Thread by @bluntshovels

Gee, imagine what the #DisabilityRC could have uncovered/found out/got justice for if it was even a quarter as effective as the #RobodebtRC has been in drilling down to who did what and why.

Worth asking some questions about why this has happened.

Three years, $500m budget, and we're heading into a hearing next week about 'inclusion', with no clue what the #DisabilityRC is going to do to STOP VIOLENCE against us, which was the whole damn point of it.

disability.royalcommission.gov.au/rounds/public-…

The #DisabilityRC has made no interim recommendations in those three years, so we have no idea what direction they are going in. They have been hostile to disabled people and disability organisations, and have insisted on 'both sidesing' core issues, like group homes.

All those disabled people who have told such terrible stories about the abuse and violence and neglect and exploitation that has been done to them, by individuals and systems, and the DRC has done very little with any of it.

Royal Commissions are a tool, not an outcome. The Robodebt RC has been used to pry the lid off the maze of buck passing and drill down on who did what to cause so much harm, with precision and focus.

The powers of a RC are strong, and can be used to do exactly this.

And yet the DRC hasn't done this. It has no investigative arm, doesn't refer anyone to the police (as far as we know), doesn't trawl through papers and documents to pin responsibility on specific people. Doesn't haul Ministers before it, that's for damn sure.

Perhaps all this was the point. Perhaps the way the Chair of the DRC seized power in 2019 meant it was always going to be like this. Perhaps the DRC was designed not to do a damn thing. Which is a shocking story of injustice all on its own.

We have a few months left now, with the DRC spending now until September writing their final report. What will it say? Will it design a 'better' segregated system, or call for actual measures to stop the violence against us?

Of course the DRC isn't the only tool, but the final report will influence change for our community for a long time. It is vital that the recommendations actually point to change, not to continuing the same broken system that hurts so many of us.

Now is the time to send in a submission before 31 December, to contact your disability organisation and get them to lobby for change, to write to MPs arguing for an end to a separate world for disabled people, and an end to the violence against us.