Page 1713 - Week 06 - Thursday, 30 July 2020
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with disability; being the 2015 CoAct local hero award, for exemplary work done in local areas; and being the 2020 ACT Senior Australian of the Year.
Sue’s work with ACCAN included being a board member and chairperson, following ACCAN’s first AGM in 2009. She stayed on as a member of the board until 2012. She also offered support to ACCAN’s standing advisory committee on disability issues. She was chair of the committee from 2009 to 2010. In recognition of her pivotal role with ACCAN, she was awarded life membership of ACCAN in 2019. Sue worked hard to provide guidance to other people involved in the telecommunications area. This is where her longstanding involvement with the deaf community must be recognised. She understood that deaf people needed and deserved access to telecommunications.
But Sue’s interests were even wider than people with disability. Twenty years ago, she received a grant and wrote a research paper about access to telecommunications for women with disabilities living in rural, remote and regional communities. Twenty years ago, we talked about this as the digital divide. That research paper talked about things like access to online banking and all sorts of other new communications and telecommunications that were not yet mainstream as we see them today.
Many, many people in the deafness community, the disability community and the Canberra community generally will be forever grateful for Sue’s work. I would like to add my condolences to her family, friends and colleagues. She was an encouraging and knowledgeable mentor for many people and a caring and compassionate person overall.
Sue and I often joked about the fact that we are on different sides of the political fence. But as an indication of the type of person she was, on many occasions when I was campaigning four years ago at the Tuggeranong Hyperdome, and Sue was maybe having a cup of coffee at the cafe across the road, she would send over a cup of tea and a cake to me while I was campaigning. This is a measure of the type of person that Sue was. She supported other people, and politics was not her number one criterion for doing so.
Sue will be sadly missed. I absolutely laud her contribution, which will be ongoing in our community.
MS STEPHEN-SMITH (Kurrajong—Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Minister for Children, Youth and Families and Minister for Health) (11.10): “Good leaders build more leaders.” This is the opening line of Christina Ryan’s and Carolyn Frohmader’s obituary for Sue Salthouse, published in the Canberra Times on 26 July. Many people have said many things about Sue over the past week and a half since we heard the terrible news of her passing, but this has been a constant theme.
Sue built people up, nurtured, mentored, educated without judging, and always—always—made people feel more than rather than less than. Whether it was Women with Disabilities ACT’s Pitch your Passion event or consultation on a policy question
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