Today Abigail gave a speech in Parliament ahead of International Day of Persons with Disabilities, highlighting the systemic failures of the Minns Labor Government on just about everything - including housing, transport, education, health, advocacy and justice - and demanding urgent action to dismantle ableism and build a truly inclusive, accessible and just society for all.
Abigail said:
The International Day of Persons with Disabilities is marked every year to celebrate the diversity, strength and achievements of disability communities across the world. It is also a day that reminds us just how far we have to go in confronting and dismantling ableism in the long campaign to build an inclusive, accessible and just society for all—a society where the rights and dignity of people with disability are not an afterthought but woven into the very fabric of our social and physical lives. When I speak with people in the disability community, there is a prevailing sense of fear, anxiety and hopelessness. They tell me just how uncertain and challenging things are for so many people with disability, and how governments across Australia continue to fail people with disability. Shamefully, the Minns Labor Government has proven to be one of the worst. Time and again it fails when it comes to improving the lives of the more than 1.3 million people with disability in this State. Basic reforms promised after the landmark disability royal commission go unaddressed, and the pleas of the disability community go unanswered.
We are facing a housing crisis, and yet the Government refuses to even acknowledge how profoundly people with disability are bearing the brunt of the lack of affordable housing, rising rental costs and the scarcity of accessible housing. People with disability are at much greater risk of living in unaffordable housing than those without a disability, and even more at risk of becoming homeless. The alternative for many is living in institutions or group homes, denying them dignity, independence and choice. Despite that, the Government refuses to sign on to the minimum accessible housing standards in the National Construction Code, which would ensure that all new housing stock is built with basic accessibility for all people. Likewise, our public transport network remains woefully inaccessible, with investment in accessibility upgrades in every budget failing to make the cut.
New South Wales is more than three years past the deadline—which was agreed to more than 20 years ago—to meet the Disability Standards for Accessible Public Transport. That is more than 20 years overdue, and Transport for NSW tells us that people with disability will be waiting at least another 47 years before all stations are independently accessible. In our education system, where we should be building inclusion, the New South Wales Government continues to expand segregated education instead of investing in inclusive education as it promised to do after the disability royal commission. Meanwhile, the Government is rolling out one of the most extreme and ableist exclusionary discipline policies that sees disabled students suspended and expelled at alarming rates and further entrenches discrimination and exclusion.
The list of failures of this Government and the previous Government is immense. It includes failing to end cruel and inhumane restrictive practices, underfunding inclusive health measures and programs, starving advocacy services of basic funding, refusing to begin developing a supported decision‑making framework, and the ongoing failure to address the drivers of the significant over‑representation of disabled people at all stages of the criminal justice system. Disability rights are non-negotiable. We need to work towards building a genuinely inclusive society where all people with disability have equal rights, equal opportunity and equal access. We know exactly what is needed to achieve that; we just need a government with the leadership, integrity and compassion to do it.
Read the transcript in Hansard here.
19 November 2025