Professor Ron McCallum
Former Dean of Law and Professor of Industrial Law at Sydney University Professor Ronald McCallum, AO believes the Australian business community has “done well” providing more employment opportunities for people with a disability.
“There has been a great deal of improvement,” he says. Professor McCallum says that perhaps the biggest change occurred in 1976 when the United Nations designated 1981 as the International Year of Disabled Persons.
“I think that made a big change and since then I think Australians and Australian business have become more aware of people with a disability.”
The introduction of anti-discrimination legislation in the 1970s also paved the way for people with a disability to be able to work.
“Beginning in South Australia, legislation prohibiting discrimination on the grounds of race and sex was passed by the early 1970s and spread to NSW and Victoria in the mid 1970s.
“We were seeing for the first time, it being unlawful to discriminate in employment matters for persons on the grounds of gender or race.”
The Federal Government passed the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975 but it wasn't until 1984, with the introduction of the Sex Discrimination Act, that it became unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of sex.
“It took a while before it was realised that the law could protect people with a disability who were discriminated against either in employment or in the provision of goods or services,” Professor McCallum explains.
“There had been some state legislation extending the grounds of discrimination to disability. The big breakthrough came in Australia when the Federal Parliament passed the Disability Discrimination Act 1992.”
“The Disability Discrimination Act really says that the employer must not discriminate against a person with a disability unless they cannot do or perform — and these are the important words — the inherent requirements of the job.
However, the Act also imposes upon employers a duty to make reasonable accommodation.”
Professor McCallum uses his own situation as an example. “If asked generally is it an inherent requirement of a law professor that she or he be able to read legal materials, we would all say yes, that's an inherent requirement. But of course, being totally blind, I cannot read legal materials. With the assistance of computer-based adaptive technology and synthetic speech I am able to read legal material that is either scanned or on the Internet.”
“It only costs a couple of thousand dollars for this equipment to be given to me and in my case my employer has made a reasonable accommodation by providing me with some extra equipment. I have shown that with this extra equipment I can carry out an inherent requirement of being a law professor, namely, reading materials.”
Until the introduction of computer based technology like this, Professor McCallum relied on others to read to him from law texts. It was using these methods of work that Professor McCallum led to becoming the first totally blind person to be appointed to a full professorship in any field at any Australian or New Zealand university.
Professor McCallum says that often it's not until you talk to a person with a disability that you can really tell whether or not they can perform the inherent requirements of a job. “It may mean a special chair, it may mean wheelchair access, it may mean moving a shelf,” he adds.
“As I understand it people with a disability have the highest level of unemployment of any group in Australia, other than Indigenous Australians. Of course, some of us aren't in good health and some disabilities are debilitating and one must take that into account. But I think people with a disability want to work, we want to participate in society.
“Work is a public act of participating in society. We want to: provide for ourselves and our families; to be citizens in the community; we want to work and pay our way; to vote. We just want to be given the opportunity to show what we can do.”
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