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June 3rd, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
Core strength … the Deane family in 2008, rear, from left, Joel, Zoe, Kirsten and front, from left, Sophie, who has Down syndrome, and Noah. Photo: Angela Wylie
Assisting those affected by disability has been a neglected challenge.
About the time Kirsten Deane’s house was being built, the first version of a national disability insurance scheme was also being drawn up.
As the house that was to become her family’s home was being erected in Melbourne, bureaucrats and politicians were working in Canberra on a piece of policy that, unbeknown to them, would take another 40 years to find its moment.
”There was a proposal sitting with Gough [Whitlam],” explains Deane, the deputy national campaign director of Every Australian Counts. ”It had passed the House and was sitting in the Senate when he was dismissed. The prototype has been there for 35 years.”
“If you help and support people early they will reach their potential” … Kirsten Deane. Photo: Ken Irwin
The campaign has been remarkable in recent political times for its ability to generate broad support for an issue that does not normally receive a lot of attention – the day-to-day reality of life for people with disabilities and their families.
The campaign’s push for a national disability insurance scheme has bipartisan political support and $1 billion to run a trial of a scheme that would be similar to Medicare and provide lifelong support for people with disabilities.
Looking around her house, Deane now possibly considers another 40-year time frame when it comes to the seemingly limitless amount of renovations on which one could embark.
”We’re restoring it to how it was,” Deane says of the late-1960s house she and her husband, Joel, bought several years ago after returning from a stint living in the US.
”You can see the architect’s vision for it [and] how cleverly it was put on the block.”
Despite the work the family needs to put into the house, Deane says they had lived in ”too many dark apartments” and needed the space once they were back in Australia.
There is plenty of the era’s familiar mission-brown painted woodwork and a courtyard that was once paved with red brick.
When workmen were ripping it out they discovered bluestone paving hidden underneath which has been restored. A wooden deck centres around a weeping cherry blossom.
The house is U-shaped with floor-to-ceiling glass windows facing out to the courtyard.
”Having children in this house, I know where they are,” Deane says, before recounting the downside of so much glass with young children when one careened through a window on a ride-on ladybug.
What once was the garage is a large playroom for the three Deane children – Sophie, 11, Noah, 9, and Zoe, 4. There are only two bedrooms.
For now, the three children love to be together but Deane says they are trying to work out how to reconfigure the rooms to accommodate three teenagers.
On the wall of the living room is a Mexican rug, a souvenir bought on a recent road trip the family took through Mexico to visit Joel’s sister and brother-in-law.
Books are everywhere – Lauren Child’s Charlie and Lola series spill out of the playroom while stacks of political biographies and fiction line the bookshelves in the entrance hall.
The kitchen features a pipe-cleaner-and-butterfly papier-mache chandelier made by the children during the school holidays. A glass-fronted cabinet is filled with delicate old china, much of it given to Deane by her late grandmother.
Deane did not set out to be a successful political campaigner praised highly for her intelligence and passion by all sides of politics.
She was a journalist before she and Joel, a former speechwriter for the Victorian Labor Party, moved to Berkeley in California, where she began her PhD.
”I was interested in social attitudes towards disabilities when I had Sophie [the oldest of the couple’s three children], who has Down syndrome,” Deane explains. ”She was our American souvenir.”
The family’s dog – a Labrador spaniel cross – is named Berkeley after the US sojourn. After having Sophie, the couple moved home. Deane was well placed to take on the then-fledgling campaign for a national disability insurance scheme in 2009.
The idea, which had first been debated during the Whitlam years, was not talked about much until Kevin Rudd held his 2020 summit in 2008, where big reform ideas for the future were debated and discussed.
A national disability insurance scheme was one of the policies the forum earmarked to push forward, but it needed a full-time campaigner and Deane, who has also worked for the National Disability and Carer Alliance, could not say no. ”I had to be a part of it,” she says. ”I knew we had to give it a chance.”
The former NSW minister John Della Bosca now heads the campaign. Bill Shorten, the federal Minister for Workplace Relations, was one of its earliest and most passionate advocates within the Labor government.
Both men, Deane says, had ”road to Damascus”-style moments when they started to learn about the circumstances of people with disabilities.
Deane does not like to play on her own family experience but it undoubtedly gives her an insight into the benefits of such a scheme, which groups representing people with disabilities are predicting will be a watershed.
”People couldn’t imagine how hard it is for people with disabilities and their families,” she says.
”They think we have had some progress, that someone somewhere must be looking after people with disabilities. [But] you really need to see what it’s like for yourself.
”Which country allows people and their children to wait for more than two years for a wheelchair? Australia. Some kids wait so long for a wheelchair they have grown out of it [by the time it arrives].”
Deane acknowledges her comparative good fortune – a supportive family network, a good education, a background in media and politics that means she knows how to campaign, lobby and explain a complicated policy in a straightforward way.
”If we were a Third-World country we’d call it begging but here it’s called finding resources,” she says of the financial burden placed on parents of children with disabilities.
”For some people it’s week-to-week. People get the national disability insurance story in terms of how it will help people. If you help and support people early they will reach their potential and cost the system less [in the long-term].”
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