Writing in The Australian about the case of Bernhard Moeller, Jan Gothard and Charlie Fox say disability has become the “new unmentionable”  in Australian immigration policy, replacing race as the excluded category no one talked about. Australia barred non-whites from immigration until about forty years ago.

Gothard and Fox trace the history of Australian law that permits the exclusion of “any idiot or insane person” and “any person likely to become a charge upon the public.” They say exclusion of people with disabilities is explicitly permitted in Australia because immigration policy is not covered by the nation’s Disability Discrimination Act (DDA), as spelled out in Clause 52. An excerpt:

The perception that people with disability can be nothing more than a cost or a burden has been out of date in Australia for at least the past 30 years and explicitly devalues all people in Australia living with disabilities.

Families with a child with a disability … should not be put in the position of having to fight their way through the Migration Review Tribunal before being accorded the right to bring their skills and qualifications into Australia. The family of Tracey Robinson, who finally received ministerial approval for migration last week, had waited more than six years for a resolution and over that period had to endure an appeal to the tribunal as well as to the Federal Court. Immigration Minister Evans should be called on urgently to exercise his discretion and offer closure to the many other families in waiting. But above all, the DDA should be changed and its clause 52, like the White Australia policy before it, should be consigned to the dustbin of history. It’s time to throw aside legislation cast in century-old attitudes, and for the Rudd Government to do for disability what the Whitlam government did for race.

Gothard and Fox are parents, historians and members of Down Syndrome Western Australia.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 11:55 am and is filed under Down syndrome, discrimination, international. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.