Jody Barney sums up the contradictions often experienced by people with disabilities in Australia when it comes to everyday life and voting in elections.
Ms Barney herself is deaf and speaks to me through an interpreter with a forthrightness not to be dismissed, her spirit inspired by her late mother, Nel, or Nellie, who insisted she not let that disability limit her.
“My mum was a very staunch Irishwoman and had married an Aboriginal man,” she said.
“We already had that discrimination, but I grew up in a house full of advocates and activists, we were very much the people who would inform others.
“I was about 18 at the time and I said, ‘Mum, you’ve got to vote,’ and she said, ‘I’m not allowed to vote,’ and I was absolutely gobsmacked.
“That was frustrating for her. I grew up with a very robust mother.”
Ms Barney is a Birri-Gubba/Urangan woman living on Yorta Yorta Country in Shepparton and has worked for more than 35 years with First Nations people with disabilities, currently as a disability and cultural consultant for the Australian Federation of Disability Organisations.
Last year she was inducted into the 2021 Victorian Honour Roll of Women for significant leadership and excellence in her field.
She is supporting a campaign by a group of 65 organisations and experts, which has written an open letter to the federal leaders of Labor and the Coalition calling for law reform to reduce the number of people with disabilities who are being prevented from voting.
Ms Barney said too many people were being excluded from voting based on their disability, when more could be done to help them overcome it.
“I pay taxes, I pay rates, I do all of those things,” she said.
“I don’t see interpreters at voting booths. I don’t see interpreters at the debates of political parties. I don’t see captioning on the news around coverage of the federal election.
“There’s a scale of people who would need support to make a decision. There’s a way you can explain the political space and it’s easily understood.”
Ms Barney also said the abilities of people with disabilities were often underrated.
“I have some people in that bracket, who aren’t allowed to vote, who are deemed unfit to vote and watch it on social media and they say, ‘I don’t like him, what he’s saying doesn’t fit his body language,’” she said.
Ms Barney said rather than being excluded from the electoral debate, people with disabilities should be invited to contribute to it.
“If you use a model where it is given to those organisations to empower and inform the community around their voting rights and needs, it will become second nature to them to participate in any democracy business,” she said.
And what of her mother’s thoughts? What if she knew that many people with disabilities were still excluded from voting?
“She would be there with gloves off,” Ms Barney said.
“She would get in there like a bat out of hell and she would say, ‘You can’t forget the rest of the population.’ She would say, ‘We have the rights to this information.’”
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