Page 2879 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 14 August 2019
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their house to help them get out of bed and get dressed to go to work, if they are lucky enough to have a job. There are people who have trouble getting a shower more than once or twice a week because of a lack of resources. That is not to say that this is not an important issue and that people with disability do not have the same rights as anyone else in our community.
When Ms Cody was chair of the Standing Committee on Health, Ageing and Community Services there was a report into the gaps in the implementation, performance and governance of the national disability insurance scheme. There were 30 recommendations in that report. Not one of them was about sex, sex therapies or sex workers. I was prepared to give her the benefit of the doubt. I wondered whether she had conflated, either wilfully or ignorantly, the decisions of the AAT about sex work and sex therapy. By her own admission earlier, she has deliberately done it. She was deliberately conflating an issue that was specifically excluded from the judgement. She has conflated sex therapies, which were the core of the matter, and sex work, which Deputy President Rayment went to such great lengths to exclude from his judgement. This case does not, in his opinion, “throw up for decision the question whether the services of a sex worker ought, on the proper construction of the act to be funded for persons with disability if their needs require it”.
Ms Cheyne: This is out of order.
MADAM SPEAKER: Ms Lawder, I have asked people to speak in broad terms and not to make reference to the decision or to any comments that could be before the appeal. I pulled Ms Cody up when she was getting specific. I ask you to be more general in your debating.
MS LAWDER: Thank you, Madam Speaker. There is the implication in Ms Cody’s motion that sexual rights are human rights: there is a right to sex. There are many people throughout our entire community who do not have access to sex workers or sex therapies, for a range of reasons. This is not to exclude people with disability but to treat them the same way.
Given that there is a looming and lodged notice of appeal to the Federal Court, we are sailing very close to the wind. Once again, Ms Cody is seeking to wrongfully bind the Canberra Liberals to signing a loopy letter to the Prime Minister and the commonwealth minister for the NDIS without discussing it with us prior to this debate. She is seeking to add, to quote a Canberra Times article, to her string of batty headlines, trying to grab the spotlight by talking about sex and using people with disability and the idea that sex sells as a vehicle to do that. I am really interested at any time to talk about the NDIS. The NDIS is a great social policy reform.
Ms Stephen-Smith: That is a commonwealth matter, Ms Lawder.
MS LAWDER: Ms Cody has brought this to us today and it has not been ruled out of order. At the time when it was brought in, as we all know, it was supported by all Australian political parties because previously the disability sector was very underfunded and there were a multitude of schemes and programs, such as disability
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