad after space, and Our Watch recommends placing the greatest focus on that primary prevention so we don't require so many life rafts and ambulances and on paper, that sounds really reasonable, but I think it really actually over simplifies the way that we should think about and resource prevention work. So let me show you what I mean by that. I'm just going to go briefly back to HIV prevention. So when the sector pivoted, it actually started using all four pillars. If you're negative and you get tested and go on PREP, well, that's prevention. If you're positive, intervene early, take medication, that's response, drop your viral load, that's recovery, and then you're also helping to prevent transmission. But imagine if it was basically saying, if governments were saying, we're only going to fund what you can prove is the prevention part of that. That's what happens in gender based violence. So these four pillars, they don't just shape funding and service delivery, they frame the very way we think about ending violence. So let me show you what that actually looks like in practice. I'm going to use two key examples, and I'm going to just going to not plot spoil there. Firstly, in the response pillar, we generally place things like women's refuges and women's refuges, they're really one of feminism's, I think, most enduring and effective innovations. But refuges are often dismissed as being that ambulance at the bottom of the cliff offering crisis support and nothing more. But the best refuges, and I would say the best feminist run refuges don't just respond. They actually do the work of all four pillars. So they are literally homicide and suicide prevention centers, because women and children who are at highest risk of being killed or of suiciding are the ones who are placed in refuge. These are places that women and kids go to hide. It's not just because they can't live in their house anymore, it's that they physically cannot be found otherwise they are in harm's way. Shelters also provide response so legal help, financial assistance, social security, counseling, immediate safety, the best refuges also do early intervention with kids who have grown up with that violence, and they support them to recover alongside their mothers, by helping them rebuild their lives, sometimes from scratch. And in doing all this, they're engaged in prevention, breaking the cycle so that kids are less likely to become future victims or perpetrators. They also actually, quite literally, run education programs in schools like women's community shelters. They run the walk the talk schools program, and they agitate for systemic change, and yet we mostly fund refuges as if they are only in the response bucket, which means often they are ending up doing far more than they're resourced for, and they're burning out the women who keep them running. So this is why the way we frame these pillars actually matters, because when we treat those four pillars as neat, separate boxes, or if we imagine violence as this simple before and after event as the river of prevention implies we actually end up designing and funding systems that don't match the messy, overlapping reality of people's lives, and we under resource the very services that are doing integrated system wide work to end violence. The second example I want to take you through is respectful relationships education and consent education in schools. And I know there's one particular person in the audience who have a lot to say about that. But we're not going to quite go there, just right now, staying focused anyway. But you know, educating young people is the jewel in the prevention crown. So those young people, they are the people on dry land in the prevention imagining it's where we stop violence before it starts. We challenge gender stereotypes. Teach consent and respectful relationships work to make young people less likely to use violence as teens or adults, but for many children, the violence has already started, and I'm not sure if I have I'm not going to pot spoil that either. Four in ten Australian children are growing up with domestic and family violence. One in three are subjected to serious emotional abuse. One in four experience sexual abuse before the age of 18. Three in ten are subjected to serious physical violence from a caregiver. And that doesn't even include corporal punishment, which remains legal if it's deemed reasonable for the use of discipline. 60% of young people report being physically punished by a caregiver at least four times. Some children are already using violence at home. Some have engaged in harmful sexual behavior. We're talking about sometimes as young as daycare. This is not high school. It's definitely primary school. Some are already experiencing or perpetrating coercive control in a relationship. So in every classroom, there are victims and there are perpetrators. For want of a better term, it's a bit icky when you apply it to kids. So do these programs shift the attitudes of those most likely to offend? We actually don't know yet there's not a lot of conclusive evidence, almost none in Australia, the evaluations in Victoria, it's the only state where education is mandatory in public schools doesn't actually include any data on student attitudes, which is wild.

The reports do indicate that the attitudes of high school students are more difficult to shift than students in primary school, and I really think any parent of a teenager could have told them that for free. But anyway, I think it's worth noting as an aside that, according to a recent lit review on effective sexual violence programs that was conducted by La Trobe University, one of the few programs worldwide that showed strong results is one that teaches young women how to avoid sexual assault. So, you know, digest that for a moment. That's a whole other conversation we can have, and maybe we'll pick up on that. But what we do know is that when you do education in schools, there's one guaranteed outcome when children are taught about sexual abuse, grooming, consent, coercive control. They recognize it in their own lives, and disclosures go up, and often they'll disclose to the teacher delivering the lesson, maybe another student might go to the school counselor, and sometimes those disclosures warrant a police response, and in Victoria, police get six reports of child on child sexual abuse every week of term, and half of those are from primary schools. So that means that these classes aren't just doing prevention. They're doing early intervention. That's what. No, maybe I didn't do that anyway. That's the wrong slide. They're doing early intervention response, and they are aiding with recovery, because actually, a positive response to an early disclosure is maybe one of the most important safeguards against ongoing harm in that victim survivor's life, and may actually prevent them from going on to become re-victimized or using sexual violence themselves. So next year, the federal government will mandate respectful relationship education and consent classes in public schools nationwide. And I think there's many questions that we need answered before this rolls out. Are we resourcing schools to respond to disclosures? Do they have any guidance on what happens when there are two students involved, because right now, too often, it's the victim who is forced to manage their own safety, which can often mean leaving that school altogether. Now I know the timer is ticking down. I do want to get through a little bit more, and I know Tom will forgive me, just going to ask for forgiveness later. So I just want to zoom out now and take an eagle eye perspective on the national plan, and then let's talk a little bit more about the need to interrogate those presumptions and challenge accepted wisdom. So we had that first national plan launched in 2010 some forms of violence have actually gotten worse, but especially for young people. So the most sobering findings come from the Australian child maltreatment study, which started publishing findings in 2022 so what it found, surveying 8000 Australians, is that 65% overall had experienced some form of child maltreatment. For Australian now aged 16 to 24 adolescent perpetrated sexual abuse has surged. They are the first generation more likely to have been abused by another child or adolescent than by an adult, and amongst those who have had intimate partners in that same age group, sexual violence has doubled in a single generation, and yet this is the same generation that grew up with the most comprehensive education on respectful relationships and harmful gender norms that we've had. It hasn't been perfect. It's been patchy, but it's been in a lot more than the previous generations. So why are they perpetrating more sexual violence? Sexual violence services have been warning about this for years. They say the victims are getting younger, the perpetrators are getting younger, and the assaults are getting more severe. They talk about the fact that whereas things like anal rape were like a very occasional incidents that they came across now it's daily, they often point the finger squarely at free online porn, which, as we know, has become ubiquitous and has done several things, but one of which is normalized choking, which is literally a leading sign of lethality as a mainstream sexual practice. I had a very strange conversation with the Governor General of New South Wales, Margaret Beazley, about vanilla sex, and she's right across this just letting you know, never forget, we could spend a lot of time expanding on that one point, even just about Governor Beazley. But let's zoom out to the national plan. We have a theory that underpins the national plan, and that is that gender inequality is the primary driver of gender based violence, so improving gender equality must be the key to ending it. We've invested hundreds of millions of dollars into proving what began as a hypothesis that if a country could alter its social conditions, improve gender equality, shift community attitudes, loosen rigid gender norms teach respectful relationships, rates of violence should fall. So the first plan was supposed to see those results by 2019 when that didn't happen, we were given a new horizon. The statistics would likely stay static for at least another decade, and after that, so long as those markers of gender equality improved, the rates of violence would begin to drop. When that will start to happen, or what conditions will be required to make it happen, is actually anyone's guess. It's very hard to see how that's being measured. I think it's really strange that despite the first plan's failure to substantially reduce violence, the second national plan just adopted the same theory of change. There were a few dozen grumpy feminists who implored the government, then the Morrison government, to grapple with what seemed to us to be a crucial question, why did the first plan fail? It will shock you all to hear that this opportunity for self reflection was not embraced, but we're in a new time. I love audience members snorting. It's a sign that you're doing well. But we're in a new time with the Albanese government governing until infinity and beyond, seemingly. So should we just have another go at it, this time with a government that's actually interested in improving gender equality and community attitudes. How confident should we be that if we did succeed in improving gender equality and changing those harmful attitudes, we would actually reduce violence or maybe even end it by 2050, obviously, there is strong evidence that men who perpetrate gendered violence are more likely to feel entitled to women's bodies, hold attitudes that condone violence and cling to rigid gender roles. They weaponize misogyny and other forms of gender inequality that are baked within systems. Persuade doctors that their wife is mentally ill or present as calm and rational to their mates in the police while their partner is being labeled hysterical. But I think the problem is that just because these attitudes correlate with violence, it doesn't mean that we actually know how to change them, or that changing them will change behavior. I think the most clear example of that is that some of our biggest wins on attitude change have actually been among young people. So in the national community attitudes survey, we've seen measurable improvements in their views on consent and sexual autonomy. And yet among adolescents, you've had those rates of intimate partner sexual violence double within a generation. So we have to ask whose attitudes are being changed? Are they the kids who actually would never have used harmful sexual behavior anyway? Or are we getting a thing where some young people are simply telling researchers what they think they want to hear, while their behavior tells a different story? I think what's abundantly clear is that it's harder than ever to influence attitudes. So back in 2010 you know, our values were largely shaped by family, peers, pretty homogenized media. But now those points of influence are so fragmented. We live in a globalized sphere of influence. Hardcore pornography, as I said, is ubiquitous, although we've got now forthcoming age restrictions, both on porn and social media, which we'll see if that goes some way to changing that. But we're also contending with this many headed hydra of the manosphere, which exploits boys' fears and aspirations and feeds them disinformation about women and feminism and ASIO Chief Mike Burgess warned late last year that in one generation, we have allowed our children access to alleyways content and people they would never be allowed access to in the physical world. And for some young men, this is hardening hearts and minds against feminism and gender equality and 2024 one in five Australian men aged 18 to 29 agreed that, if necessary, feminism should be violently resisted. But the last thing that I will say, and I thank you for your updated timings, here, is a deeper challenge, I think, to the gender equality hypothesis, and it's something that's become a bit better known. We certainly raised it in our work, and it's what's known as the Nordic paradox.

It's a very pretty place. I got to say I would love to go to Iceland. The Nordic paradox is basically a term for those who don't know it was coined in 2016 when researchers found that among women in the Nordic countries, the most gender equal societies on Earth, reported some of the highest rates of intimate partner violence in Europe, prevalence rates in Sweden, Finland, Iceland, Denmark and Norway hover around 30% which is significantly higher than Australia's one in four rate, but higher than the 22% average across the EU and I think even more puzzling is that countries with more traditional gender roles often reported lower rates. Spain, for example, came in at just 13% so this finding, it shook the prevention field worldwide, and I think the people who wrote that paper soon found out there was quite a lot invested in maintaining the fact that gender equality was the answer. So that dominant belief, though it was suddenly under question, or at least being interrogated, turned upside down, having its pockets emptied out and saying, like, what's in here? What should we be asking? And some researchers argued, well, Nordic women are just simply more willing to report or they're better at identifying but there was a collaboration between Spanish researchers and Swedish researchers that was actually commissioned by the Swedish government because they were like and they found in one of their studies that Spanish women actually report to police at higher rates than Swedish women. Australian researchers found a similar pattern in 2021 the ANU Crawford School found that Australian women who earned more than their male partners are much more likely to experience physical violence and emotional abuse from them. So what's going on? Is this backlash? Is it men reacting violently to the loss of traditional power, or is something else at play, something cultural, maybe less to do with gender? Could the Nordic focus on individualism create conditions that enable intimate partner violence, could Spain's family centered culture, despite its more traditional gender roles, offer some kind of protection, and what about the promising results we've seen in some developing countries, where actually programs that shift attitudes and promote equality have reduced rates of violence? I think the point is there are no simple answers, but the paradox shouldn't be dismissed. We should grapple with it because it challenges the very foundation of our current approach. So none of this means that we should abandon attitude change or gender equality efforts, but it may mean that there are more effective ways to reach those who are at the highest risk of offending, and as Mike and I have been adamant about, you cannot change attitudes in people by simply telling them the right way to think, unless you put them in a re-education camp. But you know, there's problems with that in a democracy, you need to meet them where they are, and you need to design any messaging about violence with the clear understanding that 65% of the Australian population has experienced child maltreatment. So what can we do? I think we should tease some of that out in the conversation to follow, because I am definitely out of time, but I'll leave this slide here just to ponder. Anyway. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1  40:21  

[Background music]

Sarah Malik  40:41  

Thank you so much, Jess. Thank you, Michael, for being with us. I'd also like to pay my respects to the Bidjigal people, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today. And I'd like to pay respects to elders past and present, and extend that respect to any First Nations people present today always was and always will be Aboriginal land. So I just also like to flag that we will be discussing some potentially triggering topics today. So please feel free to take a breather if you need to. And lastly, there will be some time for questions in the end. So please start thinking about what you might like to ask and add your questions to the slido, and I think some information will be up about how you can do that again. So big welcome to you both, Jess and Michael. Thank you so much for that. And you know there's lots of light bulb moments happening for me as you were speaking, and a lot of questions as well. Now you kind of set up the scene there where, you know this violence against women has been a priority for the last few years, but what is happening is that the strategies are not working. The numbers are going up. And I guess I want you to set the scene a bit, Jess, for us. You know there has been you've talked about it in the book, so please buy the book, guys. Now there's been this kind of tussle in the DV sphere between the feminist gender equality model and the psycho pathology model in terms of addressing violence against women and children. And you use this beautiful analogy in your first book, this furniture and floor model analogy, I was wondering if you could kind of speak to what these two models are, and what this perceived conflict entails, and does it have to be a conflict. I think you mentioned you're arguing for a properly negotiated peace and a lasting end to the war, because there are many practitioners who occupy both sides. 

Professor Jess Hill  42:44  

Yeah, sure. 

Sarah Malik  42:44  

Wondering if you could speak to that a bit.

Professor Jess Hill  42:46  

I try to remember it. Yeah. So thank you Sarah, and thank you for moderating. Sarah's done so much great work, as Mike introduced so it's like a real privilege to be interviewed by you. So really the conflict and why it matters is because for a long time, it's been almost taboo to talk about, I guess, the pathway from victimhood to perpetration. And by that we mean it's been almost taboo to talk about the role of trauma in perpetration in Australia and the, I guess, the war, for want of a better term. I mean, sometimes it does feel like that between we can loosely say is the feminist model. The feminist model is, like, it's the patriarchy, stupid, you know, it's, it's gender inequality, it's men's entitlement to women's bodies. They do it because they can. They do it for power and privilege. They do it because they like to exploit women for their labor and resources and their sex. Why wouldn't you if you were able to that's, you know, that's the basic frame on that. And for the feminist model, understandably, they've watched as various schools of psychology have pathologized victim survivors have blamed them for their own abuse. They've seen the community excuse perpetrators because they were drunk or because they were drug influenced, etc. And so they've really, I guess, built a bit of a brick wall against those excuses and said none of that matters. It's all about patriarchy and gender inequality. If that was not the case, none of those extra things would matter. In the I'm from the psychopathology model, it's like we need to deal with why this particular man or person was violent, what happened in their childhood? Were they substance affected, etc. They don't traditionally and this, again, there are people who occupy much more of a middle ground. I'm talking about the extreme camps. They often balk at the idea of, like, this idea of patriarchy and of like, there being a cultural underpinning for this violence. And so the house analogy that I gave was basically to say. That for the in the feminist model, you have, you have a room, and in that room you have some furniture. So the room is the is the man. The furniture could be child maltreatment, could be an alcohol problem, could be a gambling problem. That furniture is all sitting in the room, and it changes the way that the room looks. But the foundations of the room are gender inequality and patriarchy, and so basically, if you just change the foundations, the rest of it doesn't matter. And I guess the negotiated piece is really the sorts of work that you see from, say, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman, who can incorporate both and say we're dealing both with the cultural legacy and continuing reality of patriarchy in all of its forms and gender inequality, and we are dealing with the individual person and their background, and why would you try to separate one from the other? It's just nuts. So that's that's essentially and I think where we're at now is we can't keep going just through one narrow perspective or the other, and the two sides should not feel like they're at odds with each other. I think the Victorian Royal Commission kind of tended to favor the feminist model. So things like alcohol regulation and everything was treated as much more of a side issue. There weren't opportunities taken that should have been, and we've had, really, probably 10 years of wasted time not attending to some of those individual issues.

Sarah Malik  46:33  

Yeah, brilliant. Thank you for setting up that scene. So there's basically two drivers, you know, there's like two drivers of this car called violence against women, and the feminist model male entitlement, gender stereotyping. And you also have the psychopathology model, Child child maltreatment, cycles of trauma, substance abuse, alcohol and porn industries. And you need both of these to be addressed. Now, what was mind blowing to me in that talk that you did was the Nordic paradox, which blew my mind, because, you know, for me, my assumption, I guess, from a global South perspective, like a country like Pakistan, okay, you are, if you solve, you know, access to abortion, divorce, financial equality, you're going to have, that's going to resolve DV, right? And then you have a country like the Nordic countries, where there's female PMs, there's female ministers, there's still high rates of DV. So what's happening here? Can you tease that out? Like, does one thing work in one context and maybe not another? Does DV become more sophisticated in developing countries or changes? Like, I'm wondering if you could tease out that a little bit more 

Professor Jess Hill  47:37  

Sure. And I love Mike to weigh on this, actually, because we've, we've chatted about this, we're really, like, just bouncing theories around because we don't know, yeah, but I think it's, it's clear that you see in some cases, particularly, I mean, we've seen when they've been gender equality initiatives in place, like in some South African townships, for example, where they've gone like full pelt to to empower women economically, give them more access to independence, but they haven't attended to men in the community. Actually, gender violence rates went up when they attend to sort of both, and really get the men on board for gender equality. Then actually you do see violence rates go down. You see in some countries like Nicaragua after the war, you know, where there was really low rates of gender equality, that some work there did reduce those rates. And Mike and I, we've been bouncing around a theory. I'm going to make a really crass analogy, just so that actually it's simple to communicate. But excuse me in advance, is that if you have a country that's got really low rates of gender equality, and you bring in programs and initiatives that have an impact in a local area, then you get this bump quite quite quickly. And the bump I've sort of analogized as when you first start exercising after not exercising for 10 years, the first five or six kilos you lose is really easy. It's your water weight, right? And then the next 10 kilos take you, like, five years. Because, actually, it's the first part that's like, it kind of drops away, and a lot of that what is actually quite nonsensical community attitudes about gender inequality and men's and women's roles. Sometimes, when you start bringing them to communities, and you can make it make sense for them in a way that works for their culture. You have these really incredible realizations, and you see some change. But in countries like Australia and evidently in Europe, where you've actually got pretty good rates of gender equality across the board, nowhere near what we would like. But it's much more subtle the argument, like most Australians think gender inequality has either been achieved or has gone too far, like that's that's the that's the environment we're living in here. We would have different ideas about that, but so trying to pursue a gender equality approach and making getting those wins small what become smaller and smaller wins. I think they have a diminishing impact, and perhaps, as we've seen, actually have a regressive impact, where you start to see either backlash or attitudes aren't catching up with reality, and like those men who are being out earned in their relationships and using violence, we have to ask why that is and how do we safeguard women if we're using a gender equality approach against backlash? 

Sarah Malik  50:28  

Brilliant. Thank you. Jess, I'm going to break it down a bit further how this monster keeps morphing in our societies now, Michael, you work in the child abuse and trauma sector. You're an expert, and you've spent a lot of time interviewing and understanding the real life experiences of people who experience dissociative conditions as a result of abuse and neglect. You've worked on a two year study with 40 women who have complex trauma. You've interviewed them and who's also who also experienced domestic violence. What did you find in your study?

Professor Michael Salter  51:05  

I mean, really, what we found was the just that continuum of gender based violence from childhood into adulthood, the way that child sexual abuse intersects with domestic violence, which intersects with sexual assault, which intersects with child maltreatment over the course of someone's life. But I think increasingly we need to sort of think beyond just one lifespan, you know, really think about how trauma gets passed down through generations, gets transmitted sort of laterally as well. And I know that sometimes there's resistance to thinking about trauma like this, because it sounds like a pathogen or a virus, but I actually think it is a pathogen or a virus. I think that's how it spreads. It's not to say that everyone who's impacted by trauma passes it on in the same way that sorry, but everyone who has a cold doesn't necessarily give a cold to other people, but it's about the increased risk and the spread and the impact, and so for the women that we interviewed, it was a study that just said to women, do you identify as having complex trauma? And it's a term that Judith Herman created to describe the traumatic effects of gender based violence when trauma was first conceptualized in psychology, it was actually mapped onto men's experiences of war. So it was really designed in the 70s around the Vietnam War and the impact on combat vets. But once they took that concept of trauma out to the community, they diagnosed three times as many women with trauma, as they did with men, despite the fact that it was meant to be, to be honest, a male dominant condition, and the reason for that was gender based violence. And so Judith Herman, in the early 90s used this term complex trauma to talk about the trauma in interpersonal relationships, trauma that you can't escape, trauma that you can't run away from, and she understood that in terms of child maltreatment, but also gender based violence. And so speaking to a group of women about their experiences of trauma across their life, and they also talked about the impact on their parenting in all sorts of ways, and then systems. And a big part of the focus for us was that the mental health system was not attentive to women's experiences of violence and abuse. The criminal justice system wasn't attentive. Law enforcement wasn't attentive. How you know, housing welfare, it just went on and on. And so starting to think about gender based violence, not just in terms of victims and perpetrators, but also that context where often we have workforces who they want to do their best, they want to make a difference for their clients, but often what we were hearing from women was reaching out for help. Re traumatized me. Reaching out to help didn't get the outcome that I wanted. I'd rather just keep this to myself. And so coming out of that project and that study that was part of the impetus for adding recovery to the national plan in 2022 was saying, we can't just fund the response to gender based violence in terms of crisis, women have the right and children have the right to recover health and well being after violence, that is a human right, but also when they are healthier and happier and safer, then there's a protective impact in a whole set of ways. 

Sarah Malik  54:33  

And I think some you talked about something around revictimization and how abuse clusters in people's lives, and I found that really profound. I wonder if you could speak to that a bit as well.

Professor Michael Salter  54:46  

When I was like a little baby researcher back in 2008 in the midst of time with Jan Breckenridge, who heads up the Gendered Violence Research Network here, couldn't be here with us tonight. Although she really wanted to be. So, Jan and I worked on this project on female survivors of child sexual abuse and their experience of alcohol and drug treatment, because we knew that women who have been sexually abused as kids are more likely to use alcohol and drugs, and we were interested in how services in New South Wales were reacting to that. It's interesting when we talk about gender inequality, and what we understand that to mean, 90% of people who have an alcohol and drug problem are male, for example. And we can start to think about alcohol and drugs as actually predominantly a male problem. Certainly, the service system, or in alcohol and drugs, is really orientated to men, because that's the majority of the clientele. And so we spoke to women who have a sexual abuse history, who were alcohol and drug clients. We spoke to, we spoke to workers in the field as well. And every woman who we spoke to was fleeing domestic violence, and every worker that we spoke to said, well, of course, all of our female like all of our female clients, have a sexual abuse history, but the acute issue they're often presenting with is they're leaving a DV relationship. And so that was the first cue to me that we will when we were working with in the sexual abuse space, especially with the adult survivors that we're dealing with this sort of cumulative set of experiences, and for me, as a sexual abuse researcher, to say, oh, well, I just want to talk to you about what happened to you when you were a kid. But I'm but this, this thing that happened is happening to you right now, is not so, so relevant. That was my first cue that there was this important intersection between child abuse and violence against women. And so then, when I started to work more in the primary prevention space about violence against women, it was somewhat frustrating to see this arbitrary division that said, oh, well, what happened to you before the age of 18 is not in scope for our prevention strategy. It's not relevant. And that's what I was told. It's not relevant. And I understand there's a different system around child maltreatment, in terms of, there's statutory obligations, there's a child protection system. I understand that the system is different, but that's not how survivors talk. Actually. 

Sarah Malik  57:17  

I think that's really important, because just like racism is an intersection in domestic violence. It seems like child abuse is also just as an important intersection that we haven't explored, and that overlap between child abuse and domestic violence is an important one. You have suggested a more trauma informed approach to prevention. Michael and in in Jess's book, you talk about misogyny as a maladaptive defense. That mechanism, a mechanism that perpetrators use as a coping mechanism. I was wondering if you could talk us through that one.

Professor Michael Salter  57:53  

I won't take credit for it. Elizabeth Howell is a feminist practitioner in United States, and she published work in 2002 looking at the link between childhood trauma and gendered attitudes, and looked at the ways in which and again, these are generalizations, but men with a trauma history are more likely to hold and display behaviors that we associate with male stereotypes. So they're more likely to be to display externalizing behaviors, aggression, really black and white thinking, particularly around gender and about male dominance, but also in a clinical setting, for therapists who are working with female survivors of sexual abuse, they're often dealing with a lot of self blame, shame, internalized aggression, in the sense that survivors, female survivors, are much more likely to self harm, for example, and then also be targeted in their adult relationships by abusive men. And so the broader point that Elizabeth was making was that there is in society a trauma. There's a traumagenic aspect to misogyny, and so that for men who have experienced the shame and humiliation and powerlessness of childhood abuse, misogyny offers a kind of narcissistic defense that says, actually, because I'm a man, I have these entitlements, and I have the right to XYZ and but if we're going to unpack that defense mechanism, he needs something in to replace it. If what misogyny for that man is doing is protecting him from the humiliation and shame that he can't tolerate. If we take it away, he needs something in response that's going to work for him. So I think that this is again, just a useful reflection on the intergeneration and collective nature of trauma and also. It's and misogyny and it's collective function. It's working for men and boys in a particular kind of way. It's giving them something I actually don't particularly buy the feminist argument that misogyny and male entitlement is fun and enjoyable, and it's just power over is something that anybody will grab if they can get their hands on it. It's not my model of human flourishing. I don't think it is an equitable model of human flourishing, and I don't think it expresses men's nature. I think misogyny is doing something for men and boys, and we need to figure it out and give them something else.

Sarah Malik  1:00:43  

And Jess, you mentioned in your book this line, which stuck with me, violence is like cocaine, moving shame into grandiosity. You feel big and strong and invincible, and it works, but it creates havoc in your world. Now, it is hard, but I think it's necessary to tackle this complex in a world of abusers, which you describe, and it's, I guess, entitlement, but married with you talk about trauma, shame, humiliation, insecurity and the need for control as all kind of linked in this kind of toxic cocktail of domestic violence, I was wondering if you could talk us through that.

Professor Jess Hill  1:01:24  

I can try. I mean, I think Mike went some ways to doing that. I think sometimes what we see as entitlement is also like disregard for others. And I think, you know, that rigid style of thinking is also one of the you know, what literally creates, and I don't use this term lightly, an evil kind of behavior, because it's this sense that, like, I think, where the traditional, like modes of masculinity come into it. And I'm very much citing Terry Real here, who was, you know, who that quote comes from, is that if I'm not one over, I'm one under, and that if I'm not winning, I must be losing. So in order for me to win, you have to lose in this equation. And honestly, when you see this play out again and again in relationships, but particularly in post separation abuse, and I've seen it play out in my own life, not with my own partner, but with friends and their ex partners who were previously great, great friends of mine and my partner, where you see guys who have just a trace of visible insecurity, quite strong attachment to more traditional masculinity, not very overt about traditional gender roles, until the woman challenges or leaves and says, I'm I'm due half of your earnings, or I'm due half the house, and suddenly it's like this, I'm going to basically destroy you. I'm going to destroy your life because but, but even to the point where they're destroying their own life, because, in the end, I have to win and you have to lose. And as Mike was saying, you know, a lot of what I wrote about in the, I mean, in the original book, see what you made me do was about shame as the as the root cause of violence and this deeply unacknowledged shame that becomes malignant in someone. And I think you know at the time that I wrote the book, and even more so now, Donald Trump was like, kind of the archetype of that in his first presidency, he was having arguments on Twitter with, like, faceless avatars, you know, who he felt had slighted him. There are people who are so shame sensitive, and so it becomes like a distortion in their perception, where they believe that you have disrespected them, even when all you've done is just ask them to wash the dishes, or you've accidentally burnt the toast. And it's like you did that on purpose. You did that on purpose because you want to win and you want to see me lose, and that, you know, win or lose, a world kind of perspective I think really underpins this, and that's why, I guess, we try to come at things around, you know, sort of trying to make more space in what masculinity can mean for people who are attached to it. But ultimately, unless you get to the really deep seeded reasons for that shame and that fear, essentially, that these men have none of the gender re education is going to wash because, as Mike says, they're using it as a defense. They'll use whatever they can as a defense. They'll use racism as a defense. They'll use whatever it is that makes them have one over the other person, because ultimately what they're seriously afraid of is being seen for the defective person that they are, the defective person they believe themselves to be. And they cover that so often with a fire wall of grandiosity. And it's like, if I just keep this firewall of grandiosity and and callousness towards my partner, but projected generosity, and, you know, great guy image to the rest of the community, I'll be protected from that little boy who was never good enough, was never man enough, was never strong enough from that little boy ever being known. And the horrible thing about that is that victim survivors, they can see that little boy, and they want to know that little boy, and they want to show that little boy that he can be loved. And I'm talking obviously male female binaries here, but in this situation, it's so often the case, and they will throw themselves on the pyre to prove to that little boy that he can be loved. And in the end, the only one who can show him that he can be loved is himself, and that's what so many women end up finding out.

Sarah Malik  1:05:59  

And Jess, you know, I think this is, it seems like, it seems to us unfathomable, that someone who is so powerful and is doing all these destructive things can experience themselves as so small, you know. But this is part of the psychosocial model. And I guess I do want to talk about that attitudes, behavior paradox that you mentioned as well. And there's just so many, so much great stuff in the book, and I do want to mention it a bit. You know, in terms of the limits of gender equality campaigns and surveys, because you write, it's difficult to ascertain how a person will behave when they are drunk or when their attachment issues are triggered, if all you're doing is asking them questions in a controlled environment. And you quote an expert who wrote, I measure attitudes, knowing how contradictory people can be, that shows particularly in the realm of violence and control, because the tendency to be abusive is something deeper than culture. It's deep within the body. It's a psychological impulse. And there was, amazingly, someone you quoted in the book, Rebecca Huntley, who wrote the book Sassafras, a memoir about the intense personal physical violence she experienced as a child. And she writes, you write, my father. My father was a professor of law, a champion of women in the workplace. He supported women to be judges, if you had given him a survey, he would have ticked every right box, yet he was a horrible father. Now, that's pretty intense. You know, this difference between our explicit beliefs and our implicit beliefs, attitudes and behavior. So in terms of what works, you know, how do you actually change people. You've spoken about three programs in your book that actually do work, safe steps, shifting boundaries, and she is not your rehab. So to move this in a positive direction, what works actually changing behavior, not just on a superficial attitudes level, if you could talk us through those three programs? 

Professor Jess Hill  1:08:03  

Yeah, sure. I mean, I've got, I'll try to recall the Safe Dates and shifting boundaries. I think that interestingly Safe Dates was, is an American education curriculum on respectful relationships. It was evaluated sort of late 90s, early 2000s and only in a certain area of America. So it's still, I think, up for grabs as to whether, if it were evaluated now, would we see the same reductions to perpetration and changes in attitudes. But the evaluations are sound, and they did find that there was both the changes in attitudes and improvements and reductions in perpetration among the young people who received it. I think central to it was not just we're talking about gender roles and what constitutes respect, but also role playing. So they would, they would put on theater productions the students, they would host, like poster competitions. They get very involved. And apparently that, you know, according to a whole meta review of these sorts of programs globally, that was one of the things that differentiated Safe Dates from other programs that really hadn't seen those results, is really getting the kids by kind of viscerally personally involved the shifting boundaries example. I thought was so interesting because it took a lot of what Safe Dates did, replicated it to the extent that you can, but found that when they did the classroom education, it didn't reduce behavior and perpetration. What did reduce perpetration is setting is was changing the environment. So they brought in classroom level intervention orders where there had been, like, you know, allegations of assault between students. They asked students, where were the places on campus that felt unsafe, and they brought in more lighting, they put more security in those areas. They actually changed the living conditions that the students were inhabiting. And that's what reduced perpetration. That, combined with the education, also reduced perpetration. She is not your rehab does I mean essentially what Mike and I have been advocating for, not because we had the idea first. It just like so happens that they have, you know that that's what they're doing, is that it is a trauma informed approach to prevention. It is one that says. And literally, and I'm quoting Matt Brown, who's one of the drivers of this with his wife, Sarah, brother, I know how hard it is to heal. You know your trauma was not your fault, but your healing is your responsibility, and I find their work extraordinary. I've had a very immersive experience with it. I was part of a group of Aboriginal and Pacifica community leaders who did a three hour program with them about how do we bring this work to the people we're working with? And it required us to look at the stuff that we hide from. It required us to do even things like stand in front of a mirror and say what we liked about ourselves. Half of the people in that room just wanted to run away. They could barely stand in front of a mirror and say what they liked about themselves. And these are people who lead this work we all like ended up in total puddles on the floor. It was like a bit of a psychosocial hazard at one point. But anyway, I was in a puddle probably about three minutes in. So that was a long three hours for me, but, but they have this app called in a boy, and it's basically like a 30 day guided program for a lot of guys who are either not going to seek help from a traditional counselor, have tried and found it really disappointing, or cannot even get there, can't afford it, whatever. So it's free. It's guided by Matt. He's always got a, you know, really extensive and intense trauma and violence background, and it really conveys that it's like we're going to help you get into that moment where you're about to do what your father or your uncle or whoever or your mother did to you, we're going to get in that moment and we're going to just give you more time to breathe, like talk to that little boy inside you, and just have a different option. And one of the amazing examples they gave was of this. This guy had grown up with pretty extreme violence, and he's, you know, he's woken up in the morning the dishes are unwashed, and he's like I told my 15 year old boy to wash the dishes last night, and he didn't do it. He's disrespected me. I have to go in now, and I have to discipline him, which means physically punish him, because he needs to know that I'm setting a boundary. And what he had learned through the inner boy app was just basically to stop at the sink and take a minute and reflect. He managed to just take that minute and reflect and go. Is that Is that the entirety of what's happened, and is that what used to happen to me? And what he remembered is, yes, that's what used to happen to me. My father would come and and lash me when I hadn't done that. In that moment that he took to reflect, his wife comes into the kitchen instead of blowing up at her, like, why didn't you get him to do the dishes last night? He just takes a beat and says, The dishes aren't done. Is there any reason why he didn't do that? And his wife says, Well, yeah, actually, he had a really hard time at school yesterday. He was bullied. He came home really upset, and in that moment, this man just stands there and thinks, this is a moment I have to be there for my son. He goes into the bedroom and sits with his son and has a conversation and gives him a cuddle and just like, that's the stuff I'm like, the only way we're going to prevent violence is if we get in between and into those moments where someone is going to exert control or use manipulation or use violence and persuade them that it is in their interests and the interests of the people that they apparently love not to do that. And for some sociopaths or people who are so callous and so cut off from their own emotions, this will never work, and we as a society just need to manage those people, and sometimes that means just finding a way to warehouse them, put a bloody monitoring bracelet on them, because there's nothing that you can do. But with a sizable section of men who use coercive control and sexual violence, there are possibilities, and we have to at least try to work with them, but it has to be on them.

Sarah Malik  1:15:10  

Thank you for that. Jess, and that makes sense, because this issue is just yeah, a round of applause for that. Thank you.

And this issue is so pervasive, so it cannot be that cannot be the case, that you you need to resolve it using these approaches. So it's really that behavior interrupting approaches that are working. 

Professor Jess Hill  1:15:34  

With some people. 

Sarah Malik  1:15:35  

With some people. Now, Michael, you've spoken about how you know victims of trauma are over represented in emergency departments, in prisons, as homeless. You talk about the cycle of violence and in terms of what, what has worked, you've spoken about a one stop shop for survivors as being pretty effective. What is this one stop shop and why does it work?

Professor Michael Salter  1:16:00  

Part of the research project we were talking about earlier was just asking women, what would they like? I mean, they talked to us about what didn't work when they approached services, but also what would be helpful. And really starting to think about, you know, taking services or service provision, that's place based. It's in your community. It's staffed by people that are from your community, and instead of, you know, to get your mental and physical and psychosocial and legal needs being addressed all over town. So if you've in the middle of a complex situation where there's a lot going on for you, you've got six different appointments in the week, and you're running around the place, but you've also got childcare obligations and all sorts of things are going on. What it would mean just to have one place where you could go and you could get your needs met. And also there would be some information sharing. So your physical healthcare is related to your mental healthcare, but also people are realizing, oh, there's a legal matter and there's a child protection matter, and can we help you fill out your Centrelink, or what about your NDIS applications, and all of these things that women were finding themselves entangled with, what it would be like to go somewhere where there was just sort of one one place. And so this was something that we sort of put together as part of the project, based on women's recommendations, and it's been taken up in different sorts of ways, and not just because of our research. There's been sort of broad activism around this and advocacy. And so the Illawarra Trauma Recovery Center, the women's Trauma Recovery Center, involved the practitioners co designing the service for women who have a trauma history, and it's designed to, in some cases, provide an oasis from a currently violent situation, but at the same time, acknowledging women have kids and they both and everyone has needs, and have physical health needs and mental health needs. The Commonwealth has also funded six Primary Health Networks around the country to adopt a recovery orientated response to violence, and that idea of a recovery orientated response that just says what's happening and what do you need? What would help? And it's really interesting, what helps. Because there can be a whole set of issues. You know, there can be long term, yes, violence and abuse, but then chronic pain. And we know the lot of women who have experienced trauma and abuse go on to live with high levels of pain that are not being addressed by their GP, that have just been normalized, that can be really debilitating, that then reinforce depression and anxiety. What about What about just food? What about your diet? What about exercise, what about psychosocial skills, all of these things. So that was really sort of the challenge that we proposed as part of the research project, and it'll be really interesting to see the evaluations from Illawarra, but also the public health networks that the Commonwealth has funded to adopt a model like this and say to people again, if your health, if your wellbeing, is impacted by safe by violence and abuse, you have the right to recovery. You have the right to the restoration of your health and to go on and live a healthy life.

Sarah Malik  1:19:36  

Yeah. Thank you so much. Michael, and I just briefly want to condense some of these amazing questions that we've got from the audience quickly. Jess, I thought it would be worth bringing this in because you've talked about it in the book. People are asking about, how do we support men's emotional psychosocial development in a way that prevents gender violence? People are talking about Andrew Tate and the manosphere. And I guess that's something I did want to kind of address, because it was kind of mind blowing to me. In the book where you talk about it's not just Andrew Tate and the podcasters and the manosphere, there's something a lot more insidious and systemic going on with that, to the tune of over $700 million I think. What is this funding? Where is it coming from? And what is it doing? We are in this kind of toxic online stew of misogyny that is kind of weaponizing a lot of these feelings of shame and humiliation men are experiencing into this kind of world. So, yeah, what is this money? Where is it coming from, and how is it kind of fueling this? 

Professor Jess Hill  1:20:48  

Well, just briefly, basically, this money is coming from anti rights organizations. Can be fundamentalist Christian organizations across the EU and the States can be, you know, far right think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, famous for Project 2025 thanks, beautiful work, and and and other like basically loosely affiliated groups who, unfortunately all, although they disagree on a number of things, they all agree on one thing, and that is that gender equality and the rights for LGBTQI people should be undermined. So they're very united on that front. I spoke to the ambassador for gender equality about this, Stephanie Copus Campbell, who's now the former ambassador, so I can actually cite her on this. At the time, it was a bit like, don't quote me, but, and literally, don't quote me, because I'm having to go into these meetings in the States, and I'm concerned that if I'm on paper saying these things, I literally will not get the meetings that I need to get. But she was basically just saying that she had been to something horrendous, like over 100 countries in 18 months, and she was seeing the same language turn up in Malawi in Papua New Guinea in Florida. It was like the same lines that were being planted everywhere and everywhere she went, the legislation that had been achieved, like, you know, same sex marriage, or, you know, the right to same sex relationships in Uganda, were being turned around, and it's a concerted effort to drive back the gains that have been made over the last 30, 40, 50 years, they spend money really effectively. I don't even think I mean, Stephanie was saying that progressive movements are actually outspent. I think with a few high profile divorces like Melinda and Bill and Mackenzie and Jeff, we've actually got some very rich women who are now quite intent on funding gender equality efforts, so for reasons that they have not yet divulged. But I think that I don't think it's that we're out spent. I think the problem is that progressive movements often fight amongst ourselves and and perhaps aren't spending that money as effectively. To be honest, it's also a lot easier to undo stuff than it is to do things. It's a lot easier to lead from fear. It's a lot easier to unfortunately, they can exploit all sorts of narratives. They can exploit. You know, they can basically use this like idea of a decadent west where, you know, the colonizer is affiliated with LGBTQI rights and gender equality and all the rest of it, and go into these, you know, post colonial countries, and say that essentially, for you to be post colonial, you need to reject the values of the west so they can exploit whatever it is to get this message across, and they do it supremely effectively. And I think that unfortunately, what we were talking about like shame based, shame based men who've experienced things in childhood that then put them in this win or lose a mindset and rigid thinking. I mean, unfortunately, that's a lot of guys in Silicon Valley who are now sort of setting the agenda for the brave new world that we're all walking into. And you stood that saw them all standing behind Trump at his inauguration, and everyone's just like, you know, waiting for cookies at the table. And that's, I mean, that's scary. It's also setting what we see online, like algorithms, all of those things, these aren't accidental. And the stuff, the fact that we see rise of, you know, trends like Trad wives and all the rest of it, this is being supported by those anti rights actors. It's being supported by very deep pockets. It's not just, oh, organically, these people seem to like rise to the surface because they're rage baiting or. Whatever. There's a lot more going on and now, unfortunately, Russia and America are to some extent in lockstep around opposing the more progressive values of the West. Used to be Russia versus the West, now it's Russia and America versus the West, apparently. So it's a very difficult spot to be in, and it's filtering through trade negotiations, removing gender from trade negotiations. I mean, it's everywhere, and they are very determined. And project 2025, was pretty much a road map for that and for authoritarianism.

Sarah Malik  1:25:37  

I think that was really mind blowing, reading that it was just the tip of an iceberg. These manosphere and these social media influences are actually funded in a very deliberate, systemic way. So that's a really systems issue. I think that is really important. So thank you for that. Now, look, I just wanted to, I know we don't have that much time left, but before we leave, I did want to end with, you know, something hopeful now, Michael, you know it can be depressing, this idea of re victimization and the loops people find themselves in, especially vulnerable people. And as an expert, you've spoken about how vicarious trauma can be challenging for people supporting others who've experienced complex trauma, but you also speak about this idea of vicarious resilience, and what a life affirming and even joyful process it is for you to work with and learn from survivors who've made changes, who've broken cycles. So I was wondering if you could speak to that, and what do you find most hopeful about the work you do.

Professor Michael Salter  1:26:48  

A part of this project, we were interviewing workers who their primary works in complex trauma, and so we were asking them about the impact of the work and burnout and all of those things. And we had this woman who just said, I'm so sick and tired of being asked this question. She said, I love my work. She said, I love the people that I work with, and I love coming to work every day. And she said, you know, I don't have to leave my work behind when I go home, because what I take home with me is so much hope. And it was a bit of a sort of a slap in the face for us as researchers. And so we went back, we looked at all of the interviews that we'd done. We'd done 60, and then we just saw time after time these workers just talking about these incredible clients and these and and how much they admired their clients, and how much they learned from them and how much they grew. And so we sort of, we started writing about not just vicarious trauma and getting traumatized because you work with people who are traumatized, but actually what you learn from victims and survivors because of their resilience and and that is absolutely what gets me out of bed in the morning every day is just you meet the most incredible people doing this work. And that is true for the survivors. That's true for the workers. And often the workers are also survivors. And I people often ask me how I do the work. And it's not hopeless. It doesn't feel hopeless at all. You know, part of just on my paper last year and the conversations we've been having is there's so many opportunities to prevent violence that we're not taking and we could, and the levers are right in front of us, and that's part of my frustration, is we've sort of gotten stuck on a couple of key concepts that are maybe not working. That's okay, you know, I thought things 10 years ago that I don't think anymore. There's no shame in saying, okay, well, we tried something, it didn't work. We're going to do something else. We're going to augment something we've been doing. We're going to backstop it with some other approaches. So I really don't want anyone to leave tonight thinking we can't do this. I absolutely think that we can do this. I absolutely think we can do this. I think the fight is tough, and some of the fight is with the technology sector, for example, and our online information hygiene. Part of our fight is around pornography, which is bad for children, and we shouldn't give it to them, but also it's not great for adults, either, and we probably should do something about that. Alcohol is an issue. It is an issue. And men have a problem with alcohol, and part of that problem is the more we drink on average, the more violent we get, so the less alcohol there is. Gambling is a problem, like we could list it, and Jess and I have listed these opportunities so it's out there, and my hope is, okay, America's going to hell in a hand basket. That seems to me to be their problem, but we've got a decent government that I think wants to do something, and frankly, feels on the hook for it, if in five or ten years time, violence is not going down. We will all be holding them accountable for that, and the y know it.

Professor Jess Hill  1:30:03  

And they'll still probably be in government.

Sarah Malik  1:30:07  

Thank you so much. Michael, now, Jess last question for you, you know, you've spoken about people who choose, you know, the path of least resistance violence, which you know, instead of vulnerability, they choose control, and the knots of violence and aggression in our human family feels so fraught after speaking to you. It's not as simple as we think, but you do talk a lot about neuroplasticity in the book, and how do you think we can change our brains, our wiring and our society? What makes you hopeful for change?

Professor Jess Hill  1:30:42  

Yeah, of course, takes a lot of work, though, like as someone who's gone to therapy myself for many, many years and is now at the age of 42 thanks probably a little bit to menopause or perimenopause, discovering that I actually didn't know myself at all really, until two weeks ago, and now I probably will find things out in five years, but that's from going over that neural pathway again and again and again. Re like, basically, if you've got these neural pathways in your brain that have been set up by certain experiences, and they've got, like, deep grooves, you need to establish new pathways, and you need to do it again and again and again and again. And that's not even if you've got like, deeply habituated, you know, problems like substance abuse or the use of violence, even people who are just dealing with garden variety kind of maltreatment and attachment issues have to do that work, and it's long and it's lifelong. The last thing I'd say is that I think one of the best conversations I had, aside from the one with Mike, obviously, for the quarterly essay, was with Sheryl Batchelor, who is an Aboriginal woman running Yiliyapinya, which works with basically the the children that nobody else wants to work with, who are essentially going towards youth justice response, um, and she really said, like, when her the kids she's working with are, like, auntie, you know, it's just my trauma, you know, there's nothing we can do. Just like this is not just your trauma. You've had hard times, but we're talking about brain health, and we're going to cuddle your brain, and we're going to teach it that it can expect better, you know, and then we're going to help you learn how to expect that and how to give that. And she, I won't go into the particular story now that she told me, which was extremely harrowing. But one thing that that they do is this thing called made by mob. So every week they'll have this, like carpentry thing, where they bring, you know, mom and son often this, often the sons sort of maybe used violence in the home or used harmful sexual behaviors, has been massive problems. And they'll come together with a carpenter and they'll make a table. Sounds lovely, except for the fact that, like, there's like a 15 year old boy with a hammer and a saw and large pieces of wood, and you know, you're having to sit there and just let him hammer nails right next to you. You may be a bit dysregulated from your own experiences of violence, so, but they basically have this space where they say you're going to get triggered in all the wrong ways right now, and we're going to help you regulate as you do this practice together, and at the end of it, you're going to come out having produced something together. And we're going to do this again and again and again, and we're also going to do this in ways that feel culturally sound for you. Going to take you out on country. You're going to log you back into why you would even want to create these neural pathways, why you wouldn't just throw in the towel all together. And and Sheryl is just so great. She's just like, she came to the work because she read Norman Deutsch's the brain that changes itself. And she was like, Yeah, fuck yeah. Why don't we just change the brain? Let's change some brains.

Sarah Malik  1:34:13  

Change some brains. That's a perfect end to note, to end on the power of change and how abuse goes a long way, but care can go a long way too, and this is such an intractable problem, so I think we need to throw everything we have at it. So I appreciate both of you. Thank you so much. I think I could talk to you for another hour and please give a round of applause to our speakers. [Applause]

And just a reminder everyone that books are available for signing, so please come and yeah, buy a book if you want, and feel free to grab some food as well. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER:

Hi everyone, it's great to be introducing into this showcase. I am an academic in education for the Disability Institute. I also wear several other hats and Professor of Special Education and Deputy Head of the Scientia School of Education here at UNSW. Co-deputy director of the Centre for Education Academy and a newly appointed role of faculty of arts design and architecture education fellow UDL. 

My history as a Universal Design for Learning, or UDL practitioner dates back to a high school teacher in the 90s when UDL was just getting it start. I found UDL to be such a game changer for my students and got very passionate about it and very excited now that it has begun to find its footing in higher education in the past decades and also proud to have been a part of UNSW's journey from the beginning. This event today is the signature inclusive pedagogy event at UNSW and each era continues to inspire and challenge and is now in its sixth year. One of the greatest things about it and the thing that I love the most is it attracts presenters from across the University to do been great to have the opportunity to hear about the inclusive education initiatives and pedagogy is from all of the faculties including medicine, law, business, science, engineering, and even the PVCESE.

Two of the biggest barriers, also in the literature and one that I've experienced anecdotally to making courses and research more accessible time and knowledge. Hopefully the students can assist with both as we hear the opportunities to the College with different subject area expertise incorporating Universal Design for Learning and other accessible practices and we get to do this in bite-size, easy to digest pieces. I invite you to think about this as you listen to our speakers and think about one change can make to your own practice to make it more accessible. I encourage you to get involved in your own faculty and University UCL accessibility initiatives. If you are looking for guidance, there are two places you can begin. The UNSW UCL framework is a checklist of things you can do to make your course more accessible and you can also see which are already doing which is always motivating to see that many of us automatically teach accessibly.

Diversifying inclusive teaching toolkit also contains a series of checklists that you can use and you can perhaps choose one or two things to add and see what you are already doing. I know the momentum of Inclusive Teaching Forum continue to build and I look forward to seeing some of the participating today and presenting at our future circuses. Thank you for coming.

PROF JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

Thank you for being here. I'm a professor of bioethics but importantly this context I am the director of the Disability Innovation Institute at UNSW. As an Institute, we are grounded in research and age care and engagement that is inclusive, particularly that is disability inclusive, and so our commitment is to ensure that across UNSW, and ideally beyond that, all of our students are respected for their disability, nationality, ethnicity, religion, whatever, anything else, and can fully participate in learning, supported by the appropriate physical environment, internet environment, appropriate teaching strategies and methods and the curriculum and so on.

Just before we go into today's event, I'm going to acknowledge the traditional owners of the unceded land here in Kensington, the Bidjigal people. And also there are many people attending this event online and because it's recorded and there will be people looking at this event in future he will be on different lands across Australia and elsewhere. We pay our respects to Elders past and present and as we gather to explore the various ways that we have of collecting and sharing knowledge, we recognise the enduring connection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to this land, to culture and to community for thousands of generations, and commit to continuing to explore together in the spirit of respect and understanding.

We started out with a welcome. She specialises in Universal Design for Learning but unfortunately couldn't be here with us. She is a central figure in inclusive education processes in UNSW and Universal Design for Learning. It was her who put together our very first Inclusive Education Showcase. Just checking how far back that was, it was seven years back. So that even predated me arriving here.

We will go straight into the first presentation and we will then have 10 minutes for this presentation and we will go from person to person and there will be questions at the end, so if you do have particular questions for presenter, keep them in your mind or make a note of them and save them up for the end, if that's possible. We are first of all going to go to Dr Harriet Ridolfo to give her presentation and I'm going to be sitting there, so I can read the captions but I will jump up at something like eight minutes and will be very independent in my timekeeping. Welcome, Harriet.

DR HARRIET RIDOLFO:

You can hear me? Cool. I am Harriet Rodolfo, senior project officer in Student Equity at UNSW and today I want to share. That's not going to work. I want to share practical strategies for students from underrepresented backgrounds, so this draws on some work that we've been doing at the start of any project and that is to give you some simple evidence-based ideas you can take away and use in your own teaching when I started the project, its collaborative, and we wanted to build students confidence and skills so they can succeed academically and equip educators with strategies to teach inclusively. The project was about the student experience in teaching practices that shape it. 

There is a toolkit on the right for students preparing for university, PDF on the left, and that one on the right. I will focus on the inclusive teaching guide on the left. I will talk through briefly a change approach, I'm sure many of you are familiar with it, if you're not it is a framework for helping us explain how well a design change is expected to happen.

If you are looking at it, you want to go right to left. You see the aim, the impact of the project is for them to thrive academically at university in their first year and be able to complete the program successfully. To the left of that, it's all about how are we getting there.

So the guide pinpoints the specific needs of equity students, maps out the steps to address those needs, and clearly defines outcomes we aim to achieve. One of the first things to think about in Inclusive Teaching methods is what is it? Many students from equity cohorts, the first thing they found when they come to university, their cultural and educational diversity, often there is a lot less familiarity with how the university works, systems, expectations and even language.

That's important because it's not about capability, these students are just as capable as anybody else, what it does mean as educators, we sometimes need to make things explicit. A little extra clarity and guidance can make the transition into university life so much smoother.

One of the biggest challenges for students is academic literacy, so things like understanding academic conventions, engaging with death developing research and study skills. For some students, literacies have never been taught directly, so they feel like they are constantly playing catch up. As educators we can help to unpack those expectations.

This could mean something like modelling, how to approach a difficult text, explaining how to structure an argument, giving examples of what good work looks like. Small practical interventions can really help level the playing field.

Another important practice, another important piece is help seeking. Asking for help can feel incredibly hard, let's face it, even if someone who is as old as me find it difficult to us for help. For students it may be harder because they worry it makes it look incapable or they just don't belong.

We can shift this by normalising help seeking in teaching. For example, explicitly encouraging questions, building peer support activities into tutorials, and regularly pointing out services existing for students. The message is simple, asking for help is not a weakness, it is a smart strategy for success.

And then there is academic self-efficacy. Basically, students believe in their own ability to succeed. Students with high self-efficacy will take risks, seek help, and persist when things get tough. But if you have had negative experiences at school, that confidence can be fragile. The good news is that self-efficacy can be built. Giving students tasks that are achievable and show progress.

Also vicariously through experiences, the stories of other students facing similar challenges and finding ways through. That is why we have included lots of student voices in our resources. So let's take a little look inside the Inclusive Teaching guide.

We have got videos from front-line educators, showing their experiences of Inclusive Teaching. Non-academics and educators like to hear from other academics, and educators, so lots of stories from the frontline.

Here is a glimpse of what some of the teachers told us in those interviews. "Understanding diversity in your classroom can completely transform the way that you teach". "Ask if help is often one of the hardest thing students can do" And we also have student voices, these are audio, so students cannot be identified.

They talk about positive and negative experiences of Inclusive Teaching. Simple things like constructive feedback makes people feel more motivated to continue to learn and improve.

Here are some more things that students told us. Some positive at the top "the tutor did an excellent job of discussing challenges without perpetuating serotypes". Negative "many people assumed that my ground was a struggle".

So with the Inclusive Teaching guide helping educators recognising and understanding the diversity already in their classrooms, it draws on some key equity data to highlight current student demographics. And points to the diversity of universities in the future, diversity of background, preparation and life experience, and this offers practical strategies to respond to this diversity.

In supporting educators to make Inclusive Practical the norm, rather than the exception. We have a timeline that outlines the broader evolution of equitable access in Australian higher education. Over the past few decades, participation widens significantly, but we know that it's not just about getting in the door, it's about supporting students to succeed once they are here.

The Inclusive Teaching guide includes a set of principles, there are a couple of examples, two here. One, designing inclusive curriculum assessments, for example providing a clear unit structure, embedding literacies by explicitly teaching academic conventions encouraging active engagement with academic text.

Cultivating positive and inclusive classroom culture. This diverse teaching strategies and resources, for example, offering course materials in a variety of formats. And some more examples. Embedding support systems, for example, help seeking opportunities in coursework and facilitating reflection. And we also have got a section called "Inclusive Teaching in action" which provides templates to help put principles and practice.

On this slide you can see 'embed support systems' is about providing opportunities for peer feedback. The Inclusive Teaching guide actually features 19 practical examples of Inclusive Teaching in action. Student insight, for example, gather information about students previous writing experiences and so on.

I mentioned I concentrated on the Inclusive Teaching guide, so I want to mention UniReady which is about getting ready for university for students. A student facing website. This is the homepage and you can see there are five modules. There is information at the back if you are interested.

And it is full of interactive developments. We have students'videos, animations a lot of practical interactive inside, what is my timetable look like? How do I manage my time? And if anyone wants the QR code, there is also something is at the back. Thank you so much.

(Applause)

VIVIENNE TICO SALCEDO:

Hello everybody, I am Vivienne Tico Salcedo, I wear too many hats, some people may say. I am an impact officer with a not-for-profit and a Masters of education student in special and inclusive education but above everything, I am a teacher and a student. I am an Autistic teacher and students.

In many ways I sit at both ends of the table, being someone who is an educator and someone who is being educated and that is one of the reasons I'm here today. Today I will talk about how to teach Autistic University students. This is evidence-based and experience informed based on a booklet I wrote, available at the back which I highly recommend taking a copy of, if you are an educator. Or educator adjacent, or if you interact with anybody who is Autistic.

Now, before I get into the nitty-gritty, let's talk about why this booklet exists. First, while there are more People with Disability graduating from university, the number of Autistic graduates has dropped by almost 3% between 2018 to 2022.

Now, it's not like Autistic people disappeared, so what happened? We are either dropping out or failing out of our degrees and this can happen for a few different reasons. Autistic students are factually more likely than their peers to either fail the degree will not complete it for two main reasons. One are systemic issues and the other is university related or specific challenges.

We know a problem exists. A lot of it pertains to assessment design of the learning environment, and according to the Disability Discrimination Act and Disability Standards for students, from years ago, we as educators have the obligation to at least try and accommodate students, because they deserve the chance, just like their peers, to access the benefits of education. Regardless of the circumstance.

Also, the reason why this exists is that it was an assignment that I wrote for class that thankfully my professor quite liked, and the TIU was thankfully thinking of this something worthy to present to you today. So, now, let's have a look. The definition of Autism physical changes constantly because of research and discoveries. But it can broadly be defined and characterised by two things. Differences in difficulties in socialisation and repetitive behaviours or activities. It is here that I would like to tell you that factually, a lot of people think of Autism as something to cure, fix, because it is viewed as an illness or disease. It is here that I want to tell you, and I hope you understand that, as an educator, it may be better to take a more affirming stance. Being neuro affirming is understanding that what is a neurodiversity is a part of human experience and condition. It's not something to fix because it's not something wrong and as educators, this is the view we should take with students. What we do try to fix other challenges they experience in relation to their characteristics and symptoms at university.

What is at university can present itself as social difficulties, which make group projects and class discussions very difficult. You can also present as academic difficulties, because the restricted interest or repetitive behaviours make it difficult to engage in new learning, because they might be outside the realm of interest of the Autistic individual. I nearly failed quite a few courses in my first year, because the information presented to me just wasn't interesting. It wasn't the fault of anyone, it's just how my brain was made up.

These difficulties, as we can see, can impact motivation of the ability of the Autistic student to complete tasks and this is what we will try to address. This is where we are going to look at specific challenge areas. Specific challenge areas I have identified are group work and class discussions, because again, socialisation is something that is difficult, even for someone who is not disabled, icebreakers, be forced to be in a group is not a fun experience. Next is course delivery. We know some courses are structured in a way that makes it difficult. This is what is referred to as extrinsic cognitive load, the material is hard and the weights assigned makes it even harder.

The last challenge areas are presentation style assessments because those criteria there that is being graded on, such as body language, or communication, that for an Autistic student is already naturally difficult and that's what they are being marked on. That's where we talk about solutions and strategies.

Here is what we can do, everything I will say are practical solutions, so we know that they work, we just have to make sure we do them and we do them well. So, for group work and class discussions there are two methods. First is modelling and the second is prompting. Modelling can be done by demonstrating the site behaviour to increase ability over time and an example of this is that I have students in my classes who do not know how to give feedback and it seems like a simple ask, and that is giving feedback to your classmates and peers. I usually hear silence and insert myself and go, when you give feedback I would so love it if you do this, and I demonstrate it.

This where they can see what I'm doing, they can mimic it and copy and model it over time. The first attempts are usually unsuccessful, but because they have seen an example, they are now able to see what is good and correct and copy it. Over time it becomes more and more successful. Sometimes all they need to see as an example. 

The second thing is prompting a specific program. I do this when they need to continue speaking today feeling they can continue speaking or if it's time to stop I can raise my hand. These are gestural cues so they know if it's time to keep going or time to stop. A common gesture I personally use i might s the thumbs up so they know they are doing a good job and when they know they're doing a good job, they are more motivated to repeat the same behaviour because they know it is acceptable. There are two methods for the course delivery. For technology, use technology to your advantage. You and your students need recordings or things of the like because it does benefit you. Here at UNSW, use Echo 360. If you are a lecturer, I beg, please use the echo 360 platform. It is so important to record your lectures. The main reason being if you are an autistic student, I am one, my sensory needs sometimes mean that I cannot be in the lecture theatre, and it's because I specifically have auditory sensitivities. If I am in a room full of say 100 students, I can hear them breathing, moving. I can almost hear them blinking which means I can't listen to the lecture so near the recording so can listen to it in my own time and absorb the information in the way another person might be able to even though they didn't have the same sensory sensitivities.

Next our official supports, concrete accusatory information about the course, the activities and expectations. You could have a schedule, list, a checklist that clearly states what you expect from your students. This is an actual screenshot from one of my lectures which was one of my favourite lectures because every week they showed me what I had to do. They show me what I had to read and submit and do in that week. It gave me less information to process. I didn't have to scan tens of documents to find what I needed to do. I had less to pass so I had less distress about. This is why visual supports are very important.

Lastly, presentation style assessments. My recommendation here is video modelling. In a similar way to modelling, you show people videos of what you expect them to do and demonstrate good and bad presentations that align with the marking rubric so they understand what you expect to see. As a person who doesn't always know or understand the nuance of gesticulations, it's important because presentations were once the pain of my existence. The rubric said they will graduate and good body language. People who are Autistic do not understand that naturally. We process socialisation is in body language in a manner that is different. What might be good for you is not something I understand to be good so it is necessary because it makes things less vague. It makes us understand what we want to be able to do for you and what you want to see from us. It's here that I have to acknowledge all these suggestions might feel simple or small, but that is the thing. They're so simple we might forget how impactful they could be for a person who might think differently to us but I also understand that I don't want people to do something for nothing, so here is why you should do it. The benefits are perhaps we might have more autistic graduates because they might pass their assessments better and maybe will have increased academic achievement.

There are more factors that affect someone's ability to graduate from university. They can say for certain is, once an academic does something to help a student, it creates a better student experience as we will live learning and that should be more than enough reason to be able to do these things. For an autistic student, feeling seen and heard is everything. I hope that you take this opportunity to help your students thrive at university, not just survive because they deserve that opportunity to. Thank you.

PROF MIRA KIM:

Thank you colleagues and friends for being here. I would like to introduce personalised learning as a pathway to inclusive education. I am from the School of Design and Architecture. We have a large population of students at UNSW, at least more than 30% of total student population from 130 countries. How about their learning experiences. Are they thriving and happy or are many of them struggling with learning difficulties, feeling depressed?

International students sadly face many difficulties, challenges, and this is well documented in many studies. For example, in a study in 2016, it reported international students in Australia encountering cultural differences, alienation, social exclusion, racial discrimination, financial pressure and homesickness. Most of all, they experience a language barrier. Language barriers can exacerbate these challenges, leading to academic difficulties, social exclusion and psychological distress.

When students express this negative emotions and don't know how to manage these negative emotions, a vicious cycle can occur. They feeling anxious and then it becomes even harder to engage. Disengagement will make it even more difficult to make progress. Without progress they start to lose confidence and feel depressed.

This is the context that motivated me to create the personalised English language enhancement. I was really grateful to get a generous support from the University 2016. I was building on the pedagogical model that I had developed in my talking to students and it was an effective pedagogy so it became, and these are different things available for cohorts across UNSW and university.

The peer model works in this way, students analyse their linguistic needs within specific context to be able to communicate better and develop their personal projects and then implement it for a certain period. Along the way is, teachers provide a scaffolding creating a warm and supportive learning environment with peer mentors to complete the course earlier and come back to the community again.

Assessment tasks are designs for this cycle. The first one is personalised project design, and this is a blueprint for students to enhance the English communication skills, and in this process, we reframed English learning from a communicative perspective. For example academic writing is a communication between the tutor and the students and the students are encouraged to think about what holds them back from effective communication so that's how they designed their personal project, and they record their daily activities and students have to do their personal project every single day except the weekend and have to record their activities and we have a learning festival where students share their biggest gains and the last assignment is that project evaluation questions, they have to present quantitative and qualitative data to measure their progress. This is how it works.

I was really curious about the efficacy of this approach for international students, so I collected data from surveys and focus groups and I published the findings based on the data that I collected. I collected from 447 students. This is one of the most striking findings. Students focus on a very particular aspect of linguistics, but how come they feel much more confidence across speaking, writing and reading? Not only in academic contexts but daily communication as well. What is most important is Harriet talked about self advocacy, and asking for help is really difficult. For students, self-efficacy, asking for help in developing strategies for language enhancement, increases significantly and also the self-efficacy and class participation in group work also improves significantly. As a significantly because these findings has a value smaller than 0.01, which means it doesn't really happen by chance, but will show the significant impact of this program on student learning. This is another way of showing the same data. More than half of students improved reported improved confidence in writing, by one, two, three on a five-point scale and this is a really significant.

In later studies we compared PELE students and non-PELE students, and at the very beginning, PELE students reported a lower self-efficacy, especially in English and self-directed learning. But at the exit point, students either matched the scores of the students or surpassed. This is what we find out from undergraduate students, and what is also interesting is in well-being and sense of belonging, PELE and non-PELE students were similar and in the end the PELE improved a lot more than non-PELE.

And similar performance in HDR groups and also PhD coursework students. Even PhD students, supervisor noticed significant improvement in the supervised PhD students confidence, fluency and willingness to communicate and taking initiative and presentation skills. This is a comparison of average improvement from entry to exit for undergraduate students. As you can see, the students reported significant gains in confidence in PELE in English for all the variables but non-PELE students didn't really show much progress in all the variables.

This is an geriatric, this is postgraduate PhD students, and undergraduate students, all the variables are strongly correlated, only in PELE group but not in the non-PELE group. This is undergraduate students after HDR students. This is a breakdown PELE and non-PELE of the schools. The entry point, was similar but in the exit point PELE well-being scores is higher than non-PELE in all 14 islands. Similar patterns in HDR.

What we consistently observe in PELE is of course the vicious circle becomes a virtual circle. When students feel safe, they are more willing to engage, and when they engage more, they improve their competence. With increased competence, their confidence is increased and they become very active in community building, that's what we see every single time when we teach PELE.

Through this process, I just realised that personalised learning can be an effective pedagogy to achieve progress for all but there are three essential conditions to be met. The first one is psychological safety. Students feel much safer when their individual needs and different starting point in different learning styles are respected rather than being viewed as semantics.

The other one is autonomy. Self-directed learning with autonomy. When they are given the choice how they want to do it, like breaking down tasks into manageable bite -sized chunks and developing healthy habits to do certain things on an everyday basis.

We introduce a lot of resources and methods as well and they become really active community builders. And they want to give it back to the community, what they learn from the PELE community and these conditions are in line with human basic psychological needs, according to the self-determination theory.

According to the theory, all human beings have three psychological needs, one is autonomy, second is competence and relatedness. So I believe this experience, like 10 years of teaching and research, in and about PELE convinced me that this is personalised learning which can be a really effective pedagogy for progress for all at UNSW, and beyond. Thank you, this is the references, and you can scan this QR code for the PELE website and PELE community YouTube videos. Thank you.

(Applause)

DR GERALDINE TOWNEND:

Good afternoon, it's a pleasure to be here and share some information about a subject that is so important to us all. My teaching philosophy is very simple. Every student deserves to be seen, and to be catered for. And to be included.

That is it. And today I'm going to talk about equity, have a nudge at some of the complexities of learning styles and learning needs, and supportive strategies. And supportive strategies are all highly accessible on our platforms at UNSW, so I am going to introduce some of those ideas today. So first, equity.

We are all equal, but we are not all the same. And that is how I premise all of my inclusion. I like to bridge theory to practice, I'm from the School of education, and therefore modelling, which has been discussed earlier by earlier speakers, is very important to model how we can bridge theory to practice for my students to be able to take this into their schools with their students and their complex needs.

Secondly, the complexities of learners' needs. And my goodness, they can be very complex. We can have so many variations. My particular area of expertise is around high ability and where it intersects with disabilities impact learning, and also where it intersects with students who are neurodivergent.

We have needs across the University. And we can cater for these, quite simple, by including some very approachable strategies that are possible, even though we are so time poor. UDL, as Terry said in the opening welcome, Universal Design for Learning talks to the notion of independent learning and autonomy.

The idea that we can access, people can access content in very many ways, traditionally it was always lectures and readings. But what else can you do? There's so many different media forms available for people. People who have ADHD with hyperactive subtypes are not going to easily sit still and have a reading. But if a reading is in an audio format, as they are walking, they are consuming. And reading. And that is very, very accessible. I've worked with students that say "just let me walk and I will take it in. Just let me sit at the back of the class and move, I will take it in. Ask me to sit still, and it is not going to happen".

And also the assessment, which is being touched on by earlier talkers here. What are we assessing? Are we assessing concepts, and how they apply in particular contexts? And how applicable they are in real-world situations? How many different ways can you assess that using the same rubric? Of course, if you are assessing the ability to write an essay, somebody has to write an essay. But if you are assessing concepts, applied to contexts, based on readings and background information, different ways of showing knowledge is very important.

So, how can we do this? First of all, I do something that I find is really accessible. During lectures, cognitive load can get very high, and students need to move, or talk or just have an interruption. So, in pairs, small groups or individually, I might do a quiz.

The worst outcome of quiz is that it can be reinforcing of how much knowledge an individual has gained and that's a very positive outcome. I might do a Kahootz pallets, Mentimeters, all these things are free and ubiquitous online are very accessible. I can do it face-to-face or online lecturing.

With particular disabilities or disorders that impact learning, such as what we used to call dyslexia, things like that, and also with students who identify as neurodivergent, such as Autism, ADHD, there seems to be a common thread that runs through, and it is around executive function, organisation, and Vivienne earlier actually talked to that cognitive load, so what I aim to do is, using simple features, is reduce that cognitive load around organisation. The first thing I do, for every single week, left-hand side, second one down, Checklist.

That is a checklist of what students know they have to cover for the week. I don't take it, it's for them. They find the feedback is that it is very reassuring, and it is so easily integrated. The other thing I do around organisation, cognitive load, is examples, templates. This is a template we put together in a tutorial once, all of us. And that template went online. Of course, my aim was to help people who are neurodivergent to help them organise their ideas and thoughts.

But other people came back to me, people who were juggling careers or caring for other people or had not been to university for decades, or even with just plain overwhelmed, found this really helpful, it's a place to start.

I also put up accessible examples, they can be from previous assessments that have been submitted with permission, and I have their work examples so I put my feedback in there. I don't put too many are, I don't want to overwhelm people, but it is just enough and if people email me for more, I will send them a version of that period again, all accessible, all on Moodle.

The other thing I did, and it's something, it's the same format on my Moodle. Start with a checklist, it's the readings in the lecture link, lecture slides, lecture recording, collaboration exercises and any results from the collaboration exercise, any forums, exactly the same each week. It helps with organisation and helps reliefs cognitive load and helps with engagement because people know where they are at and what is expected and they can engage more and that's what we need, engagement. All this is to enhance engagement.

So, building on that engagement idea, I very often use guest speakers in my course. Thank you. Guest speakers. And it helps the students relate to the real-world context in which they are going to work. And modelling, the use of simulations, and the use of assessments that can be used directly, the next day if they want in their classrooms.

Like I said earlier, these strategies can help everyone in our classes. They are effective and inclusive. And they are particularly supportive and they are very simple, and supportive of those students who really do need and want executive function support.

So I encourage you to lean into any professional learning, any Moodle platforms you can access, any UDL forums. These are not just tools but catalysts for change. And we are here to help optimise our students' outcomes.

And if you think of the hundreds of thousands of students you work with over the very many years, that's a lot of impact on student outcomes. That shapes futures. And after all, that's why we do this work. Thank you.

(Applause)

DR ANASTASIA SHAVROVA:

Hi, everyone. We are going to do a little bit different of a presentation. What Sarah and I have done is, we are working on a podcast for a course so what we will do is run a podcast episode of what we were thinking to do for that course. A podcast of a hard cast. I am Dr Anastasia Shavrova, a lecturer in the School of biological earth and environment sciences and a science communicator.

DR SARAH BAJAN:

I am in the school of biomolecular sciences and I was convening a course called commercial biotechnology and that is the course that we just developed this podcast for.

DR ANASTASIA SHAVROVA:

Can you hear me? Where is the microphone? Did I speak loud enough? Sarah, why do you choose a podcast platform for your course?

DR SARAH BAJAN:

Following on from last talk about engagement and giving students different formats of content to consume, the course traditionally had traditional lectures, on class tutorials. So we wanted to have another format which the students might find more engaging.

As like you Anastasia, as a colleague, and I knew she had a science communication arm, when thinking about things we could add to the course that might tick those boxes, I thought a podcast would be a good idea.

And there were also practical considerations, this course was delivered by a lot of guest lectures from the biotechnology industry and organising those very busy people to be available at a specific time of the year and in a scheduled class, could present scheduling issues. Several practical purposes, having someone pre-recorded that we could do online or in person or on campus, which could be edited, so everyone was happy with the product, seemed like a really good idea.

DR ANASTASIA SHAVROVA:

Wonderful, and what inspired you to do a podcast episode for the course?

DR SARAH BAJAN:

As mentioned, the guest lecturers that contributed came from the biomedical industry and they had been contributing to the course since its inception. At the time the guests really reflected what the biotechnology industry look like at the time of the speakers invited were not very diverse.

So many of our contributors were of the same gender, same ethnicity, not reflecting the student cohort. In order to try and increase diversity of the guest speakers we had, I wanted to try and expand who we invited and get more of a different kind of voice about their experience of, including their own personal backgrounds and experiences contributing to their experience in the biotechnology industry.

DR ANASTASIA SHAVROVA:

Wonderful, from my perspective I run podcasts in another course of mine and from the student perspective I find it very accessible platform. As Geraldine mentioned, students love the accessibility of gone for a walk and listening to a pod cast episode, and they do retain things more because it tends to be a conversation with the expert that you are interviewing. Like what we're experiences, these topics can be more vulnerable and students appreciate that. What kind of people of you had so far in the podcast? 

DR SARAH BAJAN:

We've only recorded one but several we've invited, one is a doctor that is in the biotechnology industry, starting her own company when she was just 22 years old so fresh out of finishing her undergraduate degree and since then she has had a number of roles in biotechnology and part of her job, she enjoys mentoring and coaching other young women in the field so we thought she would be a wonderful first guest to have on because she can be a really good connection for students who are interested in the fact I just got an email yesterday introducing her to one of my former students who wanted to have more mentors in that area, so while I do have that one-on-one ability to introduce students to people I know, I think having these kind of podcasts where they can have these more personal approaches so they can be introduced to people who may become future employers or mentors as a mortar broad approach that I can do from just emailing people happen to know.

We've also been planning to invite other people like a couple of Indigenous Australians that we hope to invite on, so people like Darragh Lyons who started a company that's been using Indigenous knowledges that is observed that biotechnology, and a company was started called Ochre Sun which was the ability of some native flora to have components within the connector's natural sunscreen so they built a biotechnology company up in Queensland about that.

DR ANASTASIA SHAVROVA:

Wonderful and how accessible is been implementing this into your course? Is it been difficult for you to get started and get off the ground? Or has it been slightly easier than getting people in for a lecture? 

DR SARAH BAJAN:

The ability and scheduling to prerecord according to people's schedules has been good. With recording, it's been difficult. I had to learn that there are no slides. We had a couple of slides I wanted to make sure that if students wanted to watch something, then, so getting my head around more traditional forms, something from Anastasia is much more well-versed in podcasts, the audio medium and enthusiasm you have to have in your voice and those kinds of things, being a bit more of an entertainer was a learning curve but having her there was brilliant because she could lead the way with that so I think that is why we put this together as a project and hopefully the students will appreciate the different aspect of delivery.

DR ANASTASIA SHAVROVA:

Wonderful, can you tell us more about your slides because we have a wonderful poster that Kate helped us make and over there you can find a QR code of a template of slides that we use for every single guest. Can you tell us more about what's included in those slides?

DR SARAH BAJAN:

They just introduce a bit more about who the person is, the journey that they've had through biotechnology. And they can add some photos, so students can have an idea of what the aspects of the industry they are hoping to enter, and just the lastly just connection details, if they want to be connected on LinkedIn. I struggle to listen to podcasts, I like to have something to look at, I am learning that I'm a visual learner. Just something to accompany the conversation and the podcasts, we thought it might be helpful if those slides are a very simple template that can be developed to any kind of guest talk.

DR ANASTASIA SHAVROVA:

And of course guests have been very open to connecting and helping the students out and everyone is happy to connect with students went on LinkedIn or via email. Last but not least, what are the implications beyond the course for this project?

DR SARAH BAJAN:

I think one of the main things is that the students feel that they do have the opportunity to have that career in biotechnology. I think a lot of the courses especially in my school, we push research a lot onto them and a lot of the students don't necessarily want to do that in the future and they crave the connection with industry, and I think my course is one of the few that is perhaps available to help them do that so if they can visualise themselves in that field, they can see people that have a similar background to them, that can hopefully be a really great outcome. I think having the more accessible form of delivery, hopefully the students can connect with that and engage with that more than they might do with traditional lectures but we have yet to get any data about that so we will be releasing the podcasts in T1 of next year and hopefully we will be able to get some metrics and engagement and student interest in that and have more concrete detail to share with you at a future time.

DR ANASTASIA SHAVROVA:

As we were mentioning we have template slides as well as template outlines for how to run a podcast because I have run so many and we kind of have those housekeeping things, how to get yourself started and how to edit a podcast and things like that, that we will have available for people across the faculty at the University if other academics or staff members would like to start something like this in the course so we are always happy to chat and help out anybody in the University. Thank you everybody.

DR SAMANTHA FURFARI:

I'm going to be finishing up the session talking about inclusive practical design. My name is Samantha but I prefer to be called Sam. I'm located in the Department of Chemistry. I will talk to you today about things I have taken with me from the University of York which before I moved back to UNSW, that's where I was before last year. Oddly enough all of this came out from a City University of York moving from a trimester system to a semester-based system so I'm hoping that talking about this now will maybe give a few things to think about as we start another journey of semester-isation here at UNSW.

A bit about myself, I am a first-generation student with lived experiences and structural and cultural barriers that face students at university. I genuinely believe that the lab is a space for growth, something I'm specialising in. It's not just about growing technical skills but also allowing students to build up those transferable skills and really trying to make sure that they can use that problem-solving aspect to take them through regardless of whether they decide to do chemistry or go forward from there.

I'm quite committed to inclusive educational design, also looking at decolonisation and ensure we are creating material that caters for students who are neurodiverse.

I want to focus on students confidence when they're in the lab and building that. It seems to be a place where students get most anxious because you can't hide in the lab in the same way you can in your more traditional formats of lectures and tutorials so I want to focus on making sure we are building the confidence and encouraging the collaboration, focusing on that as a core aspect, and really redefining success and what it means to be a successful person in STEM and really challenging the ideas of who actually belongs in a STEM based career.

Why inclusive design matters is because it's about fostering a supportive learning environment. If we have inclusive design in chemistry labs in particular, which is my focus, supporting students' growth in confidence and a sense of belonging in STEM. Part of that is making sure we are creating practices and any kind of supplementary information that we give them to help support diverse learners. Then redefining this sort of success in making sure we've got equitable learning for all students as we go through, particularly when you think of a lot of traditional science subjects like chemistry, physics and maths, has a very narrow definition of what success is so we're trying to challenge those as we go through.

These are the principles and frameworks that we were using when we were redesigning a practical curriculum course. We were making sure that we had this neurodiversity framework in mind, so making sure that we had a diverse curriculum that supports a diverse range of needs through cognitive and also as they are carrying out stuff in the lab as well. Students in my experience, particularly when they are in the lab, get a lot of understanding to the practical hands-on experimentation and also building in that reflection of what went right and what went wrong, what we can improve on next time. So I really value the students as partners and I would probably widen that out not to just be about students but also making sure we are bringing in technical staff, demonstrators that are in the lab as well because they have a very different experience being a lot closer to the students then sometimes I have as well and I found it really beneficial to have students' collaboration in shaping the curriculum and also helping us design our live experiences, because it's different when you are the expert on the subject and what you kinda think about is assumed knowledge is very different from the student perspective on that, so it's been valuable and it's really enriched our curriculum by working with students in a practical sense. Critical theory is looking at how we can make sure that the lab space starts challenging those sort of dominant narratives, particularly in chemistry and where it's a very white European focus on what is success in chemistry.

Part of when we were designing this was also making sure we had authentic assessment tasks. A lot of the lab assessments tend to be very report driven and what we are trying to do was making sure we had a diverse assessment that starts to mimic real-world practices that they would meet after they finish that the undergraduate labs and I'm a big advocate for the spiral curriculum so it's really making sure that when we introduce practical skills, that we revisit those skills and then build up that complexity over time so that when they get to the final year, that they really got the real basics down pat and we can introduce the complexity in a real deliberate manner.

These lessons that have come out of this as being able to design flexible learning strategies, and this is where the spiral curriculum really comes into play because by repeating skills and then building the complexity slowly, it means students have a chance to learn and also make mistakes, and build up confidence in those particular skills. What we also did is the lab can be quite loud at times, there can be a lot of sensory challenges for students that are neurodiverse. We started moving our pre-lab briefings to an online format beforehand and it gives you a bit more context on what the experiment is and also talk about the safety information and implications for the chemicals that they would be using and this was quite beneficial because it also then allows students to get into the lab and start, they didn't have to wait for the academic to talk about what they were going to be doing in the labs. It meant we could have a bit of a stagnant start.

I think the biggest change we made that had a big impact, particularly on student anxiety and the labs was moving to these formative lab days. So rather than having some measure of assessment in every lab, a report or similar, we moved to these kind of low pressure systems that would allow the students to build their confidence in those technical skills as they go through and then building up some formative tasks that would eventually lead to a summative piece of work, but it was more designed with learning in mind for this formative lab days. Where we went about changing some of the assessment structure, it was around this assessment for learning. We had these direct skills and observations that for anyone familiar with the medical field, at least this is in the UK, is that there are certain competencies that the students had to demonstrate to show they had learned that particular skill so it meant that this was done under probably more exam like conditions so it would come in and be observed by a trained demonstrator or member of staff to show they had proficiency.

The important thing was that they had met these skills at least three or four times in the semester previously so we know that they would have had a chance to practice those skills as well. We also start introducing multiple-choice quizzes because one of the things that was really lacking in assessment was the understanding of students' practical theory.

We also had a portfolio assessment, more reflective of what they would have to present in a paper if they went on to do some work. And we also had a more balanced approach to their assessment. More formative structures that would lead up to their formative methods to ensure they got the appropriate feedback before tackling their summative work. So we also introduced reflective writing, sorry reflective practice in scientific writing in a staggered way. One of the things we have with the report structures, we didn't actually teach them how to write scientific well.

This allowed us to design tasks where students submitted feedback and then we provide a cohort wide feedback so students could see examples of common mistakes and good practice, and allow them to build up in that way. We also again built in a reflective practice into the post lab work so they were thinking about what they were doing as they went through.

This meant students have structured feedback as they went through which allowed them to boost confidence in tackling summative tasks. Sorry about the animation there (Laughs) the other thing we did was integrating the Student Voice and feedback integration. We were really deliberate making sure we could include a Student Voice, and so it allowed us to tackle problems. Sometimes it was very much, we had more equipment in the lab, which is not always easy to tackle. But it also allowed us to address, close, a feedback loop and address concerns as we went through.

Again, it helps empower students to have an interest in their own education as they went through. In terms of the outcomes and impact, we saw great student engagement when we started introducing more formative tasks. And they went to a much higher performance in the summative tasks, which is always great to see. We saw a massive reduction in student anxiety tackling this as well which is great to see.

And also we got some external validation, which is always nice. Through the Royal Society of Chemistry. It also just allowed us to showcase that you can be inclusive in a practical design as you go through. For those who are going to start their own journey and looking at practical curriculum science, I would look at a backward mapping approach. Start with where you want, the skills you want your graduates to have, and map it out. I highly recommend a phased rollout because inevitably things go wrong, as you go through, and it's important to get the student feedback as you go through. I could not have done any of this work without a really collaborative team, so again, it helps everyone have, if they have input in the project as you go through, allowing that monitoring as we went through, allowed us to make sure we were getting a really nice effective curriculum at the end.

These people help support along the way, the teaching and scholarship team and the technical team helping with more practical aspects. And wonderful summer interns that allowed us to get some really great practical is at the end. Thank you very much for your kind attention.

(Applause)

PROF. JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

Thank you to all the speakers. And I mentioned at the start, if you have questions for any of them, save them for the end, and bring them out now.

There will be a roving mic going around, I think, and we should have another mic up the front for relevant people to respond to the questions. Can I ask if anybody in the room has questions for any of the presenters at the moment? Don't all rush at once! Is there anything online?

SPEAKER:

I'm trying to multitask, there have been a few questions... The first one for Harriet, going chronologically, "when creating the Inclusive Teaching guy, what was your biggest challenge?".

DR HARRIET RIDOLFO:

Thank you, the biggest challenge, I think we wanted to be succinct. And we also, if I say, use the expression lowest common denominator, we were thinking about a casual academic who might have no agency over their curriculum, assessment, but could still pick up things they can do in their teaching style. But we wanted to make it manageable.

So I think it was, making it credible, having all that evidence-base at the centre and ending up with a small, practical artefact.

SPEAKER:

For Vivienne, noting it was a powerful presentation. Do you have any plans to expand the work, or future plans?

VIVIENNE TICO SALCEDO:

Funnily enough, I'm currently taking a course on intellectual disability and advance behaviour strategies and is asking me to make another booklet as an assessment. So, one, it's mandatory for me. But I do think, in terms of just focusing on career, this is something I do want to pursue. Currently, I am a Research Assistant and Neuroinclusive Designer, and I work with the team. There are researchers here at the campus currently being built regarding how to make assessments better, how to make students feel more included and like they belong here. I'm quite lucky to be involved in that. For now, it's just a teaching guy but there is a world where more of these things, perhaps for students with intellectual disabilities, from different backgrounds, perhaps these guys will exist. I know there are currently resources, so I might be an extension, because a lot of the work that is this is really good work.

SPEAKER:

I do have more online. I will see if I can pick one more, because I'm conscious of time. Everyone has been so diligent paying attention. "About the podcast, what feedback from other educators and academics have you received about the podcast, they willing to embrace or do they need persuading?"

DR ANASTASIA SHAVROVA:

Wonderful question, I've had quite a few academics come up to me saying, "this is something I really want to get started in my course, please help me out". And then it takes a 30 minute meeting with them just to get them started, and they feel very confident, and they realise how simple it is to get started. And how little work, how little behind-the-scenes work they really do have to do. So yes, I have had very, very positive feedback.

Sarah was one of the people who approached me, and it is snowballing, it is wonderful.

PROF. JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

For those of you who were too shy to ask your questions in person, we are going to have a refreshment break now. So, we will have the opportunity to speak to the speakers, they will hang around and have a well-deserved whatever, so you can ask them your questions personally.

I do want to end by thanking everybody who has been here today, audience, and the presenters, of course, who have been doing this work all through the year but have also put together their presentations for this event.

And we all know it's much harder to put together a 10 minute presentation than it is to put together a 30 minute one, because you have to be so tight and succinct, so I am grateful to all of you for keeping under that 10 minute limit, it was great. I didn't have to be nasty to anyone.

I really want to thank also, the Diversity Festival team who have helped put this event together. The A/V team who have helped in the background, and particularly Kate who has been running around the background doing all sorts of things, working on this and other events in Diversity Festival week for some time. Can we give a round of applause for Kate and the team.

(Applause)

And a quick reminder that the DIUU has another event coming up on Thursday at 2:30 PM in this room and that is going to be a discussion about diversity under threat and Keeping Disability Rights on the agenda, because I think all of us are noticing a kind of retreat from some of the progressive ideas and ideals about diversity and inclusion, and equity. Happening worldwide and in Australia.

So it's a general discussion about those phenomena, but focusing on, in the end, and how that is affecting disability in particular, and how, as I have said, we can keep the issue of disability rights in people's view. So, thank you all once again, please help yourself to the refreshments, which I believe, hope and trust are at the back of the room. Yes they are. Thank you.

David Gonski AC (Chancellor, UNSW)

Ladies and gentlemen, it's an enormous pleasure for me to welcome each and every one of you here. On behalf of the Australian Human Rights Institute and also the University of New South Wales, this is positively my favourite room. Unfortunately, it doesn't belong to the University of New South Wales, although I have to say there's some movement for the Australian Human Rights Institute to take it over.

Ladies and gentlemen, in welcoming you, we acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this wonderful room stands. We're talking here of the Gadigal people, and we absolutely pay our respects to their elders: past, present, and—in the case of a university—emerging.

It's a wonderful opportunity for me to be allowed, as Chancellor of the University of New South Wales, to welcome you. And I must say, I pushed a little bit to get this role, and many might say it was bestowed upon me, but I had to push. And why did I push? The reason I pushed is that the Australian Human Rights Institute, in my opinion, embodies so many of the things I value about the University of New South Wales. It's not just theoretical. It's basically a group that's come together to bring research together with arguments and ideas, to bring also the idea of actually championing ideas within the community and actually bringing some reform, if one can possibly do that these days.

We are enormously, enormously impressed by the work that the Institute's already done. Those of you who've followed it will know that they've already done wonderful work on Australia's Modern Slavery Act. They've highlighted Australia's significant impact on climate change from fossil fuel exports, and they've addressed gender inequalities and inequities in health and medical research. And so here they are again, looking this time at the pursuit of diversity and inclusion. The big question is: is it dead?

I want to also say, if I may, that I was asked to give a plug for the Global Student Fellowship. Now, one of the things that happens to chancellors is often they're asked to do things, and then they don't trust them, and then they put on a very good movie that does it for you. But there were a few things that weren't said. And I think through modesty, there were 20 positions offered in the last 12 months or so, and there were 200 applicants for it.

And when Justine, who I'll introduce to everybody who knows her in a second, basically looks around for funding, she does that from philanthropic sources, and she's worked at ways of doing it. And for those who know her, you know you can't say no to Justine. But if you do know anybody who can help, this is a need. This is a need that's fantastic for people who want to work in human rights. This is a need which is fantastic for students who want to see other aspects of life.

I'm really proud that our university is associated with this. I think that this provocation series, which is being launched tonight, is just what the community needs. We need to chat about things, and I've been lucky—I've been talking to some of the people who are going to be talking to you tonight. And boy, they've got a lot to say. But also it's well worth listening to, particularly when they comment and say how good UNSW is.

Ladies and gentlemen, my final role here tonight is to introduce Justine Nolan to you. I'm pretty sure that all of you know her better than I know myself. Justine is the Director of the Australian Human Rights Institute. She's also a Professor in the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales. In her part-time, she sits on the Council of the University and torments the Chancellor whenever she can. She's globally recognized—not for tormenting the Chancellor, but for her work and connections between business and human rights. She works closely with government, companies, international institutions, and NGOs. And in my opinion, she's a first-rate person. Over to you, Justine.

Professor Justine Nolan

Thank you, David. Good evening, and welcome to the launch of the Australian Human Rights Institute's annual event series: the new Provocation Series that we're launching tonight with the question of 'Is the pursuit of diversity and inclusion dead?'

Thank you so much for coming out in this weather. Human rights is all about building resilience, so you're now part of the club. Thank you so much to David for opening our event tonight and setting the bar so high on speaking with content and humour. It is true I have been tormenting him for the last three years, and it's fair to say that my probably diverse opinions have sent him to the edge many times. But he has built resilience. And it's no relation to my role on the Council, which is why he is stepping down shortly from UNSW. He just says it's years of torment.

So thank you, David, for joining us tonight in this beautiful space. I'd also like to begin by acknowledging and paying our respects to the Gadigal people, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which we're meeting tonight. And in particular, recognize their enduring connection—of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people—to country for the sake of future generations. I think we all know that we need to do a lot more than pay respect.

This country has always been a place of teaching and learning and knowledge sharing. And as we open our discussion on diversity and inclusion, we should also begin by recognizing that the impacts of colonization are ongoing. That true inclusion in Australia must prioritize justice for First Nations people, including embracing their leadership on the issues we're going to draw out tonight.

So tonight we're talking about whether the pursuit of diversity and inclusion is dead. And this topic couldn't be more timely. Obviously, I haven't been speaking to Trump and asking him to put out new executive orders each week, but he's been doing that on our behalf. And we've also had members of our own political parties making contributions in that way as well. Across the world in the last year, six months, longer than that—particularly in the United States, which we'll talk about—we've seen global politics shifting, and there's been a pushback against greater discussion around things like diversity.

So tonight, some of the issues we're going to touch on are around whether the state of diversity and inclusion—whether it is dead or it's simply evolving into something else. What impact is there for Australia from these global political shifts? And in particular, the role of government, business, and media and how they're reacting to it.

So we have a fantastic panel with us tonight to debate these issues. And I should say at the start that we are obviously down one panellist, if you registered or looked at who should be here. We were going to be joined by Professor Nareen Young, who is a workplace diversity expert at UTS. She also brings a very unique perspective from First Nations perspective and culturally diverse heritages. Unfortunately, her flight has been scheduled and cancelled five times today. So she's had a lovely stay at the airport since 11 a.m. So she's very distressed that she's not here. She's a great person, and we're sorry that she couldn't join us today. But not to play down Nick, Sally, and Hugh—we have with us three great people.

So, in the middle, we have Sally Sitou, who's been the Federal Member for Reid since 2022. She's the daughter of Chinese parents who fled Laos because of the Vietnam War. And she has spoken passionately about the education and work opportunities that her family has been able to pursue while in Australia. Before entering politics, she held a—brought together an organization called the Mosaic Network, which brought together staff from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. Unfortunately, it was at the University of Sydney, but otherwise it was all good.

To my right is Nick Bryant, who has had a very distinguished career with the BBC, and he became to be regarded as one of its finest foreign correspondents. An American specialist, he's reported on the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden. He's the author of a number of books, including one, ‘When America Stopped Being Great: A history of the present.’ And that wasn't this year, by the way. He's written for a huge range of newspapers, including print media, The Economist, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Policy and our own local Sydney Morning Herald.

And finally on the far right, Hugh de Kretser, who is the president of the Australian Human Rights Commission. Hugh doesn't need made much introduction to a human rights crowd. For more than two decades Hugh has played a critical role in Australia in advancing human rights. Prior to joining the commission, he was in charge of the Europe Justice Commission in Victoria and the Human Rights Law Centre in Melbourne. He's worked for a wide range of human rights organisations, and at the very beginning of his career, all his way back, advised companies about anti-discrimination law, as well.

So let's get started. And let me just give you a little bit of background before I throw my first question out.

So in April this year, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said in a speech at an American university, "Diversity and inclusion policies create a level playing field after centuries of systemic racism and misogyny." He said that real equality means reckoning with history and actively addressing the injustices that are embedded within our system. What he said is that we need to have some hard conversations around issues like diversity and what inclusion really looks like.

In our own country, we saw this debated a little bit in the lead up to this year's federal election. Then-opposition leader Peter Dutton condemned what he called the "woke agenda." He said he wouldn't stand in front of an Indigenous flag if elected. He vowed to cut funding and eliminate cultural diversity staffers among the public service. He had plans to cut down on the "woke curriculum," where he said kids were being indoctrinated with something that's the agenda of others. So obviously that didn't work out quite so well for him. But nevertheless, we know that there's a lot of issues that are still very much live in Australia and globally.

So starting in the US, I think it's worth looking at the US first before we come back to Australia. President Trump has taken what some might call a strong position on issues around diversity. So within days of taking the presidency, he ordered the elimination of government diversity programs. He ordered that only two sexes—male and female—should be recognized. He confirmed transgender members of the military would be removed, and he announced that, for the first time in history, the US would have an official language: English. Now we're not even going to get started on the Gulf of America.

The Pentagon has ordered military leaders to review all the books in their library that address racism and sexism, and the Smithsonian museums are madly searching the content to ensure that they are replacing any content that has diverse or ideologically driven language with what they say is unifying, historically accurate, and constructive descriptions. Trump has commented that they spend too much time on the bad aspects of slavery. The good aspects would be quite short, but we'll come to that.

And then just yesterday, we saw the US Supreme Court hand down a decision that supported immigration raids targeting people based on their race and language, which one of the dissenting judges said made Latinos fair game to be seized at any time. So we're going to start with the US, but it's not just the US that these issues have been happening. In Eastern Europe, we've also seen a crackdown on diversity, particularly based on race and sexual orientation. UNSW Professor Christy Newman has pointed to the dangers of these movements forging close connections with political leaders that provides legitimacy.

What we've seen happen, I think, in the last year is people saying the quiet bit out loud. So let's start, before we get to Australia, with the US. So, Nick, you've spent a lot of time in the US. What do you think has driven President Trump and his second administration to make this a driving force and a central policy of what's going on?

Nick Bryant

Yeah, that's a great question. Before I answer it, can I just say some of the nice things about UNSW that I said in private, in public. I think it's brilliant that we're having this conversation. I think you could not have this conversation at a better time. I think it's brilliant that you're having a diversity festival. I think it's brilliant that you're kicking off this whole program of events.

And UNSW—one of the reasons why it's now one of the top 20 universities in the world in the rankings—is because it is a campus bereft of ivory towers. It is a campus that has always been focused on practical solutions. It has always been a campus that wants to engage with the community. The very fact that we are not meeting tonight on the UNSW home turf, and we're out in the community, speaks to that.

Sally Sitou

Justine, give him a job already!

Professor Justine Nolan

I didn't send him any of that. But David, did you speak to him beforehand?

Nick Bryant

I'm not making a pitch to follow David as the Chancellor of UNSW, I promise you. 

Professor Justine Nolan

The job's open if anybody wants to apply tonight. The Provost is here—you can speak to him about it directly.

Nick Bryant

As to the question, look, in 2024 the American people were presented with the starkest choice in a presidential election that they've ever had. And that includes the election in 1860, which was before the Civil War. You had a Black woman who was the daughter of immigrants, who was a prosecutor—a lawyer—somebody who believes in the majesty of the law, up against a felon with a long history of racism, with a long history of misogyny, with a long history of nativism. Literally somebody who made his name in the political realm questioning the very legitimacy of Barack Obama, America's first African-American president.

And if, like me, you see in his election in 2016 that it was partly a backlash to having an African-American president—let's not be too reductionist about this. I'm not claiming everybody who voted for Trump was racist, and everybody hated the idea of an African-American president. I'm not claiming that at all. But it was an element. And some of the early support that Trump got, particularly, was from far-right groups who liked what he was saying about Barack Obama.

So how do you interpret his second win? I mean, one way of thinking about it is another backlash, this time against the racial reforms that came into place after the George Floyd summer. You remember, George Floyd was the African American who got murdered by the police in Minneapolis. And I think, to a certain extent, it was a reaction as well to some of the gains made by women after the MeToo campaign.

So that has emboldened Trump. And he won a very clear victory. I mean, given the choice between those two very different candidates, America did choose Trump. I mean, he won seven of the battleground states. He was the first Republican candidate in 20 years to win the popular vote. He didn't win more than 50%—I think that's really worth pointing out. He won 49.8%. And let's not exaggerate the scale of the victory in the same way that he does. It was not a landslide on the historical scale. It was a small win. Had 230,000 votes changed in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, we would be here tonight talking about America's first female president. So it wasn't a big win, but it was an emphatic win. It was a clear-cut win.

And that win emboldened him to do exactly the things that you have been describing. And one of the first acts was to sign that executive order. And I actually looked at the wording of it today, and there were so many executive orders that not only flourishes with a thing like this, but on the very first day, one of his very first acts—the Biden administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs going by the name Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) into virtually all aspects of the federal government in areas ranging from airline safety to the military. You know, he wipes all that history out with a flourish of his Sharpie pen.

Professor Justine Nolan

Well, that's the good news. So, Hugh, when you look at what's been going on—and it's hard to sort of ignore what's going on in America, it's so much in our faces all the time—how do you see that playing out in Australia? I mean, that was part of Dutton's playbook. But do you feel like it's broadened out into Australian society beyond that, post the election as well?

Hugh de Kretser

I think, yeah, yeah. We have to be really cognizant about the very different context in Australia, both legally, politically, and culturally. And, you know, following the Prime Minister's speech after the election where he said, "Let us join together," or words to that effect, and unify under Australia's enduring foundations of fairness, equality, and respect for one another—and he spoke about no one being left behind and no one being held back— and so there is a very radically different message coming from the leadership of this country compared to the leadership of America.

Against that context, let's be clear: we've just had rallies across the country. Melbourne, where I grew up and lived until recently, had neo-Nazis walking brazenly on the street. You know, there's explicit calls for "Australia for the white man." We had communities across the country—particularly Indian communities—feeling deeply unsafe and saying, "Should I go out this weekend?" across the country.

We've got anti-trans sentiment here in Australia. We've got Queensland whose paused public health treatment for trans kids. We've got rising racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Palestinian racism, anti-Arab racism. And we've got the impact of the voice referendum where Australians rejected what was a pretty modest proposal to give First Nations people a better say on things that affect their lives. So that's the context here in Australia.

I think when you look at the question for tonight—is diversity, equity, and inclusion dead?—no, of course it isn't. I look at things like the Respect at Work report that the Australian Human Rights Commission did about making our workplaces safer, more equal, and fairer, particularly for women, addressing sex discrimination and sexual harassment. That is a big shift across both the Morrison government and the Albanese government. They implemented every single one of those recommendations. We now have a positive duty for every employer in the country to eliminate, as far as practicable, sexual harassment, sex discrimination, and other unlawful conduct. And we're the regulator for that positive duty now.

So very different context. But those global winds, particularly for companies that have connections or headquarters in the US—I've spoken to people who work in those companies, and how it's had a chilling effect on their ability and what they say and do about human rights and equality issues.

Professor Justine Nolan

So, Sally, staying with the political environment: this year we elected the most diverse group of politicians ever sitting in Parliament at the moment. So on the face of it, we have a very diverse group. Do you feel, though, that means we're hearing those voices? Despite being—because one of the accusations around diversity and inclusion sometimes is that we tick boxes around it, we put people in positions, but we don't then listen to what they're saying. So what's your feeling around that in terms of politics at the moment?

Sally Sitou

I think one of the great things about this new parliament is that there is diversity from so many aspects—certainly cultural diversity, gender diversity—but also something that we haven't seen in politics in a long time: a diversity of ages as well. We've got the youngest senator at the age of 21, and we've got many who are Gen-Z, millennials. We've got two millennial cabinet ministers. And I think what that means is they bring different perspectives to the decision-making process.

But I'm going to be a bit contrarian here, and I'm going to say the term "diversity and inclusion"—I do think is dead. Not the concept—the concept I am fully supportive of. The term, though, I think we need to do a better job of explaining what this means. We need to do a better job of letting people know why this is important. And that is what I've been trying to do as a member of Parliament in one of the most diverse parliaments that we've got.

Because when we hear "diversity and inclusion," we have inherent good feelings about it—that this is going to mean we get better decision-making, that we lift people up, we think it means good things. But when others hear it, they attach a different meaning to it.

And my husband, he's a great litmus test for all things outside of politics. I think he voted Labor the very first time when he had to vote for me. But he listens to this kind of tech-bro American podcast called All-In. And there's a couple of common threads in these podcasts. One is the supremacy of the tech world to solve all problems. The other is like, how can you make more money?—which is kind of what he listens to it for. And then the third is they rail against, and they call it DEI. That's their shorthand for diversity and inclusion.

And their shorthand is: you're promoting people who don't deserve to be there. "We're having to try to get more women into tech when they're undeserving and they're not as good as us." So their framing of what diversity and inclusion is is totally negative.

But one of the hosts of this podcast is a guy who was an executive in Facebook, and he's made billions in smart investments. He's a Sri Lankan-born tech finance entrepreneur. And if you track his story, his family, down and out, had to survive on welfare in Canada, really struggled. But he came of age during the time of the Rodney King riots, and where he was living in Ontario, the government there had a program to help support young people who are of minority backgrounds. The program was all about: you got to get yourself a job, the government will pay your wage so that you're not a drain on that company. So he used that program to pitch himself a job at an investment company, and then springboarded that into extraordinary success.

He is someone who's directly benefited from a DEI program, but he rails against it for other people because the concept of DEI for them has become so narrowcast into this idea that we're promoting people above what they should be promoted, we're having to get women into the tech world. And so I guess what I would like to see is for us to stop using the words "diversity and inclusion" and be specific about what we mean by it.

Professor Justine Nolan

So, I love the music finishing you out there. And also thanks to the three American tech guys just sitting there who just saw the tech conference down the road. One of which is my husband. Thank you for joining us. 

Sally Sitou

We all love our husbands. 

Professor Justine Nolan

I know none of them voted for Trump, so that I can say.

But let's stick with that terminology a little bit, Nick. Do you see a big difference in the way diversity and inclusion is discussed here versus DEI in America?

Nick Bryant

Can I approach that question by telling a story?

Professor Justine Nolan

You're a journalist. You've never answered the question I've asked you.

Nick Bryant

That's exactly. No, it's the art of deflection. Four years ago, we arrived back in Australia, having been in the States, and we were staying in a quarantine hotel because it was the middle of Covid. And on the first Saturday morning, we heard this kind of muffled roar of a crowd down below. You know, "What's that?" It's actually an anti-lockdown protest. And we turn on the TV later and we saw them carrying Trump flags—you know, flags that we would ordinarily see in Mississippi or Michigan were being paraded in Sydney and then in Melbourne.

And at the time, the lockdowns for American conservatives became this real cause célèbre. You know, Tucker Carlson bemoaned the fact that the gun laws were so tight in Australia after Port Arthur that people couldn't take up arms against the government. You had Candace Owens, who is a right-wing talk show host, literally saying the US Marines should invade Australia to liberate the people. You had Ron DeSantis suggesting that America might break off diplomatic ties. And during that period, Donald Trump Junior tweeted, "Don't Australia my America."

And I remember thinking the complete opposite: "Don't America my Australia." And I think Australia has done that. I mean, one way of interpreting the victory of Anthony Albanese in this year's federal election was the Australians used an emphatically Australian democratic model to elect an emphatically Australian leader and reject the kind of Trumpism that was starting to emerge in the Liberal Party.

I don't think Peter Dutton was a Trump impersonator, by the way. I think he was a bit more like Ron DeSantis. There was a kind of joylessness about him.

Professor Justine Nolan

Worked out well for Ron as well.

Nick Bryant

 Yeah. I mean, you kind of need the personality to pull it off. And I think that's what Ron DeSantis found out. And I think—you know, I don't want to make a political point, that's just an observation—I think Dutton had that same problem. He just didn't have the personality to pull off Trump's policies. You need the kind of charismatic personality—he didn't have it.

And I think in other ways, too, Australia's saying we don't want to be too heavily influenced by what's happening in America right now. We don't want it in our politics. We don't want it in our corporate life. You know, we have built things here that we should try and safeguard, and it's not inevitable that we have to adopt the American way. And I think at the moment there's a kind of assertion, almost, of Australianness to say we will do things our way. We do not have to be overly influenced by what's happening in the States right now.

Professor Justine Nolan

But yeah, I mean, Hugh, do you also think it's partly—diversity and inclusion initiatives are very different from the way our anti-discrimination laws are set up as well. But we have this broad understanding. You've mentioned race and sex as well, and obviously age and disability rights. But do you think we think about it differently because we're coming from a different base or a bit different legal framework as well?

Hugh de Kretser

Yeah, I think those terms aren't very familiar—weren't very familiar—to Australians. And I completely agree with you, Sally, on the terminology and explaining it. Tim Soutphommasane, the former Race Commissioner—who's now at Cambridge—did some really interesting research in response to the Trump agenda, basically saying, "What do people in Britain think about DEI?" I think they call it "inclusion and diversity" (ID) in the UK.

And part of his conclusions from that was that the language we use is really important. People feel very nervous about saying the wrong thing and being castigated for that. People feel it's an "us and them." People feel that—and this is a broader critique—that human rights is for particular minorities, that's not for all of us. And so the message for people who care about human rights and equality—and note that I use those words instead of "diversity, equity, inclusion"—is one that we need to communicate much better.

And so if you look at the structure of the Human Rights Commission, for example, we have a Commissioner for Age, Sex, Disability Rights, First Nations, Children, and a broad-based Human Rights Commissioner. So it's sort of embodied in our structure, this idea of siloization. Why is that? Because they're the communities that are marginalized, who have suffered the so-called "special treatment." They've suffered the injustice. We have to stand with those communities and support them.

But we also have to address the critique and the kind of sentiment that drove Trump's election, I think, and followed it more. So the last time around. And that allows someone like Steve Bannon the last time around to say, "Let them call you a racist and wear it as a badge of honor." And that is tapping into this kind of sentiment, because there are people who say, "Well, the modern world is increasingly not for me." And we don't talk enough about class.

And I think a lot about my own background as a son of a Sri Lankan migrant. So in one sense, I tick a box for diversity checklist, if you like—person of color, culturally diverse background. And I grew up speaking English. And I've worked with people in human rights who are white men from deeply poor backgrounds who have disability and mental illness in their backgrounds. They have way more human rights lived experience than I do from the privileged background that I had.

And so for me, we need to have a much more sophisticated conversation about how to address equality issues and inequality. And we need to make sure that people do not feel left out of this change, which we absolutely need, and that we explain it properly why we need a level playing field. And I just finish by talking about an article a colleague of mine—a First Nations colleague and brilliant thinker and writer and speaker, Maina Singh, who is the Aboriginal Children's Commissioner in Victoria—and she wrote an article which you can look up online explaining why we should change the pension rules to allow Aboriginal people to access the pension at an early age because they're dying younger. And she talked about the critique of people getting this so-called "special treatment" and said, "For 200 years, we've got special treatment: our lands been stolen, our culture has been suppressed, our language has been banned, we've had stolen generations, etc. Expecting there to be a level playing field in the world for us, for First Nations communities, is ridiculous. That's why we need it." So we need to take the time and explain clearly.

Nick Bryant

Can I just jump in there and make a comment about how Trump weaponized DEI language? You know, one of the most effective ads that the Republicans ran during the campaign was the ad that said, "Trump is for you. Kamala is for they/them." So the use of those pronouns and turning them up—and it was incredibly effective, politically speaking. The ad just went off online, especially in the manosphere.

It's worth pointing out as well that, you know, Trump won a majority of white women in 2024. He won a majority of white women in 2020, a majority of white women in 2016—even after the Access Hollywood tape, he won a majority of white women. So it's not just the manosphere. And, you know, there are a lot of women who voted for Trump.

Kamala Harris was labeled a "DEI hire," you know. They are using this language in a way—they've weaponized it. And there is an absolutism on the left right now. There's a kind of "gotcha" if you don't get the—if you're not fluent in the language of intersectionality, you know, suddenly, and there is not kind of—and if you live in the Rust Belt and you feel like an economic casualty of a system of globalization, you know, the notion of white privilege doesn't mean a great deal to you either. You don't feel privileged.

So it's finding ways to come up with a new vocabulary, not be quite obsessed about how you apply the existing vocabulary. And in the workplace, I mean, there's a very strong economic case to make for diversity. You know, the McKinsey study is often quoted as showing that firms that embrace diversity just do a lot better, for obvious reasons.

So it's finding ways to counter that. My worry is that we'll end up making too many concessions to Trumpism. The Democrats faced a dilemma at the end of the early '90s. You know, how do you win back the White House? The Republicans basically had a lock on the White House since the late '60s, partly as a white backlash against the reforms of the civil rights movement, which were pursued by a Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson. You'll have heard of Richard Nixon's southern strategy.

The Republicans used the southern strategy repeatedly to dominate presidential politics. And Bill Clinton came along and thought, "How do we reverse this?" And one of the ways that he reversed it was in a couple of very symbolic ways in the 1992 campaign—he basically made it very clear: "We are not beholden anymore to African-Americans in the Democratic Party."

And my worry right now is that the Democrats will do something like that, and they will throw trans people under a bus, you know, something like that. There is this concern that, you know, the Democrats think Trump's just changed the field. And he has. And my worry right now is that too many concessions will be made to Trumpism.

Professor Justine Nolan

Yeah. So I mean, this issue of terminology, which you raised first, Sally, I think is really important. And also where, Hugh, you said that sometimes the problem of people being afraid of what to say or what to name it—that was actually raised in one of the podcasts that you talked about, Sally. I heard Zuckerberg discussing it with Joe Rogan this year when he said that, you know, "We've moved too far. It's got out of hand. And anything I say now might be reported to the DEI team." He's then fired the DEI team, so he's okay now.

But if we don't think about it in that language, but perhaps a sense of belonging—where does diversity inclusion come into that? And I was struck by—in your first speech to Parliament in 2022, you said that Australia had reached this stage of being a majority migrant nation, and that, you said, had just demonstrated a genuine embrace of modern Australia. But you also said in that speech that you had long had a hesitancy about where you belonged in Australia.

So from 2022 to 2025, and you look out where Australia is now in having these discussions around diversity, inclusion, do you still feel this hesitancy around belonging? Because there was also an article that Stan Grant wrote in 2023 where he said he was looking at a picture of himself as a seven-year-old, as someone who was looking out for a world where he didn't quite belong. And I was just wondering, you know, do you feel like that's changed for you?

Sally Sitou

Thanks for quoting my first speech back to me... We're gonna play it on the video after this. And there was a section of my first speech that I borrowed from George Megalogenis, and it was the point about the fact that at that point, we'd just tipped over into becoming a majority migrant nation. But the key point that George had pointed out, which I thought was fantastic, was the way it was received in Australia—not with backlash, not with people being outraged by that. But it happened and it was fine.

And I think that, to me, was something quite powerful, because I grew up at a time when Pauline Hanson was making her first speech and some of the rhetoric that was coming out from her, also from John Howard, about Asian migrants in this country. And then followed by the Cronulla riots. And so I think that was a real moment in time for me, that first speech, to be able to recognize how far I have come, but also how far our country has come.

But if I think about some of the more recent comments from our political leaders, it's a reminder for me that progress is not linear. People like Pauline Hanson are still around, still saying the things that she's saying. She's still in our Senate. Those things will always come up because I make many speeches about how we are a multicultural success story. And I believe that to the very core. But it is a challenge. It's a challenge to be a multicultural success story. It doesn't come easy. If we wanted to make it easy and have social cohesion, the best way to do that would be to have everyone of the same faith, of the same culture. But we embrace multiculturalism because of everything that it brings—the dynamism, the fact that it was because of multiculturalism that we were able to then become the great modern country that we have today, you know, from the Italian migrants that built the Snowy Hydro, then paving the way for successive migrants to come after them and prove that we are a great addition to this country.

But there is a fragility to that that is tested all the time, and it is most tested when people are going through their own challenging times. And I make an observation of what has been happening in the US, not as astutely as Nick, but from my observation of what is happening over there, is that economic inequality that is happening—that idea that if you work hard in a factory that you'd be able to build a good life for yourself, that that is getting harder and almost impossible for some people who are living out in Alabama, in Louisiana—that means that they've got to go out and search for someone to blame. Like, "Why is my lot in life so hard when I'm working so hard? So who can I blame?" And the easy answer are migrants. "Migrants are coming in and taking my jobs. They're not worthy of being in this country."

We—and I agree very much with you—we are in a very unique situation in Australia. But we also have a fracturing of our society. We have to make sure that if you work hard, you can buy a house. Because in my first term of Parliament, I did a lot of doorknocking. And you quickly learn about your community when you're out door knocking. And I could feel it turn. I could feel the community turn when the cost-of-living pressures started to bite. Because when I went door knocking, they would complain to me about a first-order issue that they'd have, like traffic or congestion or "Why is housing so expensive?" And then the second thing they'd say: "It's because you're letting too many migrants in."

So the thing that they're most concerned about is a legitimate concern. Why can't their kids buy a home? Why is traffic so bad? Why can't they get in to see a doctor? But where they put the blame—that's what we need to change.

Nick Bryant

Well, the scapegoating is a real problem. In America, in those Rust Belt communities, 75% of those jobs have been eradicated through automation. They had nothing to do with China. They had nothing to do with immigrants. It was just that Trump made immigrants the scapegoat. And there's a real risk that we're going to have the same thing with AI. I mean, AI is going to wipe out a lot of jobs. In some ways, I mean, Trumpism was a revolt against the robots, but Trump turned it into a revolt against immigration.

And I worry now with AI—if you look at some of the projections of white-collar jobs that are going to be wiped out in the same way that blue-collar jobs have been wiped in the last 40 years—I think it's really worrying, and it's going to create even more of those tensions.

I think Sally is absolutely right. I mean, politics works when an economy works. One of the big stories in America over the past 40 years has been huge inequalities. You know, political polarization follows income polarization. You can literally track them on a graph. They move in tandem. And, you know, you've heard shades of that here in Australia with the housing debate. You know, the housing problem is a taxation system that's been based—the negative gearing and all that kind of stuff giving advantages to baby boomers over younger buyers. It's been a supply problem, not enough houses being built. It's a regulation problem. You know, some of the regulations are too stringent. It's not an immigrant problem. And when we hear political rhetoric around that, you know, that's deeply worrying and that's shades of Americanization.

Professor Justine Nolan

Yeah. I mean, I guess I want to dig down a little bit because you can paint a good story around diversity. And diversity is obviously a lot more than immigration. And we're just touching on some issues tonight. But I guess, I mean, sometimes I feel like we are becoming more diverse in sort of—you know, there's a lot more pockets of it popping up. But at the same time, it seems to be quite siloed. So there's more diverse people talking to each other, and we're not necessarily having communication between diverse groups.

Do you think that is true, Hugh, or do you think—I mean, I feel a bit like this in Australia. There's lots of success stories you can get, but there's lots of siloed diverse views where we're not willing to tolerate other views.

Hugh de Kretser

I think that polarization is a real problem. I think that's driven by social media and the media who has a commercial interest in that kind of division and polarization. And you mentioned belonging in your question, and I'm really glad you did, because over the last year, probably the issue I've spent the most time on in this job is racism.

And when I speak to people who've experienced racism, each form of racism has its own unique dimensions, whether it's for First Nations people or for the Jewish community or for the Muslim community. But then there are very common elements to that: damaging that sense of belonging to the Australian community, to Australian society; the sense of well-being and self-esteem; shedding parts of your identity for safety, for your kids, whether they're at university or at work.

And so I've also thought a lot about Australian values. And I read the citizenship booklet about what it says—who we are as a community or as a society in the nation of Australia. And obviously the citizenship booklet, very controversial during John Howard years, revitalized under the Rudd government. And when you look at how the government defines what it is to be Australian, and when you look at what new citizens have to say as their pledge to become Australian, human rights values all through it—so fairness, equality, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of religion, peaceful assembly. New citizens have to pledge to uphold human rights in Australia.

And so for me, there is a way forward in this, which is human rights values. And that's why I paid very close attention to what the Prime Minister said. And I think he talked about kindness as well in one of his first speeches as well. And so against this backdrop of division and polarization, there is a way forward. And for me, much stronger—we can talk about how to do this, I've got lots of ideas—but much stronger commitment in laws and policies to human rights.

Professor Justine Nolan

But if you arrived in Australia in the last six months, would you necessarily think that we're making progress? I mean, it doesn't feel to me that we're moving on an upward trajectory. Do any of you feel like—I mean, Sally, you were more positive, but you're a naturally positive person. You know that. But I mean, you might say, "Okay, compared to America, we're looking good." But at the same time, we have a litany of issues here that we've all raised.

Sally, did you feel like that we are—if you look at the next six months, the last six months—that we're accepting more of diversity?

Sally Sitou

I think the point of—I guess if we go to the idea of multiculturalism—it has been challenged, but how we respond to those challenges is really the test of the strength that we have behind multiculturalism. And, you know, it has been a really difficult time. The tensions in the Middle East have come onshore, and we've seen a senator make some really unfortunate remarks. Senator Hume did something similar during the campaign towards the Chinese community.

But again and again, how Australia has responded to those challenges does make me optimistic. And like I said before, underlying all of this, there are real challenges. So if we were to take Senator Jane Hume's flippant remarks during the campaign about Chinese spies, underneath that is a real challenge. Foreign interference is a problem here. And the Director-General of ASIO has said as such. Then let's talk about that. Let's talk about how we address that, instead of earmarking an entire community and suggesting that somehow they are disloyal.

And that is something that was thrown at me when I first became the candidate in 2022. There were people on social media questioning whether or not I should be running because of my Chinese background, and therefore I must have some association with the Chinese Communist Party. So we don't want that, but we want to have a genuine discussion about foreign interference in this country. And I think being able to have an adult, mature, nuanced conversation about the actual issue without demonizing an entire group is something that we need to work on and is going to be ultimately how we get through these challenges.

Nick Bryant

One of the things I've noticed over the past four years since being back is the kind of fraying of Australia. I mean, weirdly, in that quarantine hotel, I looked across at the flag in Darling Harbour that was literally fraying. It was this metaphor for a country that was kind of pulling itself apart. I mean, Western Australia literally declared independence. I mean, Queensland—

Professor Justine Nolan

They can have it. 

Nick Bryant

-pretty much the same. I mean, this secession strangeness came to the fore. And I'm worried that ever since then, we've had other—we don't talk about Covid enough, by the way. And I would say, in fact, I mean, Covid did lead to a rise in racism. There were a lot of people who ventriloquized Trump and called it the "Chinese flu." So that was the problem. Then you had the voice referendum, you know. Rather than this moment which brought the country together, you know, it ended up being pretty polarizing, right? You know, not the outcome that a lot of people in this room would have liked to see.

Overlaying all that was increased economic pressures, a rise in interest rates that was putting huge numbers of people under mortgage stress. You know, when Donald Trump used to say "The American dream is dead," people believed him because they no longer could see how their kids would lead more abundant lives than they did. And, you know, the Australian dream isn't in great shape either. The Australian dream, which is based on property ownership—that's not very good either if you're a young person.

So you see a sort of generational fracturing. And then you overlay on that the aftermath of October the 7th and the community tensions that that has exposed. So I think we're in this kind of, sort of, almost this perfect storm of fragmentation at the moment. And in a milieu like that, you know, DEI becomes a harder case to make in some ways, and it becomes not an issue to unite around. It becomes another issue to argue over.

Professor Justine Nolan

Yeah, yeah. So I'm going to open it up for questions in a moment to the audience. But I just wanted to—so before we do that, if we were having this conversation in five years' time and we were talking about the status of diversity and inclusion in Australia and what it would want to look like, or globally, what are some of the things you think that you'd be interested in—you'd hope to see by then, Hugh?

Hugh de Kretser

I might do a Nick and answer your previous question, is that all right?

Professor Justine Nolan

Sure. You'll also gonna become a journalist, it's fine.

Hugh de Kretser

Right, thanks.

Professor Justine Nolan

Because the role of the chancellor is also open for others. 

Hugh de Kretser

I think it's easy to get depressed, but I think there's so much kindness and decency in the community. And I look at—there's many—like, after the voice referendum, I was pretty depressed. I was working at Yoorrook Justice Commission, felt awful for my First Nations colleagues. Chair Aunty Eleanor had a lifetime of advocacy fighting for First Nations rights.

And I looked at the reasons why people voted yes or no, and I looked at what people understand about the impact of colonization on First Peoples. And Nine, a media organization, asked this question: "Do you think colonization overall has been good or bad for First Peoples?" And 40% said good, 20% said bad, and 40% said mixed/unsure. So twice as many people in Australia think colonization has been good for First Peoples. And after the history of the Stolen Generations, massacre, violence, cultural—you know, it was hard to fathom that. But it speaks to the importance of truth-telling.

And if you look at what's happening in Victoria with the first treaty legislation introduced to the Parliament this week, if you look at the absolute transformation of Aboriginal leadership there with an elected Aboriginal representative body who I worked closely with in my two years at Yoorrook, who are doing fantastic work and have built amazing capability—and some of the guys who are working there, you know, I've spoken publicly about—they do truth-telling at Yoorrook. And one guy was in prison previously. He's now a real community leader in that. Saw him next to the Premier in a photo this week in Parliament, and he's now a leader. And there's this huge shift in leadership capability and huge shift in public understanding.

I look at the Bringing Them Home report that the Commission did, after generations of advocacy by survivors, and one of the shining lights in public understanding about injustice against First Peoples is the understanding of the Stolen Generations. My kids know about it—they're in high school now—but they understand the Stolen Generations. And that, again, speaks to the power of truth-telling and the importance of empathy and understanding. Why is there injustice today? Because of that previous injustice over 200 years. And that's why we need national truth-telling.

Last thing to just end on a hopeful note is the Australian story about the Home to Bilo campaign—the Murugappan family. People who have worked the hard yards in refugee rights here, as I've done at the Human Rights Law Centre, it is hard, hard, hard. In LGBTI rights, we're going forward. And refugee rights, it's like, hold the line and stop bad things from happening.

And then you look at the story of the Murugappan family, who had, through a flawed process, their asylum claim had failed. Yet through their community connections, that town stood up for them, did a national campaign, and against all the odds, the Prime Minister came out and said, "You know, they're going to stay here." And then Alex Hawke, who was, I think, the minister at the time, was interviewed on Australian Story. And they said, "We should provide permanency for these people who have been here for so long and endured so much."

So that, against all the odds, speaks to the kindness and decency that is there if people have proximity or empathy with the injustice. And that gives me hope in terms of this area and what lies ahead.

Professor Justine Nolan

So there's some glimpses of hope there. I guess what we're looking for is kindness. 

Sally Sitou

Well, the 2025 election results.

Professor Justine Nolan

Huge hope there. 

Sally Sitou

Hope that gives everyone hope.

Professor Justine Nolan

So I'd like to open up for questions. And Lily and Drew have got some microphones. They're going to walk around the room. If you'd like a question, please raise your hand.

Can I just ask—there's a memory seared in my experience of a few years ago, which is, something happens sometimes at human rights events that Andy and I were at. I asked for questions and preferably not comments, if you could keep your question short. And I looked around the room to find someone reasonably sane, and a man stood up and he said—I said, "Yes, sir?" And he said, "Actually, I don't have a question." And I thought, "He has a comment." He said, "I have a song." And he pulled out a ukulele.

So if any of you have your ukulele with you tonight, please keep it down. We would love to hear a song later, but that's not for right now. So we do have a question over here. And if you could just say your name and your question. Thank you.

Audience Member (Sally)

Yeah. Hello. My name is Sally. I'm an academic, so I really appreciate the importance of a question rather than a comment. Thank you to the panel for a very interesting and wide-ranging discussion.

My question asks whether DEI is dead for some and not for others. The elephant in the room is the widespread and systemic crackdown on any expressions or acts of support for the human rights of those currently being subjected to a campaign of extermination in Palestine—a campaign which I'll note was also funded and facilitated, rubber-stamped by Biden and Harris.

We are in an unprecedented situation where what is now widely recognized as genocide is unfolding in front of our eyes on the back of an unlawful military occupation lasting almost 8 years, and it's now become unacceptable simply to state those facts, to condemn that genocide and call for our governments to stop supplying weapons components to the state committing the genocide. And to do so in a workplace or in a public setting risks censure and significant consequences for one's employment and livelihood. There are too many examples for me to mention.

So my question is: how have we reached this point where, simply by calling out the war crimes of a state and asking for the human rights of a particular group to be recognized, you are risking serious repercussions for your work and false, baseless accusations of racism? Thank you.

Professor Justine Nolan

I'm going to take one more—another question as well. So we'll just—sorry. We'll take two more as we go along. So thank you for your question. And we'll go... Yep. Thank you.

Audience Member (Row Carenous)

My name is Row Carenous. I work with organizations in managing their human rights impacts, the impacts on people. My question is: wherefore art the Bill of Rights for Australia? Is it time now for us to look at that?

And the second comment I'd like to make is: we observe in the media a continual, almost barrage nonstop, of a particular point of view with spectators to it. And I feel that rather than us taking that in, is it time for us to role model and react and demonstrate how the models of human rights that we should—that we all want in society—rather than just accept what's being given to us through media channels and social media?

Professor Justine Nolan

Right. Thank you. Was there one more before we—one down here? I don't know where the microphones go. Oh, sorry. I'll take that one, then I'll come to you next. Yep.

Audience Member (Peter)

Thank you. My name is Peter, and my question is: DEI was in part a response to not using language of civil rights and human rights. So can the lack of progress in recent times be attributed to this adoption of equity and diversity and inclusion language? And is it time to just go back to talking about human rights and civil rights? Thank you so much.

Professor Justine Nolan

So we'll start with those three. And I feel like, Hugh, you might have set up some of those questions for yourself. If you planted people in the crowd. Sorry about that. So one of them is around the question around terminology, which we've also talked about, and whether this diversity and inclusion language has actually confused us more than advanced us with it. Another one was reclaiming, in some ways, the dialogue from the media. What can we do about that? The position and role of the Human Rights Act—I know you planted that one. I'm sure. I accept I know Row, so it wasn't a plant.

And the other one is the ability to speak out and say what you like, in this case in particular in relation to the Middle East and Gaza and genocide. And I would add on to that also the crackdown in Australia, in particular, around protest laws. So it's more broadly—we've seen in Australia in the last couple of years, issues not only around that, but also particularly around climate protests and others where our laws are getting more and more restrictive, particularly at a state level, where it is becoming more and more difficult to protest.

So who would like to start with any of those easy questions?

Hugh de Kretser

Happy to start. And thanks, really good questions. I'll start in the order they came. So the issue about protest rights, for a start—we're getting more inquiries every week about this. And it's fascinating to see how the media inquiries are coming, because it's the Harbour Bridge protest where people are protesting the injustice of what's happening in the occupied territories and Gaza. And it's then the controversy around the protests in Melbourne, the ongoing pro-Palestinian protests and their impact on the Jewish community and disrupting Melbourne's business and life. And then it's the anti-migration rallies, you know, white supremacists on the steps of Parliament, and broad-based anti-migration rallies across the country. And now I think there's another proposal for a rally on the Harbour Bridge, but for a very different purpose.

So we've published an explainer about this, about how to reconcile the right to protest with the right to be free from vilification and hate speech. And where you draw a line, and law enforcement draws a line, about saying if you're going into incitement to violence or if you're promoting racial vilification and racial hatred, then that's when you intervene. And so that's published—it's online for us.

When it comes to workplaces, it becomes—this particular workplaces who are being ripped apart by these debates—universities, philanthropy, arts organizations, and social justice organizations. And you put an overlay of artistic freedom or academic freedom on it. It creates particular complexities. I want the Human Rights Commission to be helpful in this regard to help employers to navigate these areas better, because you're seeing repeated examples of where employers are getting it wrong. And you can point to the Antoinette Lattouf case. Where I started the job and I looked at these issues, I'm like, "Well, Fair Work Act protects against discrimination on the grounds of political opinion. What is the case law say about what political opinions are protected?" Well, we now have a Federal Court decision that is very clear about the kinds of political opinions that are protected. And we found that the ABC got it wrong in terms of that termination.

And Nick and I were talking about impartiality in journalism, and the ABC's—you know, it potentially had a defense in terms of inherent requirements of impartiality, but it couldn't rely on that defense because ABC journalists sharing opinions about a whole range of things publicly. And they're now responding to that.

So this is a really difficult area of law for employers to get right. And they're getting it wrong because there's intersecting laws about making sure your staff are safe, making sure you protect diversity of all staff, making sure that you respect freedom of expression and freedom of association. CPSU for public servants—this is really acute where we've got the way a government—the Australian Public Service has particular requirements about impartiality. And so the CPSU has some pretty good guidance for its members and APS staff around that, where there's a particular overlay of impartiality.

Human Rights Act—absolutely. It would—I talked about Australian values being connected to human rights. If we want a way to strengthen our democracy and address the polarization and provide unity in the diversity and strength in diversity, a Human Rights Act is one way of doing that. And it's long overdue. We've got successful human rights acts all around the world. In 1986, when our organization was set up, we were supposed to have a Human Rights Act at the same time. It hasn't happened for a whole range of reasons.

There's now a recommendation from the Parliament on Human Rights Committee to have a Human Rights Act as a community campaign. Others have done polling around it that shows it would be a popular reform, and it would help to address the kind of things that we're talking about. And on language, I talk about human rights and equality.

Professor Justine Nolan

Right. Sally, would you want to pick up on any of those questions? 

Sally Sitou

Mainly the point around protesting and people's ability to be able to express themselves freely. That's obviously something that we guard, and we want to protect. And I think more and more Australia is becoming a real beacon for freedom of expression when we look at countries around the world. I see this week that in Nepal, there are a number of young people who were killed at a protest. And the ability for Australians here to be able to express themselves freely, I think, is something that we all should protect.

But like Hugh said, it does come with some guardrails around what you could be doing to others during your protest. And in the term that I have been in Parliament, the kind of ratcheting up of an intense feeling within the community has really heightened to a stage where I can absolutely understand—because what we are seeing on our TV screens and what is happening in Gaza is deeply, deeply distressing. And I think we all want that conflict to end as quickly as possible and for aid to be able to get in and for civilians to be protected.

The challenge we are finding here is that that protest is straying away from being peaceful. And when that happens—and I'm not talking about the Sydney Harbour Bridge march, which was peaceful, and a lot of the protests have been very peaceful and people have been peace advocates for something that they believe strongly in. But what we have started to see is a damaging of property, firebombing of synagogues. And I think we should all say that that type of protest is not okay.

Nick Bryant

Can I just talk about the language? Because I think it's really interesting. I'd love to know the history of DEI. I actually—when that first took hold, it seems to be quite recent. I don't know if anybody knows it, but I don't know the history of that terminology. I do know the history of affirmative action. Affirmative action just started in the Kennedy administration because they thought it had alliterative appeal. "Affirmative action." That sounds good. So they put it in an executive order without really thinking what it meant. And it didn't mean what it means today. It did come to mean something stronger in the Johnson administration. And they did think what affirmative action had been.

And Johnson was an interesting guy. Kennedy wasn't the champion of civil rights a lot of people think. Oddly, it was a Southerner—a Southerner who fought for much of his career to uphold segregation—who actually demolished it by pushing the '64 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which was the first time America had universal suffrage, which is an extraordinary thing. America's got a very new multicultural democracy.

Johnson didn't speak in jargon. He spoke in analogies. And he came up with a brilliant analogy, which was: if you're in a race and you put an African-American on the same starting line as a white American in 1965, and you expected them to compete on an equal basis, you were living in cloud-cuckoo-land. There was no way that African-American could compete against the white person, given the 200 years of subjugation, the long history of segregation and slavery. And so affirmative action—it's the right way to deal with that. We not only need to give equality, we need to actually actively pursue that equality to make it real. And it shows the power of analogy, and it shows the power of how you can switch things around by talking about things in different ways. And that is probably what we need to do at the moment.

I've come with some statistics, and it's really interesting. I think mentions of DEI in Fortune 100 companies have dropped by 98% from 2024 to 2025. So mentions of DEI—basically DEI is not getting any mentions anymore in Fortune 100 companies. But if you look at the company's financial filings, they are talking about diversity and related initiatives. They're just not calling it DEI anymore. So there is a way of getting around the kind of problem with the terminology of DEI—just call it something else. And that is what is happening in a lot of American firms right now, is that they're still pursuing the same policies. They're just calling them something different.

Professor Justine Nolan

Yeah. We've got time for one more round of questions. This one just here. Yep.

Audience Member (Sarah)

Maybe you've already answered the question. You said you had some solutions, so I was going to ask you what your solutions are. Maybe they're language and Human Rights Act, but if you want to share some of the solutions, I think we all want to hear them. Thanks.

Professor Justine Nolan

Thank you, Sarah. Another question? Microphone there? Yep.

Audience Member (Anthony Small)

Thank you very much. Anthony Small. I'm curious to expand further on the question of foreign interference in the sector. So we're aware that regimes like the Russian regime, the Iranian regime, often use the patina of human rights to try and legitimize what is otherwise completely illegitimate exercises of power. You know, the Russian regime is "denazifying" Ukraine. We have the Iranian revolutionary government taking over the Human Rights Council in certain instances in the UN.

When that filters down into the discussions of human rights in the West, how do we respond to that? And how do we in our own institutions future-proof them? And, you know, there's obviously the question of Iranian foreign interference in Australia today and given recent revelations by ASIO and issues around Russian interference in cyberspace.

Professor Justine Nolan

Great. Thank you. Last one. Drew, your choice.

Audience Member

Thank you. You mentioned the issue of fragility of diversity and how important that is in Australia. And I'm just wondering what tips you would have to equip leadership to better manage that fragility and to embrace it. It strikes me that it takes a lot of cognitive load and emotional investment to be interested and considerate of others and to consider some of those nuanced conversations that you were talking about before. So how can Australian leadership and business leaders do more of that?

Professor Justine Nolan

Great. So the people want some solutions in five minutes or less. So we've got solutions around that you're going to provide us with shortly. And then also questions around foreign interference and future-proofing that. Sally, you could sort that out. And then if, Nick, you could deal with the fragility of polarization and diversity. You've got so much time.

Hugh de Kretser

Human Rights Act was one of them. National Anti-Racism Framework is something that my colleague, the Race Discrimination Commissioner, Giri Sivaraman, launched last year—63 recommendations to transform society about how we address racism in this country. Including, for example, positive duty in the Racial Discrimination Act, like we have in the Sex Discrimination Act. So be much more proactive. Instead of having discrimination laws relying on individuals to bring a complaint to change a system which is delivering injustice, you require the institution or the employer to take proactive action supported by the regulator, the Human Rights Commission, with resources and training.

And this is about your question as well—policies and procedures. So you make it easy for employers to do the right thing, as most employers want to do the right thing. I used to advise employers 25 years ago. And so the National Anti-Racism Framework, you know, look forward to the government accepting that and starting with the taskforce to implement it is the key recommendation. And there's 63 recommendations that are including better media reporting around race, better racial literacy, cultural diversity, etc., and better laws and policies.

Sally Sitou

I'll take foreign interference then, shall I? I think the best way to guard against foreign interference is for us to build trust between each other and build trust with our institutions. And I say that because every time trust, particularly with an institution, is undermined, that feeds into much of the propaganda that these foreign governments are trying to push.

So if we are to talk about trust with our security agencies, I think that was undermined when—and forgive me for being political here—but I think that was undermined when some members of Parliament questioned people getting their citizenship. And that was something that took place during the campaign and also some more recent discussions around who should be able to come into this country and is there some sort of political involvement there. What that message is is a real undermining of our immigration department and our bureaucracy and our security agencies, because all of those people who were at a citizenship ceremony and receiving their citizenship had gone through all the processes.

Everyone knows the citizenship ceremony is the last step. You have gone through years of being tested, of having your entire life trawled through in order to get that ceremony. And if that ceremony—the legitimacy of you being able to get your citizenship at that ceremony—the questioning of that undermines the entire process before. And so I think making sure that we build that trust between each other and institutions helps to guard against foreign interference.

Because those governments in some of those countries that you've mentioned, one of the things that they do push out to their communities is that "You will never be accepted. You may think that you're an Australian citizen, that you live in Australia, but they don't really accept you. They kind of see you as other." And if you feed into that, if you make them feel like other, if you kind of ongoing questioning of their loyalty, you feed into what those governments overseas are telling them.

So I think what we need to do is to absolutely be squarely focused on what foreign interference looks like, how other governments could be trying to interfere in our political processes, because that's deeply damaging. And we've got to guard against that. And the best guard against that is to have strong institutions to be able to detect it, but also trust with the communities who would see foreign interference first.

If we can say to the Chinese community, for example, or the Iranian community, "Are you noticing some of these things? You can trust in our institutions, you can trust in our security agencies to report it." That's the best way for us to get that information and the best way to guard against foreign interference.

Nick Bryant

In many ways, I wish we could recapture the spirit that Australia had 25 years ago. What was happening 25 years ago? The Olympics were about to happen. It was a great celebration of what Australia could be. The opening ceremony was a retelling of the Australian story in a way that had never been told. I think a joyous way, an inclusive way, one that recognized the modern face of Australia. One that was fun and kind of angst-free.

And rather than this century being defined by what happened in September 2000, which was the Sydney Olympics, politics in this century got defined by what happened in September 2001, and that was 9/11. And that led to the Tampa election. And I think that election has freaked out both sides of politics. Well, not freaked them out. I think the Liberals saw a model of how to win elections. And I think Labor were so freaked out that the Liberals have found a model to win elections that it really impacted the debate about diversity in Australia in a way that we are still finding today.

In answer to your question, how do you tell that—you tell a better story about diversity and the success of diversity in this country, one that recognizes the historical problems, one that recognizes the—you know, the first legislative act of this country was the White Australia Policy. But, you know, you make the case that Australia moved beyond that.

I mean, I do believe that Australia could be the most successfully multicultural country in the world. I really believe that. But for that to happen, you need national leadership that will make that case in a very powerful and evocative and a different way. It just seems to be both sides of politics haven't made that case particularly well over the last 25 years.

Professor Justine Nolan

Yeah. I think you all raised great points around trust. You know, we're at a point where trust in the media, trust in business, trust in government are at actually record lows. Transparency of government is very low, even with the current government. Issues around protest where our voices are being curtailed in many areas.

But also I think we also have to get a lot better at having uncomfortable conversations. Too often, we're too worried about what we might say or staying in our silo, that we're not prepared to often speak about uncomfortable things in a constructive way. And, you know, as Stan Grant mentioned a while ago, we're not having those hard conversations, we're not speaking hard truths, or we're only speaking them within our circle.

So thank you so much for joining us tonight. I'm very thankful for each of you for giving up your time. And I'm sorry Nareen wasn't able to get here. She did just text that she landed. So she is out of Canberra. So on behalf of the Australian Human Rights Institute, I really want to thank you all for joining us. And thank you all for coming out on a rainy night in Sydney—means you are a gold-star human rights defender. So we thank you for that.

In particular, thank Kylie and Drew from the Institute, but all of the Institute team and our students who are here tonight for bringing this together, and our sponsors—Maurice Blackburn, Gilbert and Tobin Hall and Wilcox—we thank you for that.

This is the first in a month-long series that UNSW is holding around its Diversity Festival. The next two that are coming up: one is focused on disability rights and the other is focused on LGBTQI+ issues. So it's on UNSW's website and our website, so please have a look at those and join them.

For us, you know, this is very much the start of a debate, and I hope you continue to join us each year. But now the most important part of the evening: please find friends within the human rights community, have a drink. And thank you for coming. And thank you to our three Auslan interpreters. Most of all, thank you all for the hard work that you've done.

PROF JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

Welcome, everybody, am I audible? Are the captions working even with the delay?

Welcome everybody to this event within the context of UNSW's 2025 Diversity Festival. As usual I want to begin by acknowledging we are hosting this event from the lands of the Bidjigal people, and welcome those joining us online from other lands with other Traditional Custodians.

We pay our respects to Elders past and present and celebrate the diversity of Aboriginal people and their ongoing connections and cultures to the lands and waters of New South Wales. We also, in different communities, work in our different ways towards gathering and sharing knowledge, we acknowledge the diversity of ways of doing that and the ways that contributes to the richness of Australian society.

I am Professor Jackie Leach Scully, Director of the Disability Innovation Institute at UNSW, I'm not going to spend a lot of time talking about the Institute because if you are interested in that you can talk to me at the end.

But the Institute was interested in discussing this particular, not that, this particular topic. Diversity Under Threat. Because I think you do not need me to tell you there is increasing evidence of a retreat from what many of us I believe would call progressive values and the progressive movements of the last couple of decades around diversity and inclusion. For some of us at least to have been around for long enough, there has been a sense of disappointment, disillusionment, seeing some of the progress over the last few decades apparently being whittled away.

I thought it would be interesting for us to have an opportunity to discuss that in the context of disability, in particular. But also in the broader context of all forms of diversity. So, I'm going straight to introduce our keynote speaker who is Professor Alastair McEwin.

He has several paragraphs of biography but he's reassured me I can truncate that but again, the biography shows what an impressive speaker he is. He has extensive experience in disability and human rights, and has held a number of senior management and governance roles in government and government sectors. He served as Australia's Disability Discrimination Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission. He was Commissioner on the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability. And luckily for us he has joined us at UNSW a year ago or so, to do some work focusing on translating the findings and recommendations of that Royal Commission into the sorts of reforms that can influence life at UNSW. And beyond.

Please join me in welcoming Alastair and I will say we will not have any questions immediately after his talk, we will go to the Panel Discussion and then have a broader Q&A after that. Alastair.

(Applause)

PROF ALASTAIR McEWIN:

Thank you, Jackie, and yes I am completely reassured you never completely get used to hearing your biography again and again, and you are always wanting to wonder how much more can I add to it? But truncation is fine. Good afternoon, everyone, to you here in the room, great to see the turnout and we know we have many people online.

I acknowledge the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we are, and how my respect to Aboriginal people, First Nations people, here with us both in the room and online.

I like to think that I learned, and still learn, all I need to know about politics, leadership and how to progress positive social change, by watching endlessly, on the people, episodes from 'The West Wing'. It was the character of the White House communication director who said, "The world can move or not by changing some words."

This highlights for me the power of communication, in leadership. What happens when we see political leaders say things about disabled people, they can either harm or progress our fight to keep disability rights on the national agenda?

What happens when we don't see political leaders demonstrating the values of human rights, such as equality and nondiscrimination, participation and inclusion? Sadly, I am going to be drawing on real-life examples, because 'The West Wing' is as close to perfection as you can get when it comes to ideal examples of regressing human rights.

Donald Trump has a history of making derogatory comments about disabled people. I'm going to highlight two. 10 years ago, November 2015 to be precise, Trump mocked a journalist with disability in his election campaign. And I went back to the YouTube clip this morning to check whether the audience was laughing along with him, and yes, they were, they were joining in when he was mocking a disabled person. A journalist from 'The New York Times', no less.

Understandably, and rightly, the action resulted in strong condemnation from disability advocates, the media, and it's been listed as one of Trump's most offensive behaviours. And this week, Trump claimed there may be a link between Tylenol, or Panadol here, if used during pregnancy, and the increased risk of Autism. With a view of not taking Tylenol. He also suggested Autism rates have risen dramatically over the past two decades, and he also made additional controversial statements such as implying lower Autism prevalence in Cuban children is the low use of Tylenol, and that is, quite rightly people have been outraged. I was pleased to see a calm and measured response from the Australian Chief Medical Officer and the TGA releasing a media statement.

There is no scientific basis for that statement. At home, we are relatively fortunate in that we don't generally see the same level of attack on disabled people by our own politicians. We often see them speak positively of disabled people, and the need to provide better support and be more inclusive.

Of course, it's easy to be cynical about their often repeated motherhood phrases such as, "We must do better, we need to be more inclusive," but sadly when we hear of another preventable death again of a disabled person in a group home or hospital.

Cynicism is justified when we do not see those statements translated into action and put into change. We have also seen our politicians apologise when they have been negative about disabled people, taking accountability. You may recall in 2024, Prime Minister Albanese apologise after making a taunt during question time, I think it was, to the opposition, interjecting and he likened it to someone with Tourette's syndrome. There was outrage and disbelief and he came back and apologised. 

And who recalls former Prime Minister Scott Morrison's comment when he said that he was blessed not to have children with disabilities during a 2022 debate.

He made the comment in response to a question from a mother about the National Disability Insurance Scheme. Again, upsetting and inevitably we know how much damage it causes. He apologised, including, as he claims, context and tried to explain. When you explain something, you still wonder whether it is an apology or not. However, he acknowledged that what he said was probably not appropriate.

A few more examples, please bear with me. Pauline Hanson, she recently called a video about the NDIS, she said it was a scam and a rort. Unhelpful comments. And of course, it just continues to fuel the stigma and negative perception that the wider community have of disabled people.

And when I was Disability Discrimination Commissioner, she made some really hurtful comments in 2017 saying that Autistic people do not belong in mainstream classrooms and should be in special classrooms where they can get special attention. I'm not going to talk about the word special, but you can understand why I might have some difficulty with it. I don't think it is special and I know most disabled people don't.

She also said and I quote, it is no good saying that we have to allow these people, many Autistic kids, to feel good about themselves without considering the impact that we are having on other children around them.

Other politicians, the media and the disability community and others called for her to apologise, but she wouldn't. She stood by her comments.

So in my view, those comments contrasted or really are contradictory to what we see as prevailing current issues in Australia around human rights and what we want for children.

So, what does this mean for keeping disability rights on the national agenda? It means a few things. We cannot ignore the international geopolitical and social issues occurring around the world and need to constantly be alert to the dangers and risks of letting those issues continue to bring harm to disabled people.

If my understanding and knowledge of what goes on behind the scenes in Washington DC and the White House is drawn only from endlessly watching episodes of The West Wing and hanging on to every word the preceptory says, then I know there are good people there with values that are aligned with human rights, particularly the values of equality and nondiscrimination.

We know the disability community in the USA is very active and vocal when it comes to responding to attacks on their own people.

Often environments aren't created by one person and it can take time for the negative behaviour to be dealt with, often only years later. People might hear it and say, "Trump isn't going to be around forever, the next person will be much better." Therein lies the danger.

If you don't keep responding and working with our allies to deal with the culture Trump is driving, it will remain after he is no longer president. This is why it is vital to be aware of where the silent majority stand on issues such as disability rights and to capture the opportunity to build awareness and knowledge within.

It is time for the disability community in Australia to stand in solidarity with our US disabled friends and colleagues and support them in their responses and actions when under attack.

In bringing it closer to home, we have harnessed and maintained opportunities within the political landscape we have here in Australia. While we still have far too few politicians with disability in our parliament, we also have values of decency and fairness.

We rarely see our politicians espousing the negativity that we see coming from the White House. We expect our politicians to be respectful and open-minded when it comes to issues about disabled people.

In reflecting on the disability rights movement here in Australia, there are some significant milestones of where we have kept disability on the national agenda.

Australia's participation in the drafting of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, despite the initial reluctance of this chilling government to be part of the drafting. During the beginning, they changed and actively supported disabled people to go to New York and be part of the drafting process. They appointed Rosemary Kayess, who is now our Disability Discrimination Commissioner, and the NGO rep on the official government delegation. Graeme Innes, then Disability Discrimination Commissioner was part of that. And many, many NGO representatives from Australia were a part of that.

There was also the Every Australian Counts campaign, early 2010, 2011, 2012 that saw the establishment of the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

More recently, the establishment of the Disability Royal Commission advocates and allies fought long and hard. Keeping disability rights on the national agenda.

In bringing this to a close, I have every confidence that with such an impressive track record, the disability community and their allies here in Australia will continue to respond strongly to keeping disability rights on the national agenda.

This includes sustained and focused attention on seeing government here take meaningful and proactive approaches to implementation of recommendations from the Disability Royal Commission.

And in a world of ever changing challenges and destruction, I'm going to leave the last word to C.J. Cregg, who, when she was interrupted by someone with an irrelevant question, said, "Do you mind if I go back to what I was actually talking about?" Thanks.

(Applause)

EBE GANON:

Thank you so much, Alastair. I will welcome you to join the panel.

Thank you for opening up with a really good overview of the state of play here, where we are at in both national and international discusses around diversity and inclusion. I think some of this discussion was around this concept of incrementalism. Every time we accept something and every time we think that something is OK, every time we don't speak up and suggest we should be doing things differently, we shift ourselves further away from the goals that we have in and around the disability rights movement. I have certainly noticed that this week with the discourse around Tylenol and autism.

As an Autistic person, when I see that discourse happening, what I see is something quite radical going on in the US that then gets brought into an Australian context. And then we have politicians coming out and saying, "Obviously, that is not true. We don't have science for it. We shouldn't be blaming parents."

But still this undercurrent of a "disability or autism is the worst possible thing that could be happening to you or your child".

Even though we are suggesting that these comments are radical and not based on evidence, there is still this undercurrent of disability is something to avoid and hide away. That is slowly undoing the work we do in the disability movement. Thank you so much for setting up our panel discussion today.

Over the next hour or so, we are going to be talking to our incredible panellists about this topic. We are going to be using a couple of prepared questions. We will be sourcing questions from our online audience and then in the last 20 minutes or so, we will hand over to you and there will be a roving mic. If you're anything like me and you struggle to hold the question in your brain while listening to what is going on, feel free to get your phone out, write down your question and we will come back to it at the end.

Alastair needs no introduction. Professor Jackie Leach Scully is a director of the Institute needs no introduction either. But I would like to introduce Supriya Subramani who is joining the panel today. Our work at the Sydney University examines critical injustice in everyday work. Her projects explore how what mould epistemology and everyday works take, and how power is negotiated and challenged by individuals, especially in marginalised communities. In interpersonal instructions and institutional context. Particularly in communities. By including her on a panel, we are hoping to have a conversation around discourse, equity and inclusion. Using disability as a (inaudible) and launchpad but also as a (inaudible) because disability rights movement interacts with other movements.

I realise I did not introduce myself when I sat down. My name is Ebe Ganon, I am the chair of Children and Young People with Disabilities Australia and a disability advocate based in Canberra.

As of last week, I am also part of the UNSW community and has started my PhD in disability studies.

(Applause)

Very nice to be in a room full of peers and to be joining such a vibrant community of people committed to disability rights and studies as well. Jackie, I want to ask if you have any immediate reflections on Alastair's presentation from just now that you would like to keep us off with?

PROF JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

It is really interesting I think. It is really interesting thinking of this in the Australian context, especially as a Brit. You can tell I'm not from around here. I came to Australia six years ago. Before that, I was in the UK and I have a lot of professional colleagues in England and Australia. I'm getting lots of messages about how this is playing out in lots of different global contexts.

There seems to be a general retreat to regression from ideals of equality and inclusion and diversity. But they are playing out differently in different places according to the particular histories of places and the particular fears and particular vulnerabilities I suppose. In the US, most of it seems to be concentrating on race.

And that is not the case in the UK, where much more of it seems to be around migrants. I know the two overlap, but they are not quite the same. It is not quite playing out like that in Australia either. Although it appears as what are seen as migrants or aliens are in the news a great deal.

In these countries, disability is not at the fore but a lot of them you can see an undercurrent and the ways in which disability rights and inclusion are being nibbled away at in very similar ways. And sometimes not in very subtle ways either.

Alastair mentioned Donald Trump and his gross and obvious behaviour towards people with disability. In other places, it is less crass, but it is still there. It is in the language and the inadvertent slips that sometimes people make and apologise for the next day. It is great that they apologise, but the fact that they made the slip in the first place suggests that there is an underlying issue that needs to be addressed.

That is my first comment anyway.

EBE GANON:

Thank you, Jackie. I think that kind of intersection you are talking about there between the way that race and experiences of migrants are perhaps amplified in other jurisdictions, I do see that coming into the way that we look at migration pathways in Australia in the context of disability as well. The Disability Discrimination Act is currently under review and some of you might be aware, if you're coming to Australia through migration pathways are currently subject to an exemption under the Disability Discrimination Act where they say it is OK to refuse people based on their disability status, or perhaps support they might attract.

While it doesn't seem so significant or dramatic, it is again part of this undercurrent which really enforces these low expectations for people with disability and kind of continues to sanction this idea that we can just sideline this conversation. 

SUPRIYA SUBRAMANI:

Listening to Jackie and Alastair's reflections, for me it brought up, for most of my life I was in India and I've been in Australia for just two years. And I applied for US, but in the media the back and forward of the global North in the global south, the north is at the centre. When I was listening to Alastair, I thought about how white supremacy intersects with the insurgents of fascism growing across the US and the ways language is being used further.

Again, around migrants and race. And things with the Other, anyone who is an other as a target, and the fear that Jackie was talking about. When I came here, the referendum was happening, and the language of migration debate, especially around refugees and asylum seekers, one thing is that the way racism functions, because when you don't even acknowledge First Nations people, recognising the dignity of histories and cultures and communities, that kind of colonial discourse we are in, and then comes the language of other colonial oppressors which are intersecting.

Learning with scholars who are from trans communities, queer and positive colours, black and Indigenous communities, disabled activists, disabled scholars and activists, the symbol is much more of liberation and what needs to happen is collectively looking at how these systems are understood or need to be understood and that's what I was understanding as I was reflecting and listening to you.

I think that is my initial thought, and how do we understand the larger geopolitical discourse but also the ripple effect which we think, it's kind of exporting from the US to hear, but I think it's not exporting, the breeding ground is already there. Right? Then it's more of a reflection, critically looking at what we're doing differently, fundamentalist goals, targeting the other in different ways and people who are already marginalised. And marginalisation and identities, that becomes a target and it becomes much more oppressed in these systems.

EBE GANON:

Multiple layers of marginalisation is really interesting and in the Australian context, the way that our discrimination law works, we got all these different discrimination act that are separate, the Disability Discrimination Act, the Sex Discrimination act, and one of the recommendations of the Royal Commission, Alastair, was around looking at a broader human rights act. Where do you think that conversation is up to now, and do you see this broader conversation about the threat to diversity coming into that?

PROF ALASTAIR McEWIN:

Absolutely. I just want to check that the microphone is all good? So, when we look at what we have currently, the Disability Discrimination Act, it's based on some things of human rights like equality and nondiscrimination as I spoke about earlier. It does not really capture the changes we want to see broadly through social change, applying the Social Model of Disability.

Because it naturally focuses just on discrimination. So it's very much based on an individual thing, even though they are standard, they also should be applied to both individuals and organisations, but we are not seeing is an all-encompassing human rights act.

The Disability Royal Commission recommended a disability rights act. We didn't know if we were going to go, if we were going outside the terms of reference is by recommending a human rights act, however, the fundamental thing we want to see is domestic implementation of the UN Convention on the rights of people with disabilities which encompasses the social model.

To be honest, I don't care how we implement the UN Convention, whether it's a standalone disability rights act or a broader human rights act. The concern I have with the broader human rights act conversation is, we might be losing specific things we want held onto. Naturally this occurs when you are trying to bring everybody into one thing. However, we have seen other countries in that human rights act and to varying degrees of success. Fundamentally, we need a framework where we can point to it and keep having that conversation. So the current legislative framework.

EBE GANON:

Jackie, in the research community you work in, do you see this broader global, national influence in a conversation around the role of Diversity and Inclusion is shifting away research, is being undertaken or conversations happening?

PROF JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

Yes, to an extent. I think over the last few years, people have had the best intentions. A lot of the original drive and motivation for wanting good things like Diversity and Inclusion got subsumed under a, I was going to call it, acronymisation, so talking about EDI and DEI in the US and so on. Somebody thought that was a good thing because they felt it was becoming part of their language being embedded. But in retrospect, one of the things it did was drain some of the passion out of it.

It's really hard to get excited and passionate about "we want EDI now". You can do that with, the fundamental values driving it, so about fairness, and justice. Equality. These are all really powerful words. And I think they touch people's hearts and motivate them.

EDI is also something that becomes normalised, in a way, so that it's easy to make a sort of monster of it. So for those people who are ambivalent, or actively hostile towards equality, towards inclusion, they start bandying the acronym around and it's easy to make it sound like the NSA or the FBI or something like that. It just becomes something that is easy to be a target.

And what I think has happened in some of the areas I've been looking at, what we need perhaps is to step back a little bit. And perhaps even relinquish the acronym, and start talking more about the fundamentals of fairness and justice, compassion, equality, and so on, to bring some of the life back into it.

Because nobody, really, is going to say "I am against fairness," "I'm against justice," but they might say they are against EDI because they associated with wokeness, so they don't like it.

EBE GANON:

That's really interesting, I certainly see some of those conversations happening in the depths of niche LinkedIn groups full of DEI practitioners. I find it's an acronym, particularly in the US, but increasingly throughout the rest of the world, has been accepted as something that we sanitise enough to adopt into corporate culture.

I think it really digs at the heart of what started a lot of these movements in the first place, which were radical acts of resistance from movements like the disability rights movement. From the feminist movement. From a whole range of different parts of society that had historically been silenced. By contracting it into this acronym, as you have suggested, what have we lost?

Supriya, I'm interested, do you see this happening in your work? Are there aspects of, maybe you can call it DEI discourse, or a ddI culture, that has started to sanitise your work?

SUPRIYA SUBRAMANI:

I have noticed... India there are conversations around caste an affirmative actions, but DEI as Jackie has said, it's become appropriated in certain cultures and institutions. Now I'm very sceptical of organisations addressing the word, like should I trust this? What are they going to do with that?

Institutions want to measure and I want to step back and think about it. That's the question of diversity for me. The language of diversity has become so tokenistic in many ways. One is in research, but also in the workplace. You want to bring diverse communities, diverse groups of people, but you don't change the structure.

So what does it do, then? Nothing. If the language of justice is at the heart of DEI, if that's what I would believe, if it is something that has teeth, it needs to focus on structure and the structural ways of functioning. So structurally, just as we need to address and tackle this. But as Jackie said, it gets appropriated because institutions don't want to do anything about it. So in policies that we write, there's the documents are nice posters, to celebrate diversity, but with language, and this is something in migration discourse, so far as you have good languages all a tick box. That's not enough because you need the value in terms of the culture. It's about discourse, how much is enough of it but not truly there? I think that is something that I would see, the way we think and the way I work in these dominant spaces of what I think I can do, and it's not doing in itself and again scholars who have been engaging much more within the institutional practice are well aware of what it does not do, and what it claims to do.

EBE GANON:

Before I move us to starting to think about what we can do about this, and kind of the solutions, what we can do, I'm interested if there are any perspectives specific to how we are seeing this in higher education? Particularly given the context we are in here, universities are really good at producing beautiful training strategies and lovely documents, videos, about our attitudes around Diversity and Inclusion, and our organisational values. Those things are important. They set a standard for when people enter the institution. I recently did the UNSW induction process, and the way those things are communicated and foregrounded when you enter a new place is important.

But then you want to see what is behind it. You want to see what the organisation is doing structurally. And culturally. Not just in a marketing sense. Jackie or Alastair, do you have any reflections on the higher education context?

PROF. JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

Yes but possibly not in the direction you are going, but we can come to that may be. I think one thing I do want to say is that universities are a very privileged community. A protected community. And those who live and work within them, or study within them, can I think sometimes get a very, very comfortable view of what life is like for people. And it's like this particular environment is not all protected or comfortable but in this context it may well be.

And I think we need to become kind of… Good that it is thereabout we can use that as an opportunity to say "this is a fairly safe place to be, let's have a close look at some of those concepts that we are using". 

Because just like you, we talk about the corporatisation, and that language. At UNSW I have had a couple of occasions where I've just decided to act as devil's advocate, asking people about inclusion, why is it good? And people struggle to answer. They know that it's good, but they can't really say why. And I think that's a problem, because I think it's good, but you need to be able to articulate it and make an argument for ourselves and bring it to the world outside. So I think we ought to make the focus more on equipping people to understand why we are holding these values, as well as making sure that they have done the work and done 90%, done the training element. 

PROF ALASTAIR McEWIN:

(Inaudible) it's also been quick to pick up on the accessibility features. When you talked about, when you have conversations with people about inclusion and language, and this happens in the Disability Royal Commission and I'm not going to go too much into the behind-the-scenes, however when you look at the final report, the use of the word, for example, segregation. Segregation has a very strong history in America, the segregation of whites from blacks. The disability rights movement also picked it up.

The commission was uncomfortable with the word and attempted to sanitise it and were not wanting to deal with the discomfort of what we were trying to achieve. Sometimes we get so caught up in the use of language, we forget what we are actually trying to achieve. We were trying to achieve one thing, to stop disabled people from dying. If you are segregated, if you are uncomfortable with that word, try to reflect on what are we trying to achieve here?

We shouldn't attempt to sanitise. Please don't get me started on the word disability and how they want to adapt it to remove the word itself. We now have inclusive employment Australia, the old disability employment. We now have (inaudible).

When I see people try to move away from what has been quite rightly held with pride by the disability community, I'm disabled and I am proud, get over it. The alert to the dangers of a wider section of the community try to sanitise things because they are uncomfortable, that's the challenge we need to keep addressing. I have a lot to say, but I will pause.

EBE GANON:

I think you raise a really important point there and certainly some of the sanitisation comes from people who are allies to our community as well. Or people who align themselves with our movement or the discourse of DEI.

I don't know if you have got a disability reference group or employee group at UNSW. I see a lot of them being called ability networks. And I find that quite euphemistic. Why can't we say disability? Why can't we be proud of that word? I'm thinking about what you were saying, Jackie, around, we need to be able to bring people along on this journey.

And a lot of the concepts and the discourse that we use when we are talking about Diversity and Inclusion and accessibility can be impenetrable for some people, for people who haven't been exposed to disability lived experience in their life. People have grown up in communities surrounded by people who are much like themselves. In the context of diversity being under threat, I see this in a few different categories.

I have got people who are working alongside us. We have got people who understand. We have our undecideds in the middle and we have our active detractors on the other side.

I wonder, Supriya, in your work, you talked about, you mentioned… Breeding grounds for this kind of anti-diversity rhetoric and some of this white supremacy rhetoric that we are seeing rising not just in the US, but here in Australia as well. What role for intervention is there, there? What could we be doing there to stop the cycle?

SUPRIYA SUBRAMANI:

This is like a huge question, right? So, within my workspace, they focus within the questions of caste in India and I focus on the upper and lower class discourse. In Australia, I am looking at mental health professionals in African communities.

There, the language of racism in itself is like, people who experience racism and especially in migrant communities, sometimes communities are so heterogeneous. There is one way I think in my own work is, how migrant communities especially if I think of certain migrant communities are well-off or better, how do we work and collaborate and stand in solidarity with First Nations communities and understand and reflect on the struggles which is already ongoing and being part of that?

And then there is another whole layer of different kinds of marginalised committees and discourses which are happening and learning from each other but the liberation movements, it happens at different levels. I think we need to learn from each other, it is not happening enough. I think you were talking about this before. It is like, everyone wants to be at the level we are comfortable and familiar with, we are not expanding and learning from each other. I think that is something need to do more and more across a thing.

That's what I'm targeting, one of the holdings. If someone is a racist, how do you want to have a conversation with them? How do you bring about social change and the wider community? It is a big task and it takes time.

I was watching the discourse within the whole, the ideas of toxic masculinity and incel culture. How do we create change and it feeds into the whole language of justice I believe. The reason is, you need to look at everything but in order to do that, it is a massive job. That means the interdependence for disabilities, just as scholars have been talking about, you are looking at this and learning from each other and then taking it one step at a time to reflect and learn. I think that is important. I can't answer that, it's a big one.

EBE GANON:

It is interesting, in Australia we love to batch everyone who diverges from the white Australia into other. Whenever you look at the way we count people, the way we fill out forms. The way that we do workplace or educational inclusion.

In universities, we batch all the equity groups together and there is so much diversity within those groups and also within the micro communities within them. And the values aren't always the same across all of these groups that we batch together as other.

As a queer Jewish disabled person, you can start to see how with all those different intersectional identities, you have got so many different values and ideas and community priorities coming together.

But at the same time, when you do collectivise and then you use a particular cross-movement solidarity to learn from each other and work towards similar goals like combating toxic discourse around inclusion and diversity, you do get really strong outcomes. Jackie, I am keen to hear what you think some of the approaches we could use in bringing some of those people that you mentioned before along the way? How do we make sure that people c, because I an answer the question, why is inclusion important?

PROF JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

I think we should bring the discussion to the basic level. In part, as you said, there is a sense of using a language for people who aren't in the bubble and aren't familiar. We can make assumptions about the ways they understand particular concepts as well.

We should be open to the possibility that if you will engage in discussion and let's say somebody who might otherwise not wish to have a discussion. And can come out of it with a slightly changed opinion. If you go in thinking, "I'm going to tell them the truth," That is not a proper conversation.

That is difficult. I have sat in rooms with people telling me as a disabled person, I cost everybody money. I feel like showing them my tax return when that happens. I ought not to be taking up the job of a normal person, et cetera. That's actually difficult to sit and hear.

What I try to understand is where that is coming from. That a lot of it is to do with unfamiliarity, sometimes bravado. Sometimes it is fear. All that kind of thing.

I think that disability, if I may just… I think disability is unlike some of the other cohorts or marginalised groups, however we want to talk about them. Because there is still an underlying huge ambivalence about disability.

I think you would have to be a very, very extreme racist to say, "The world would be better off if there was only white people." You would have to be not committed to the survival of the human race if you were to say that, or that the world will be better off without women. But it is a much greyer discussion if you say, "The world would be better off if they weren't disabilities."

That's not because I'm saying that it would be better off, but our language doesn't allow us to do sort of nuance around that and if you really look very clearly at the fact that we call it 'disability'. Because there is something negative about the experience of people in that category. That negativity may be related to society's responses and so on. We have to deal with the fact that a lot of people…

You saw this correctly, sometimes overtly during COVID. We have been told about how it is only people with underlying health conditions who were dying, which is not true. But we were told that. And sometimes, there is an underlying but sometimes an explicit sense that that is not such a bad thing, is it? Because the weakest are being gotten rid of.

I think that attitude is still around much more than we are willing to admit and I think it needs to be tackled head on. That is deeply uncomfortable, especially if you're someone who embodies that marginality and you are engaged in that. I think we can do it and if we do it, we can say things like, "Actually, I don't cost anybody any money." Or whatever the truth is. I think that would be useful.

PROF ALASTAIR McEWIN:

I want to pick up on what Jackie was saying about how disability does seem very much in the grey area when you talk about being the collective approach. I'm going to channel (inaudible) and paraphrase when I say, "With the establishment of a National Disability Insurance Scheme, were being sold a lie." Let me clarify, when it was established, it was established for the right reason of providing support to those with high or complex support needs to be more independent and to be able to be able to participate in the wider community. Article 6 of the convention to be precise.

Politicians and the wider community assumed that the National Disability Insurance Scheme was there to fix every single disability problem in Australia. It was never intended for that. (Inaudible), sorry to say. We need to remind ourselves, again, the wider community are comfortable because we have got the NDIS. It is expensive (inaudible). If you need support, where is your NDIS support worker? You go to school, where is your speech pathologist? The list goes on. It is for the many disabled people. Jackie, when you talk about the collective approach, disability is (inaudible) and many people think it is solved because of the NDIS. I will say that it has however been much ending for those who are on rightly and deservedly. However, we now have a problem with trying to ensure that the money we are spending is going in the right direction.

Again, it comes back to the point about non-disabled people feel comfortable because yes, tick a box, NDIS, off you go. Not willing to engage in the uncomfortable conversations Jackie mentioned, including during COVID.

EBE GANON:

I think media plays a big role in that as well. In characterising the NDIS in a particular way. We are always talking about the NDIS on a cost basis. It is a huge line item in the budget, we are spending so much money. But then the next news story in the bulletin is about how many jobs this is going to be creating. We have so much data about the huge multiplier effect of NDIS spending. It is this toxic discourse around Diversity and Inclusion that is kind of behind that.

It is saying that we are directing money to individuals and we are selecting those based on an identity or a physical category and that is not fair. Therefore, we characterise it as a cost instead of a massive contributor, not only to our economy, but also to the moral imperative of lo

oking after everyone. 

The media plays a big role in shaping those undecideds in the middle. Supriya, what about those undecideds, people who come this way, how can we shift their perspectives more towards inclusivity and supporting the full diversity of our community?

SUPRIYA SUBRAMANI:

Again, the whole way, I don't know how to fix many things but it's a moment of reflection and to pause. I think it's about how the ableist way of functioning in society we are, which comes hand-in-hand with the capitalist economy. Which feeds into this as well, because the more we look at what's spiked from the labour unproductive aspect, so we need to make up language for this discourse, where the money goes in the conversation of tax or how each present deserves it or not, again.

I don't have an answer for that, but I think it's where intersecting systems of oppression need to be understood more closely. Disability cannot just be looked at without looking at larger oppressive systems of sexism or ableism, we are functioning in a hetero normative and patriarchal system we are part of. These are all the big words but these are the interlocking systems we are sitting with.

A person who is living with disability, it's not just one identity, so that means we have to look at what that in itself, the loop of oppressive experiences, how do we undo it? And I think with what I was talking about comments how do we address structural injustice, and at the heart of that is justice questions which we need to look at. Diversity, you cannot do it without justice.

If you want to do it authentically, understand and reflect on diversity, we cannot do it without justice, I believe.

EBE GANON:

In your work and research, do you have a sense of how we can raise the critical consciousness of people in relation to those systems?

SUPRIYA SUBRAMANI:

My learning and unlearning over the years has been much more that people are doing it really well. When I engage with communities, there is so much resistance and we need to learn more from how people are already resisting, that's something which I might take away. One of the learnings, and independent different communities, and how they are doing it and for whom, I believe so. And I think that is where the space is for learning and unloading which we should be part of, or should we just be active listening.

EBE GANON:

We had a question online which I think is relevant here. Particularly shifting the hearts and minds of folk in the middle which is "what do you think the role of protest is in this conversation?". Feel free, any of you, to jump in.

PROF ALASTAIR McEWIN:

I might begin by, when I was working in the disability rights movement, particularly in Australia, and in the US they have a good model for the Civil Rights movement, disability rights movement, many wonderful role models living and passed, it was characterised by... It was people who were physically disabled who started making the waves at the protest. You will see the images of them crawling up the steps of Parliament House.

We started to see change. We started to see the implementation of the act of the Disability Discrimination Act. And what has been really fascinating is seeing the wave of people with intellectual disabilities, they are the ones who were perhaps marginalised, and they were still in group homes and institutions, while those with physical disabilities were out there protesting.

So protest is definitely an important role. Now, what we are seeing is a growing awareness of, you could describe them as different cohorts within the disability community. And it is wonderful to see the rise of people with intellectual disability, because they are more… We are seeing them involved in government, we still have a lot more work to do with them here at the University of New South Wales, in the DIIU and the Centre for intellectual disability, they are doing it.

It's important to reflect on the ways that we protest, that's important. I don't know how important protest is now. Yes, or whether they are even necessary. I don't have a fixed view. But I'm just reflecting on the different ways of incorporating different diverse groups within the disability community to see change.

EBE GANON:

Jackie, any thoughts on the role of protest?

PROF JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

That's kind of an ecosystem of resistance, I guess. When you look at transformation, people are out there are being active on the streets, and I think that does some things, and does other things not so well. And not everybody can contribute to those sorts of activities either, which is often the case with people with disabilities, they are not able to take part in most of these.

There are other ways of like being with the system and treating people's minds, arguing back, perhaps. The danger with something like a large-scale protest is always that you, part of my language, but you piss people off who are inconvenienced and cannot get into work or do this.

And you lose their sympathy, you lose their allegiance. It's a difficult balance. I'm not a natural protester, I'm more of a natural writer of letters and so on. I like to think that's also effective, but it could be just because that is how I best operate.

I think one of the best ways for testing or resisting is simply being there. Being a visible member of that minority, doing something that you might not be anticipating, or expected to be able to do. 

EBE GANON:

We will shortly move to questions from the room so if anyone has a question, can you indicate to us? Fantastic. We will get back the microphone... And in the meantime, whilst we are getting that arranged, thinking about that final group, people who are already with us, people who genuinely align themselves with the movement and the language of Diversity and Inclusion and the EI or one of the variations of that acronym, whatever you would like to use, what you think the role of allyship in this conversation is? How would we like to be seen, people working alongside us?

PROF ALASTAIR McEWIN:

I will give you an example of positive change for the Deaf community and hard of hearing community. In the 80s, there was a politician in WA, maybe in the 90s, I can't remember, politician who had a Deaf son. So WA at one point were ahead of providing captions in movies and schools, and now what we see as live captioning. For me, that's an example of when you have somebody in the position of power or perceived power, and they are experiencing as an ally, what is happening in front of them, the discrimination that child is experiencing, from that a lot of change occurs.

But if we sit and wait for every single example like that, we will properly never ever get to a more inclusive society. So, allies for me, allyship, the other factor of it is that when we see, in the case of a disabled person, when we talk to a nondisabled person, when we take it out in a respectful and (inaudible) away, sometimes you can just step back and let them, without speaking for you, raise the issue, particularly if they have access to an environment you might not have.

But sometimes that takes years, when you are trying to influence in a collective group of people.

EBE GANON:

Can get the microphone to the front here for our first question? And as you are asking the question in the room, can you share your name if you feel comfortable and let us know if your question is directed to a particular member of the panel or it's open.

QUESTION FROM FLOOR:

I'm Ariella, an Autistic person with invisible disabilities. Earlier this year, I was approved for NDIS, which was 18 months deficit based process, horrible, you are basically proving you are disabled.

I guess something in the news there are children who are being excluded from the scheme. Just your thoughts on that in general, and it's just such a horrible process getting onto it. So, being on the NDIS can be really beneficial for someone with disabilities, but getting it is a whole other story.

EBE GANON:

Thanks, Ariella. Any initial thoughts on that, Alastair?

PROF ALASTAIR McEWIN:

Firstly, congratulations, and it's a shame once again, we have had so many bureaucratic hurdles. When I was talking about what's happening now, if we reflect for example on the Health Minister Mark Butler when he announced the Thriving Kids program, I think that was a step in the right direction. But I think some of the language in his address, and I will say this to him, if and when I see him, it was probably a bit unfortunate.

And when we talk about people who are somewhat disabled or disabled, the language is ever-changing and we will never get to where we want to be. So winding it back, and reflecting on what the health Minister I think was trying to achieve, with this program, and I've done some work on it through the Grattan Institute, it's maybe failing people with disabilities and we need to make a more inclusive. The focus is still on the NDIS providing support to those who really need it, on a (inaudible) basis. If you have significant support needs that are very different from many others, of course, you should be able to get an NDIS package.

Many people are trying to achieve, for example with disabled and Autistic children, non-verbal, I strongly believe can be guided through the mainstream education setting, not perfect and never will be, but there are many ways you can make it in that setting. So coming back to Ariella's point about having to prove you are disabled, I hope there's a movement to make the application process far less burdensome. It's just too much red tape. And justifying your disability, I think you become caught up in the government approach, which is usually quite bureaucratic.

So ultimately, it should be a simple process to 'Apply to the NDIS' and be able to get your package.

EBE GANON:

Your question is very timely amongst all the announcements we've had today around the way that eligibility for the Scheme is going to be assessed. And I think it's very much a to be continued on this question because since the Royal Commission, since the NDIS Review, we have been having so many conversations about the same problems, over and over again, and what we really need is the allyship from folk in decision-making positions, from folk who control the money and the supports, to kind of be moving this conversation forward.

Because I hear you, we are having this conversation again and again, and disabled people sharing their experiences again and again, to so many different outlets. And it's not always moving us forward. Does anyone else have anything to add to the question before I moved to the next one?

EBE GANON:

Let's go to Scott at the front.

QUESTION FROM FLOOR:

My name is Scott Avery, I am a Deaf and Aboriginal person. Or are gifted with silence rather than hearing impaired. On the agenda, specifically, I want to address what has happened with the Royal Commission. So, what I want to delve into his, since the time that, there was a fancy Latin phrase to say... Passing it on to someone else, you should breathe an audible sigh of relief working with these agencies that it's all over. 

Many in the disability community are exhausted. (Inaudible) finding out almost by accident that there has been lots of pockets of government initiatives about implementing the Disability Royal Commission. Before I had my (inaudible) started with the same people who had the story before the commission started. The consultation methods leading to pre-commission outcomes, (inaudible) structural acts of violence against people with disability (inaudible) in the first place. I find it insulting to the people who gave their time and stories to the Royal Commission, many of whom have passed. The question is, reflections on that prognosis from the panel? And then, is there an imperative to get shouty and disruptive before all that work has been raised?

EBE GANON:

You are speaking my language, Scott. Jackie, do you want to kick us off?

PROF JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

There has been lots of disappointment about what has happened since the commission. I am probably not the right person to make comments about the Australian Royal Commission because I don't know what (inaudible) in terms of outcomes. The sorts of enquiries that we have in the UK generally end up with lots of recommendations and not very much happens. I don't know if that is the case with Australia.

What was said about an ecosystem earlier is true. Something like a Royal Commission report will not achieve what people want or hope it will achieve by itself. It can sometimes disappoint people, and demoting them can help them achieve what they want to happen. Sometimes it is by informing the people who will take notice of that.

Among non-disabled friends and colleagues, I remember there was a lot of surprise and interest at the number of recommendations that came out of the Royal Commission too. You need that number of recommendations, and I was like, "Yes, they really are that bad." At that level, it can affect some kind of change. But also, like a lot of people, there is this sense of weariness and tiredness of the length of time it is taking that I never thought when I was a small, deaf child that I would reach the age that I had was so little, having changed fundamentally.

Alongside some other big changes as well. That exhaustion you talk about among people with disability and the organisations, is, I think, an unacknowledged factor in the influence that the constant levels of protest and so on that is demanded of us.

EBE GANON:

Thanks, Jackie. Do you want to pick up?

PROF ALASTAIR McEWIN:

I have a lot to say. I will try to be brief. I share your anger, Scott. And I share your frustration and disappointment with the response we have seen from the government. (Inaudible). It is really important particularly for me and I think every disabled person who gave their heart and soul to the process who want to honour the effort that they made. They told their story, they put a lot of time and effort into it. They have great hopes. I can't really go into the internal robust discussion that we had with the commissioners. Suffice to say…

In terms of the commissioners, there were only two disabled commissioners. Arguably, we were in the minority. That is a problem (inaudible) from disability leadership, from government. Having said that, Rhonda and I, we knew what the most critical issues were and then trying to work with other commissioners, some of whom had very little experience with disabilities. Again, it was a microcosm of what we are trying to achieve in the wider community.

I would love to know, what would be the intervention that we need to cut through hearing weekly almost another death of someone who died in a hospital or group home. Jackie talked about the attitudes during COVID. "Oh well, you are disabled, would they be better off dead?"

Most importantly, I want to maintain and honour the fact that we have (inaudible). You can't go any further than a Royal Commission. If we keep reminding the government of that when they tried to distract you. Come back to the point and say, "Here is the Royal Commission report, here is what disabled people said. Can we just focus on that and move forward?"

SUPRIYA SUBRAMANI:

When you are collecting the stories, how do we hold them accountable? On the one hand, were the stories heard and engaged with, and what do we do? How do we hold these institutions and systems accountable is something important.

The question is, what is accountability and how do we make sure that they are accountable? That is a kind of discourse one needs to have. I think there is a collective rage which I can hear from this. The discourse needs to move forward. How do we account for that?

EBE GANON:

From your work beyond disability as a context and thinking about, I suppose, epistemic justice at this point. Can you unpack that from your work and talk about what it is that drives our ability to value different perspectives? And how that might be a pathway forward?

SUPRIYA SUBRAMANI:

Right. I think one of the questions very often in my own discourse, in my work, it comes as how the language of difference is at the heart of, like, difference is seen as something in the language of other. But you don't really want to hear and listen and acknowledge that, doesn't come very often. In order to work through the systems, which is the end goal. If you want, the end goal is, let's say justice towards migrants and refugees and asylum seekers, is not enough to collect stories. As researchers, we are really good at collecting stories and we are purists about it. How do we hold ourselves accountable in the system?

It is something I have been thinking through and questioning. Then working with communities because as I said, communities already resist and are part of the resistance movements. How do we facilitate as a researcher and sometimes you don't have to research everything. Because you know the answer already. Especially when I look at the power discourse, we know that exists. You don't need to know it exists in order to do something. That is some of the things I think we can wonder. Then the stories as a researcher, what do we theorise and what theories… That something as a researcher commenting through questions.

EBE GANON:

I think also as researchers, we are all excellent at asking lots of questions and then discounting the value of the suggestions that you might have as to how we might fix them.

I have noticed everyone has said at least once in this panel, I don't know how we fix that. I think actually we do and we have been listening to our various communities about it for a long time and I think the courage in that leadership is really important as well. We have time for one more question from the group. I think we will go on to the side over here.

QUESTION FROM FLOOR:

My question's a little bit more in relation to the use aspect. At least for myself, as someone who is coming into the disability community because of various different reasons and really I'm hearing a lot of the stories kind of not being personally involved.

The Royal Commission was a little bit out of my timeframe with advocacy and work in that area. I guess I really want to ask all the panellists, in terms of this future generation of people who do really want to get involved and want to do a level of… Be able to support the change that is needed, what can we do? My name is Jennifer.

EBE GANON:

Who wants to kick us off? What can we do?

PROF ALASTAIR McEWIN:

You are the future, you are going to be part of the generational change we want to see.

I was an outsider to the deaf community. I was in a hearing family, which is quite common. I went to a mainstream school, predominantly for hearing kids, with a few deaf kids. (Inaudible) I have to trust them and they have to trust me. Trust is the first thing I would say. Give yourself the time to be trusted by others and vice versa.

The other problem I'm observing and I mentioned earlier about the different ways of movement within the disability community, (inaudible) abolition of some form. Whether it is about the language, "I am not disabled." Give yourself time to reflect on the barriers you are expensing, but fundamentally, give yourself time to understand the history of why did we fight so hard for the convention? It was because of the history of segregation and exclusion. That would be my advice.

On a personal level, give yourself time and also the most valuable thing for me is forming trusted relationships that I have managed to hold through and they have been beneficial over time. Whether it is ministers or CEOs in the corporate sector. Many friends in the NGOs. And of course, meeting people like yourself and learning from what you want to do.

EBE GANON:

Jackie.

PROF JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

I think very similar, to talk and become familiar with the communities and for them to be familiar with you. But not to be too timid. I work and encounter people who are constantly worried about using the wrong language or word or saying the wrong thing or asking the wrong question about disability.

There is a TV show in Australia I think called something like You Can't Ask That. There was one about disability. What was refreshing is that you can ask questions that are sometimes very… Very obvious to the person with the impairment, but maybe not to people outside.

Obviously, not doing it in a rude or crass way. I wouldn't want people with disability to be treated as somehow fragile or delicate and unable to be probed a little bit about their experiences and their opinions.

People with disability are not all wonderful and angels. Some of them are just badtempered people. You know, you deal with that.

If I can remember, the other thing that I wanted to say was, it's completely gone out of my head. If you will allow me to remember…

EBE GANON:

Before I pass to Supriya to talk about allyship perspective, my unrequested advice around disability mentorship and leadership. For folks who are becoming emerging leaders in the disability advocacy community like yourself, just like Alastair was talking about, reflecting on the experiences of those who have come before. Reflecting on the fact that as Scott was talking about, a lot of us have gotten very tired very quickly.

And whilst a lot of disability advocacy feels like a hurry up and wait kind of experience, the work in progress you make step-by-step is important. And not to get disheartened by progress that might feel slower, particularly with young people. We are very impatient and we want things to be better faster. But there are folks who have been doing this for a very long time and they understand the systems and learning from our disability elders is really important. 

Supriya, do you have more about allyship contexts? For those who don't work in this space, how do you approach this question?

SUPRIYA SUBRAMANI:

For me over the years in these spaces, if I am part of the, it depends which group I am part of or not in different ways. And for me, the first step, over the last few years, I'm back to working with my own communities back in India, my dad is from hill tribe community. Again, I am inside and outside in different ways and it goes with different communities whether it's migration or Indigenous or refugee communities. I'm an ally in different ways and not necessarily always that. So I think the big thing, and what Jackie was talking about, is just listening and also to learn, but also there is a moment of unlearning that needs to happen a lot.

I would say that's my journey which has always been about learning unlearning, and relearning, back-and-forth which is something I have to sit with and often comes with discomfort in different places. Like when I move into the refugee community, sometimes on a facilitator or sometimes I'm an observer. Sometimes I'm not easily… I'm very uncomfortable just being an observer because I feel like, "Why am I observing, why am I here?" But then sometimes actually, amazingly, the agents, all the different political agents, it's not like I'm a saviour. Nowhere am I a saviour.

Again this is a discourse within the global health conversations, we come with the idea of being saviours, or the idea that we are going to rescue the language of saviours, of black or white saviours. I think that is something that needs to be unlearned a lot, and I think that's something which is a journey in itself and so, for my own students I teach, it's like how do we do reflective practice and think about power and privilege both nonself, and engage within different spaces is important.

It is something I keep practising but sometimes something I do very badly as well.

PROF. JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

I remembered what I was going to say. Things go in waves. I guarantee if you are working as an activist or Advocate or ally, you will see times when there is enormous progress, and other times when it seems like the absolute best you can hope for is not to go back to much.

I think we are in one of those phases at the moment and hopefully that pattern continues in that this phase will pass and we can move on to something else. But one of the wisest things that Disability Advocates said to me years ago is that you cannot always predict the final outcome of any apparent gain or loss.

So you just have to hope, keep doing what you're doing. And hope that you are heading, what you're doing will move things in the right direction. Which is, it means you don't get too overjoyed at the winds, but also you don't get too downcast by the losses. Because you cannot always predict what the long-term outcome of something is going to be, and that helps I think this sort of consistency of movement and resistance.

EBE GANON:

Can we have a big round of applause for our panellists?

(Applause)

I'm told that Jackie will be carrying us out, and thanking...

PROF. JACKIE LEACH SCULLY:

I haven't got my notes so I don't need my glasses. Thank you, everybody, for coming. It has been fantastic, it's certainly been a really big learning for me and experience for me and I hope you go away interested, perhaps encouraged to continue the fight for the next however long it is going to take.

We have refreshments at the back, please don't leave them for us to doggy bag away, help yourselves to them, there are deserts, it's a reward for the end of the afternoon. There will be another event in this room on Friday, to do with elite athletes and disability.

I'm not sure about the time, because I haven't got my notes in front of me, but it will be in the program, so if you're interested, please do come along and help support and learn, it's another interesting aspect of diversity. Thank you, all. Thanks again.

(Applause)

SPEAKER:

Thank you Jackie and the Institute for giving us something to turn up to. Thank you.

(Applause)

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