YVETTE MAKER: Hello, again, everyone, I think we'll get started. This afternoon we have two final panel discussions. And they're focused - the first one - on disability research issues and priorities for the issue. And it's a panel of four individuals, who are either partially, or wholly external to the university. Intentionally to get that contribution both internally and externally into what the difference research issues are and where we should be aiming our future targets.

The second panel will be stimulating and supporting disability research here at the University of Melbourne, and we'll hear mostly from internal speakers there. Now I'm just going to go ahead and hand over to Yvette Maker, who will chair this second-to-last panel. Yvette diligently prepared mini bios for everyone today except herself, so I will give Yvette' bio. Yvette has been a research fellow with the Disability Research Initiative for two years now helping out both in the Disability Human Rights Clinic and on research projects and on organisation of both the international network and several different, more local, domestic projects. She also stepped in amazingly last year when I was on leave and really carried a lot of the activities of the Disability Research Initiative, for which I will be forever grateful, and I think we can all be grateful for, because a lot of this wouldn't have been possible - a lot of it we talked about today wouldn't be possible if Yvette hadn't really taken a wonderful leadership role. She also is soon-to-be doctor and we're all going to celebrate again now. So I will now pass over to Yvette Maker to chair the second-to-last panel.

YVETTE MAKER: Thanks, Anna. So, as well as showcasing all of the amazing work going on across the university, now our roundtable discussions in the last session brought up a range of priorities and research gaps for us to think about and hopefully address in the future. And we've brought together, as Anna said, experts in different fields to further explore these issues and priorities more in this session so if I can invite our four panellists to join me up here. Jen Hargrave, Keith McVilly, Therese Sands and Jennifer Fitzgerald. Thank you.

(APPLAUSE).

So we managed to put you first twice, Jen. I'm going to introduce you again. Jen may be familiar from this morning's session. For those of you who weren't around then, we're very fortunate to have Jen Hargrave, who is a senior policy and communications officer on violence against women with disabilities at Women with Disabilities Victoria. She has represented WDBV at the royal commission's inquiry into family violence and advisory committees. She has worked as a researcher on the choice and control on the NDIS project that some of you heard about in the last session and I should mention she has also joined our DRI steering committee. She has previously worked in disability liaison projects working with tertiary education students. Keith McVilly as you know is the chair of the DRI and professorial fellow in disability and inclusion, which is a joint appointment between ULM and Scope. Keith's primary area of expertise is in intellectual and developmental disabilities, acquired brain injury and forensic disability and he has worked as a direct support work he is with people with disability, a clinician and public service manager in public health services and private practice, as well as the university sector. We're also very fortunate to have our third panellist, Therese Sands, from Disabled People's Organisations Australia. She has worked for 25 years in policy development, capacity building and advocacy in the area of disability and human rights and she is the director of DPO Australia. She has extensive theoretical and practical experience of United Nations human rights mechanisms and how to use UN documents to further domestic advocacy for the rights of people with disability. Therese has a master of human rights, law and policy. She is a life member of People with Disability Australia and a member of women with disabilities Australia.

And our fourth panellist, Dr Jennifer Fitzgerald. She became the chief executive officer of Scope in January 2012. Her value-driven approach has led her to work in the disability, health, aged care and community sectors for more than 30 years. She has a bachelor of applied sciences in physiotherapy, a graduate diploma of physiotherapy in neurology, a Masters in business administration and a doctorate of physiotherapy. She is a director of national disability services, ability first Australia and ability roundtable and chair of cerebral palsy Australia. She is also currently on the NDIA advisory council housing innovation working group and the Victorian ministerial NDIS implementation task force, so it's very much an esteemed panel we've got together today and we're very thankful that you are all here. We've asked each of our panellists to begin by highlighting what you see as particularly pressing or relevant research priorities. If I could perhaps put that to you first, Jen.

JEN HARGRAVE: (Inaudible). (No mic by speaker)...to change from short-term funding cycles so that people can be further supported to take the time that it takes to adapting to their new roles. We can see promising practice which involves people with disabilities in research and so we have a lot of opportunities to explore answers to some of those questions. Moving on to another aspect of the questions to discuss, as a policy officer I really have to take the opportunity to think about areas where there is a lack of research. University - the University of Melbourne has researchers from various disciplines who have done work examining violence against people with disabilities and with the introduction of the NDIS and the national safeguarding framework, Women with Disabilities Victoria are seeing a great need to push this research further. Having discussed this need with practitioners, colleagues and some academics, who have made a great contribution to the area, we've identified three research priorities which I'll just go through really quickly. Firstly, there is a need for research that examines comparatively the gendered pattern of violence against girls and boys. Men and women, with disabilities. This research needs to explore violence in community and institutional settings, the nature of the relationships in which it occurs, the gender of the perpetrators and the range of violent and controlling behaviours. This research would prepare us well for work on how to respond and to prevent violence, including how to work with people with and without disabilities who choose to use violence against people with disabilities.

Secondly, Dr Sue Dyson recently reported to Women with Disabilities Victoria that when presented with evidence about gender inequality and its impact, there is a deeply embedded discomfort from disability services being a female-dominated workforce who can experience disempowerment. There is a complexity around workers identifying their own experiences of gender inequality before addressing that experience by people with disabilities. So the question would be, what are approaches to addressing this and what have other workforces done to answer these questions? And the third one, looking through a legal frame, is that women who receive intimate disability support in their own home have equal opportunity exemptions to choose the gender of their report workers bus a woman receiving intimate support in a service setting does not have an exemption. Can the disparity of these be justified? So it's really good we can open up the discussion about priorities for the future, thanks.

YVETTE MAKER: Thanks, Jen. Keith, what do you see as key priorities and issues for research?

KEITH McGill: I've changed a little what I was going to talk about this afternoon. In my opening remarks this morning, I talked a little bit about the research priorities that were developed as part of the Scope/University of Melbourne partnership, and those priorities were developed through a review of the literature, what is currently being researched and where are the research gaps, but also importantly in a consultation process involving a number of groups of

people with lived experience of disability. From that consultation process, it was becoming increasingly clear that the research agenda for people with disability did not differ greatly from the research agenda for the wider community. Strange, that! But the issues of needing somewhere decent to live, getting a good job, having an education, being able to participate in social and political processes. And having an opportunity to develop and nurture and experience and celebrate deep personal relationships. I don't think that that agenda would come as anything strange to anybody in the wider community. But where my thoughts started to turn, as the day has gone on, and listening to a number of the presentation, was I think in order to achieve this research agenda, we've got to take a step back and, as an important part of the process, and this is very much with my professorial hat, my educational hat, on, we need to prepare the next generation of researchers to be highly literate in research processes that are conducive to exploring the issues relevant to people with disability, and processes which are conducive to producing and, indeed, evidence that speaks to their experience.

We need researchers who are capable and confident in co-design and co-production. And I think we saw the evidence of the struggles that we all face this morning, over the question of, "When do I put in an ethics application"? My burning question is, if I'm going to work with colleagues with disability, as colleagues, why the hell should I put in an ethics application and get permission to employ somebody? Surely, good practice and ethical safeguarding should be provided by best practice in human resources policy. We still seem not to have made the leap from the person with disability as object, maybe as participant, to the status of colleague. And that's manifesting itself in some of these - the uneasiness about when to put in an ethics application. I do not put in ethics applications with the idea of having a colleague with a disability as part of our team. That's for HR to sort out. I do put in ethics applications when people with disabilities are participants in research. But I think that's a challenge.

I think we need to - and, um, Elaine mentioned this in our session, that we shouldn't always be looking for the evils and the wrongs of the world, and I think the phrase we used was, "We sometimes should give ourselves a pat on the back". And I think rather than a research agenda that is characterised by research for wrong and failings, we need to equip ourselves with the skills of a pre-seated inquiry. We need researchers who go looking for where it is working and asking questions about, why is it working? And how we can take what's already working and do more of it. Appreciative inquiry I think, is a highly under-utilised approach to research.

I think we need to be equipped with the skills of mixed design and mixed methodology. Surely combining quantitative and qualitative research methods sees more cohesive designs. It's not just about counting a few numbers and asking a few questions and then sort of all writing it up together. Good mixed method design takes skill, and I think we need to equip ourselves with the skills to do thorough, rigorous mixed methodology in our research.

I think we need to be exploring not only a rights-based agenda, but also how we can go about incorporating aspects of emancipatory research in our practice, and I think this is an area where we really do need to develop some skills, because as scientists and as practitioners, we can all too often set aside the rigours of research and become ideologically driven advocates, and as part of a research community we need to be able to track and reflect on our own practice and where we might be in danger of crossing the line.

But where that good work can be done, that good integration of good science and of advocacy, that's seen in good emancipatory research and maybe if we start to equip ourselves with those skills.

YVETTE MAKER: Keith, I may have to invoke my position as chair and...

KEITH McGill: And that's the point I'm just about to end up on. At the end of the day I think it's about relationships - relationships between ourselves as researchers working collaboratively together, and relationships between people with disability and the wider community. And I think we need to feel comfortable in working not only in research practice, but working in truly intimate relationships to undertake that research. I'll leave it at that.

YVETTE MAKER: Thanks, Keith. And, Therese, from your perspective, what priorities and issues should we be focusing on?

THERESE SANDS: Well, coming from the perspective of Disabled People's Organisations, it's not surprising that we have a strong adherence to the disability rights movement's, "Nothing about us without us". So in terms of our work, it's around human rights and advocating for the human rights of people with disability, and critical to that would be the research and evidence base to support a lot of our work, which is often about reframing language and terminology of the service systems. So, you know, to actually name it for what it is in terms of human rights violations. And I'll talk about that in a moment. But I think one of the critical things for us is disability-inclusive research, which is about recognising, valuing and including in a genuine co-design framework or methodology, the expertise of people with disability, including through their representative organisations, or through DPOs. - disabled people's organisations. So it's about DPO-led research where we're setting the agenda with researchers, where we're part of the research design, the implementation, the evaluation, over and above participants - research participants or researchers who may be people with disability. I realised this today - there has been a lot of discussion around that kind of research, which is fantastic, but I think what we would really like to see is some kind of more structure or a framework, such as has recently occurred at the University of NSW, where there is now, I think, approval by the University of NSW for an interdisciplinary research structure for disability innovation - that's what it is called. But it is basically a partnership initiative between DPOs and the University of NSW where the structure of the research being undertaken - the governance and operational levels - will have designated roles for people with disability, where there will be advisory panels of researchers with disability, people with disability, from the community as well as from DPOs, et cetera. And that's an exciting development that I think is really important in this space. I think some of the other areas - I just - look, there's so many issues I could talk about in terms of needing research, but one that I just wanted to talk about, because we are very focused on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, we have a quality and safeguarding framework, and we're talking about in that framework reducing or eliminating restrictive practices. Now, restrictive practices is one of those terminologies that we use around - well, it's service system language, really, for the management of people. And we're now starting to use the term of moving to "Positive behaviour support". But really, what is positive behaviour support? Where is the evidence? What do people with disabilities say, what is the trauma effects of restrictive practices? And what is the support they need if there is support that they need around behaviour or learning skills? Where is the environment causing a need for the application of these practices? So for us there is a real area there around how will positive behaviour support, what is it and will it just become another form of restrictive practice? I think we need some work with people with disability in that area.

I think another area that is really critical is around the right to parent. We are constantly hearing of mothers and - mothers with disability or parents with disability who are either dissuaded or coerced not to have children or have their children removed, especially parents with psychosocial or cognitive impairments disabilities, and they're being removed because of

disability because disability is viewed as a risk factor, as opposed to any other actual risk to the child, and often this occurs as soon as the mother delivers the child in the hospital, sometimes without even the knowledge of the mother that this has occurred. But I think there is research that we need around the trauma and the impact of that on mothers, on parents with disability, of removal. You know, we hear these stories every day, through our membership and other people we're working with, about just lifelong trauma from this kind of removal. But it's couched from the child protection system about the risks that were imposed on the child. That were potentially there for the child.

We need to also perhaps in that respect look at research with children, or adults, who have parents with disability and what was their experience growing up? What are the successes of a family where a parent has a disability in it? We don't see the positive side of that story, you know, very often.

Look, they're just a couple of issues that I wanted to highlight, but often in the work or the issues that we're taking to the United Nations in terms of human rights violations, there's just so much work that needs to be done around forced treatment, forced medical interventions, forced sterilisations and the impact people with disability from these, as opposed to how they're projected within service systems that see them as in the best interests of people concerned.

Thank you.

YVETTE MAKER: Thanks, Therese. And to round us out, Jennifer from a service provider perspective particularly, what do you see as key?

JENNIFER FITZGERALD: I thought I would give a bit of context around, why we're in the space of research. Most of my peers across Australia are actually exiting from research at this time because they're feeling under substantial pressure under the NDIS, so we're stepping into that space because we see that it needs to mature within our sector. I've come for many years working across human service settings but certainly my most recent experience was at St Vincent's where research was part of business as usual. So pretty much everyone was a research practitioner. My aspiration is to see that maturation within organisations like Scope, both in Victoria and nationally. We've been in the space of research for over 30 years, and like many such organisations, commence with individuals who had a pressing research question they wanted to answer and who had individual capability. That then led to the board of Scope in 2008 approving our first formal research plan and we are now on our third plan. When I came to Scope I had aspirations and conversations with the board about research not being a cost but being an investment and, to their credit, the board could see it as an investment, both for Scope but, more importantly, for the people that we serve and support. And hence the partnership that is now in its second year.

I think that it's really important, at the time of the NDIS - we have an opportunity. We're in transition. It's a time of turbulence and a lot of change, but also an opportunity to have impact and I think we should be very cognisant of that timing and as researchers, as partners and collaborators, I think we need to be very intention in the timing of our research and the things that we bring to the fore that we say are priorities for research. We see the need for prevention focused research. We've seen decades of research conducted nationally and internationally that has shown that people with disabilities are amongst the most marginalised groups in the community. It has consistently shown that people with disability are often disadvantaged in every aspect of their daily life, including education, employment, housing, and access to services and often they live in poverty and we know that we are - I think I said earlier today -

29th in the OECD nations for proportions of Australians with a disability living below the poverty line. So we think it's time to move away from assessment-based research and instead turn our attention to interventional research and find out, as Keith said, what works and what doesn't. What can we leverage or improve upon. What can we place in the pond and see ripples and effects in the pond to changes in policy and practices going forwards? We think it's lacking and we think it's very necessary and I'm sure that you concur, but I would like to point out that I think there is a real timing opportunity in transition, it is a really co-design phase at the NDIS and I think there is a real opportunity to have an impact.

The second thing, and no surprise, I guess, when you hear about the partnership, I guess, is the need for collaboration for the sectors beyond disability. So when I spoke to Bernadette several years ago, where we had that forum where 90 people came, Scope had been looking for a partner for two years. We were very considered in the way we did it. We wanted it to be a true partnership and when I spoke to Melbourne University they said, "Who are you working with"? And they were surprised to find that we had been working for a couple of years with the school of business, with the faculty of education, unsurprisingly with health through our therapy teams, working with design -, with the school of architecture, transport - the list goes on.

And that was a pleasant surprise to both parties, to see how extensive the tentacles, if you like, had been over that period of time. So for us, we saw great examples of it in the session that we ran this morning - that collaborative research that brings the right partners into the room, who have the right knowledge and who have the right skill and who have the desire to create policy change or change in the way that supports are provided, or change that enables the voice of people with a disability to actually influence and impact the way things are done.

The third thing, no surprise, I think I've been told that less than 2% of NHMRC funding is actually attributed to grants for research in the area of disability that's just not good enough. At a time like this, that has to be challenged and it should be done in a very forthright manner. I think that we are seeing lots of interest in research in this area, but I don't see the major funding following it through. I think there's also an opportunity, as Elaine said, I think it was this morning, to participate with the corporate sector. There are lots of applications for the work we do that are beyond impacting disability, they affect human services more broadly, and in fact can have environmental design and built environment impacts as well. So I think it is time to be pretty forthright around equity, in allocation of funds for research in disability.

It's one in five Australians who are impacted, either directly with a diagnosis of disability or who are a carer or loved one of a person with a disability. I don't think that can be ignored and I think that those voices should be heard, with appropriate resources to enable high-quality research. Thank you.

YVETTE MAKER: Thank you. We have time for questions but I quickly wanted to touch on a couple of DRI projects or initiatives that are centred around responding promptly to research issues as they arise. One is our disability human rights clinic in the Melbourne Law School that Anna established and that I've been involved with in the last few years. The clinic is set up to take on small research projects from the communities, so prioritising DPOs, we've also worked with governments, service providers and others, to address violations of the human rights of people with disabilities and finding quick solutions. We have a good turnaround for investigating options like legislation, and so on. It is twelve weeks a semester, and we would love to hear from anyone who has project ideas. And so up to now, we've provided research support on things like attending litigation at the Australian Centre for Disability Law, support for the UN's special rapporteur's report to the commission. And our international human disability rights

research network which Anna also established at the beginning of last year and which I have been coordinating and the purpose of that is really to bring together the perspective of human rights bodies, persons with disabilities and researchers, to support research that contributes to the realisations of human rights again and a key goal is to act as a dissemination channel to respond quickly through law clinics, through collaborations on funding, and so forth, to emerging gaps in research. So they are a couple of additional avenues that we have been fostering in those terms. And with the little time we have left, does anyone have any questions or comments?

NEW SPEAKER:

(INAUDIBLE QUESTION)

...about how we prepare the next generation of researchers. Do you imagine that this would be something that's embedded across all disciplines in a similar way, or do you imagine some alternative approach?

KEITH McGill: A challenging question for this time of the afternoon! I think that preparation for working with people with disability needs to be embedded in all aspects of graduate training and research training in particular. I think that there are a vast array of approaches that our various disciplines take to research and we need to be flexible in that. But I think at the very core of whatever we do, it's about ensuring that our graduate students, with and without disability, work alongside researchers and research collaborators with and without disability. We know from the research that you can have all the advertising campaigns in the world, but it's the personal encounter that nurtures the attitudes, that nurtures the relationships, that make such collaborations happen. So... flexible, but I think there are some core issues that we can have.

NEW SPEAKER: Thank you very much, I think that was quite a valuable point that was just raised there. The question I would like to ask is about how do you think that the university would, um... make disability research core business? And, at the same time, ensuring that through the process of disability research, that identifying and working through the lens of nepotism so that ensures that we have the voice represented accurately and not by a minority, or within a minority, but by individuals with actual experience?

YVETTE MAKER: Anybody have a reply?

NEW SPEAKER: Can I just raise from this morning's session - and please, hold me true to the conversation, the people who were there - we did have this conversation at the end of the session and I think there were four issues that were raised by the researchers who presented and the people in the room.

The first was that the Disability Research Initiative needs to continue. That it obviously has an important role now and into the future. The second was that the convening of that initiative was an absolute priority and that I think under Anna's guidance people have seen the potential of what the initiative can deliver.

The third thing was that people said we need to get together like this at least once a year, we need to hear what each other's doing, we need to leverage off each other, and a lot of the researchers talked about the partnerships that they had engaged in to undertake their research and people said, "Who knows who these partnerships are, who holds that information, so that if I have a research question, I can go to someone and say, 'I need to work with some

stakeholders to answer this question'". And I think that what it was saying was that we need a point of contact and coalescence so that we can activate our capability.

And the final comment was - and it was a great, I think - Nikki made the comment, there are clear pathways, evidence has shown us what needs to be done. What needs to be translated into policy and practice, and it's not happening. Why isn't it happening and what is the role for the university - and correct me if I'm not representing it accurately - what is the role of the university and researchers in strategic advocacy and influence of public policy and the political agenda? I hope that correctly reflects the conversation.

YVETTE MAKER: Does anyone else have a comment, I suppose, about making sure we don't become too familiar with a small group of people that we always work with? And, I suppose, ways to avoid or address that?

KEITH McGill: I think one comment that I would make is that we need to ensure that we're talking with our colleagues about the work that we do, that we might be educators or economists or architects, but we're already sold on the idea of the contribution that our discipline can make to the lived experience of people with disability. Maybe we need to make sure that we're having those conversations with our colleagues and engaging them in our research. And broadening the partnership agenda.

One other comment that I'd make here - we've been talking about the disability hallmark research initiative in its current form coming to an end at the end of this year, but there's a very clear indication that people want this sort of network to continue, to support, nurture, enable and advocate for this sort of research. I would pass the comment that, thanks to Scope, and to the commitment of the social equity institute as well as the School of Social and Political Sciences my chair as disability social inclusion continues and certainly my chair and the limited resources around it are certainly interested in continuing this work that has been so ably championed by the hallmark and Anna's initial efforts and I'm also hoping that Anna is going to continue that journey with us.

YVETTE MAKER: Thanks, Keith. That seems like a nice place to end as we go into our final panel on the role of the university in supporting and stimulating disability research into the future. Thank you, very kindly, to our panellists today, Jen Hargrave, Therese Sands, Keith McVilly and Jennifer Fitzgerald. I have some little gifts for you. Jen, we wrote your name once on the gift list and we gave you your gift this morning. I'm going to have to buy you a drink afterwards as well! Thank you, kindly. If you can join me in thanking our panellists. (APPLAUSE).

NEW SPEAKER: Thank you very much to our last panellists and I think we'll just go ahead and jump into our last panel of the day. What we wanted to conclude the day with was stimulating and supporting disability research and we wanted to have a conversation with everyone in the room sort of about next steps, but also about the best way to stimulate and support disability research. From all the different perspectives we have in the room. So we have our panellists and then we will again open it up for questions. Um, I'll go ahead and introduce all of our panellists and then open it up for them to speak. I'm just checking where everyone is sitting! OK, Professor Brendan Gleeson joined Melbourne University in January 2012 as professor of urban policy studies before becoming the director of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute in early 2013. Brendan has qualifications in geography and urban planning, including a Masters degree from the University of Southern California and a PhD from the University of Melbourne. Brendan's research interests include urban planning and governance, urban social policy,

disability studies and environmental theory and policy. His work is focused on socio-spatial analysis of suburbs, their vulnerability to oil shocks and the need for better public transport option most recently looked at the case of last resort housing to address the homelessness crisis. I will go ahead introduce you and then you can speak and I will introduce the next. So go ahead, the question was your perspectives on stimulating and supporting disability research?

BRENDAN GLEESON: Thanks very much for that introduction. Thank you very much for the invitation to be here and to speak. I know it's a heavy end to the day so I'll try and be quick. I've actually written out a few notes, which is unusual for me, but which will help me keep to time and keep to purpose so I will have a look at those as I go. The question we were posed is how we can further stimulate and support disability research at the University of Melbourne, for this session. For me, the answer begins with, I guess, the recognition that a disability is such a prevalent and, for most of us, inevitable human experience, how can we not stimulate and support research on it? At any university, including the University of Melbourne. I can't think of an area or faculty that can claim - let's think about the ten faculties here - claim or maintain disengagement from the question. Let's take the hardest test. The faculty of vet science. Fabulous and important work but it's one where a number of areas might think it is so specialised, how do we relate to that faculty? Well, I think the answers in connections abound. Consider the questions of rurality, of rural production and the obvious implication of people with disabilities in those questions and those big human experiences. Consider the importance of animals to people with disability, not just the obvious and very important matter of guide dogs, but the whole question of human/animal interdependencies and how this matters intensely and uniquely for people who experience isolation and marginality, as many - but not all - disabled people do.

So what about my own area, just a minute or two on that, sustainability. Just going into that, I make the point that my own personal research record has focused heavily, strongly, on disablement and related areas of public policy such as mental health and homelessness. And some of that work was just mentioned. I actually began my own work in my fields of urban planning and geography in the mid-1980s when the issue of disability was all but ignored - not particularly, I think, through hostility or active dismissal, because simply because no-one had really made - it was inconceivable, no-one had made the effort to link it to questions of spatiality, of urban development, urban governance and regulation. Decades on, and many contests and fights later, and there were a lot of fights, starting with me even getting support to do an honours thesis on the topic, which was just seen as bizarre at the time, in 1986. I looked at resident reactions to community care homes, St Nicholas community care homes, that were rolled out in the 1980s. It was just not seen as a big planning consideration but it turned outdoor to be a big one. My own 1999 book, Geographies of Disability, was mapping out what we could do in this areas and it was sparked by my own family and then, with specific work opportunities, I worked in care homes. As I started, I quickly realised my chosen fields saw no relationship in their inquiries to the question of disability. But powerfully, and interestingly, and I think this is a lesson for here and for this session, the people with disabilities that I knew or worked with in other settings were never in doubt - for example, about how the built environment shaped their life chances, and the title of my book was really testament to their everyday lives, which was a constant negotiation of disabling geographies.

So just to finish Melbourne's sustainable society Institute, we are an interdisciplinary institute and other directors of other such institutes are here. We are committed to doing research on disability and we're grateful for the leadership that the social equity institute has shown in this space and created possibilities for all of us. Our main but not exclusive foci are cities and climate in the institute. Given what I've just said, I think the case is clear for the University of

Melbourne to support work on disablement in urban and metropolitan environments. We have, as I've said, a thriving national and international sub-field to engage and there are a group of people working on built environment related stuff and I've seen previously in the program - I I'm sorry I wasn't here for the session on that. Importantly, I think the task that - and I imagine Vas and my other directors would agree, the task of stimulating and supporting disability research, the topic of this session, is no different in some ways to enabling interdisciplinary research of complex social and environmental - and important - problems and opportunities generally. So interdisciplinarity is the starting point. That means collaborating with the other disability research institutes, the hallmark initiative, as well as putting in different projects, the example of the later, examining the housing assumptions of the NDIS, especially its consumer-based choice approach and I saw on the ABC News as I came here there is a protest underway from the service sector who are alarmed about the rollout of the NDIS in Victoria, will it follow the NSW pattern? Are we going to say wholesale outsourcing, privatisation and the dismantling some of the capacity that has been built? Another issue is the issues paper from the Institute, how will the NDIS change Australian cities? It scopes out the theoretical but highly applied framework for considering that. It was put together by a group of cross-faculty researchers including myself and also Christine Bigby, who might be known to some of you from La Trobe, and we put in an example on that. Finally climate, a stretch - climate? Certainly not. If we agree with the British Medical Journal that climate change is the greatest threat to human health how can it not be central to the question of human disablement? Obviously people with disabilities generally share heightened exposure with impacts with other vulnerable social groups. We haven't supported work on that yet, but I believe we should. Finally, considering - yet another finally! I think it's important not to narrowly concede disability related search, as simply a question of social vulnerability and residualisation. Although these are serious dimensions of disablement, they are only part of the experience and the possibility and we should acknowledge - that we should acknowledge and consider from a research perspective in my view, in particular the areas of urban and social policy, I think there's much to be learned through applied research about the achievements and insights of people with disabilities that have emerged through decades of social striving and political struggle. For example, the successful, if incomplete, struggle to create and ordain accessible human environments. Generally those populations that are disadvantaged by exclusionary urban design and organisation, even the work we've done on children has been picked up from some of those learnings. So to finish, my view is that disability is a human experience and not simply a problematic. Thanks.

ANNA ARSTEIN-KERSLAKE: Thank you, Brendan, and also thank you for the involvement and support of the Sustainable Society Institute in our seed funding and co-sponsored events in the last three years of the research initiative, it has been really wonderful to have that collaboration.

Our next speaker is Professor Thas Nirmalathas. Thas is a Professor of electronical engineering and a member of an institute which focuses on the transition towards the networked society. He has cofounded and provided (inaudible) Melbourne accelerator program, aimed at cultivating entrepreneurship, culture, on campus and has already supported 24 different start-ups. His current research interests include energy efficient telecommunications, access networks, optical wireless network integration and broadband systems and devices. He has had many editorial roles with the IEICE transactions and communications IEEOSA journal of light wave technology and photonics. Thank you for your support and involvement in the DRI in both, again, seed funding and different co-sponsored events of our short life.

Thas, it would be great if we could get your insights on stimulating and supporting university research here at the University of Melbourne.

THAS NIRMALATHAS: Thank you for the opportunity and invitation to talk about it. I think there have been a number of cases made for why the university should be continuing the Disability Research Initiative because it has provided fantastic leadership in bringing together different disciplines. A number of Melbourne research institutes, our basic brief is to activate interdisciplinary research, even those these institutes are there we have a particular focus and the DRI has made it possible for us to join in partnership with them and then to activate this research. I wanted to reflect on a recent conversation I had with the outgoing chairman of the NDIS, and it's already highlighted a number of times. There is an issue not just in Australia, but around the world, when something has been set up as a massive campaign to have something established, and people put a tick against it and everything has been done, and let's move on and that is a danger, I think, we face in the NDIS here, as we start to see the fine details of the implementations and the service. There are more core issues that remain there and we still need to be truthful of the original cause of why we're doing it. So there needs to be further systematic research and I think I'm not an expert in this domain but I can see from a well-argued case why the university of Melbourne should continue its leadership in supporting this type of initiative.

So it is very much, you know, in agreement with all the directors in supporting this hallmark research initiative going forward.

I was also touched personally to see a positive angle on to this issue because I was reading one of the submissions into the disability strategy formulation paper and it actually talks about the concept of disability disappears and is replaced by a society that is structured to support everyone's life and contributions. I think that is really a very worthy goal for university researchers to seek to create research that actually impacts that overall outcome. Therefore, there is, you know, really no argument against, but rather to support such a research - within a research-intensive university like University of Melbourne, with partners, as mentioned before, because it is important that it needs to be done in partnership. I guess a few comments regarding the institute that I lead. We take a particular lens, which is around the connectivity that is powered by information communication technologies and how that is actually positively changing our lives, and also where that is threatening some of the integral elements of society.

And the disability research is also important to that lens because we see the original question about how we can make the disability angle disappear and everyone can contribute in the positive sense, because number of convergence of technologies might come to a little bit of help but it needs further research. For example, our life is being increasingly captured in the digital domain and because of our connectivity, we're able to capture that information and move it around with almost zero cost right now and then just around the corner there is a significant degree of automation and we see the power of automation on the screen right now here. Earlier on, a few years ago, it would have been very annoying for someone to speak and translate its text, in real-time. Yet because of the network connectivity, and the learning technics, now we are almost about to give you almost real-time translation without much effort of computation. Imagine if we can bring that into very much a virtual assistant role to people with skill gaps and disability. They wouldn't realise that they're gaining the skills through these assistive technologies, but that requires the design of bringing technology and people behaviour into context. But also it requires society acceptance of accepting that kind of enhancement as a perfectly valid way of building up the skills and bridging that gap that you have in performing certain tasks. And also automation can help you when you move into this building, it can guide you with a lot of information. Again, at the moment, it is being done as more of a technology push, or certain start-ups of people trying to take advantage of that technology being in the hands of people, but without evaluated research and a systematic review of how that design can

be implemented with human factors, as well as technology factors, working together to really provide an effective solution and that's the reason why we, at the institute, we are really interested in bringing the convergence of digital technologies, connectivity technologies and automation and seeing how we can positively enhance people who need to make the most of that assistance. So the research is also a core focus of the institute, but we are not geared to lead that initiative. So essentially we're really fortunate to form a partnership with DRI to really continue to support that kind of research.

ANNA ARSTEIN-KERSLAKE: Thank you very much. Next we have Dr Ross Coller. Since 2007 Ross has been part of the leadership team for the evolving advancement function at the University of Melbourne. From 2012 to 2015, he was responsible for planning and delivering the launch and operational rollout of Believe, the campaign for the University of Melbourne. The university's first philanthropic campaign in 60 years. In 2016 he led a newly created portfolio of advancement, comprising the teams supporting deans and divisional heads across faculties libraries and museums. He holds responsibility for driving the second phase of the Belief campaign working closely with the campaign leadership and embedding project fundraising more deeply into the university. He completed PhD studies in organic chemistry at the University of Melbourne and holds a masters of marketing from the Melbourne business school. It would be great to get your insights into how to stimulate and support disability research at the University of Melbourne.

ROSS COLLER: Thank you for inviting me. I suppose what I'm going to try and explain to you is maybe some of the theoretical framework of advancement at the University of Melbourne. So for those who don't know already, it's sort of a north American term, anything that advances the university, but more specifically in Australia we've used it for alumni relations and development fundraising. Advancement has existed for about a decade at the university, prior to that there was less activity, there was more of a reactive activity. We've been more actively pursuing this line for the last ten years. We're currently at about 640 million raised, I think, and what's important to recognise, it's less than 1% of that that is not targeted towards a particular program. There is no $640 million pot sitting out there that's not assigned. Many of you may have benefitted from particular trusts or particular research that has been supported by a particular donor but we agree with every donor where that money will be spent. So in the introduction we were talking about the project-led methodology that we're now trying to use and I suppose this becomes an opportunity for initiatives like this to really think about how do you get projects positioned in a way that they get on to the university and to donor radar. We talk about advancement being academically led and professionally supported, so what you are doing today in effect is that academic leadership. What I've heard so far is, I suppose, things that donors and people outside are interested in, including the ability of partnerships, and having someone from Scope here talking just before, for example, those things are very powerful to people outside. Similarly, the fact that you are deeply embedded and talking about the impact on individuals, on their lives, et cetera, those are very powerful to people outside. Often we have trouble talking with academic colleagues who are used to working in the NHMRC or in the ARC framework, which is really you are talking peer to peer. People outside are not peers, they are interested in real-world impacts, and you're very much talking about that today. So you're in a very good space.

So in terms of what we do, there are hundreds of worthy causes across the university and many donors already have an idea about what they want to support. That said, I suppose not all of those worthy causes within the university are equally compelling. Do they have potential donors in Australia or elsewhere, they are may not priorities from the university's perspective in terms of resourcing. We are a fairly large team now, about 110 people in advancement across the

university now but when you look at Stanford and other places, they have 650 people just in fundraising. That's how they raise $1 billion a year.

So what do you do to get your projects up the list in that sense? What can you effect? Well, the compelling part is some of the stuff I've just talked about which is really - I'm thinking about the convening power and the partnerships that you have in projects. But setting the vision for what you are trying to achieve and really talking about the needs, the solution that you're proposing, and the impact on the real world, those are the sorts of things you need to think about as you are putting together these sorts of projects. As I say, not all of them are necessarily going to come through, but if you are thinking in that perspective of how you frame things, what would you like to do? Being clear on what other funding sources there might be, people do have a little bit of an assumption oh, it's great idea, and therefore finance can provide all of it, but we're there to assist in thinking those sort of things through.

In terms of potential donors, everyone thinks of the same names, every thinks of the Potter Foundation, the Myer Foundation, Dame Elizabeth Murdoch, who has now passed away but her name was on the list. You talk with people on a daily basis. Not everyone has the capacity in that they might be able to make a transformational difference but if you link back to us and particularly if you are putting forward projects, you talk about the people in your networks who you think might be interested and who may have capacity. Our job is to understand that. Our job is not to ruin those relationships by trying to force people into giving, but to actually explore in ways that you would not normally do, of talking to them about how they might want to invest in achieving things that they believe in, that you are able to deliver through the work you are doing.

That's a different thing from thinking about charity, where it's sort of a response to a need and a very important need, but this is about saying individuals out there cannot achieve the sorts of research, the sorts of impact on lives, that you can do through the work you're doing, and if we can frame it in the right way, then those people can achieve what they'd like to achieve by contributing their resources, their money and time and talent, to projects that you are working on.

Then of course there's the other part, which is making sure you advocate internally for these projects for this initiative to be higher up in terms of - or wherever it is, I'm not making a statement on any of that, but where does this sit? I think one of the challenges for all of the interdisciplinary institutes of various natures is that although they have a home faculty often, because they are, of their nature, multi-disciplinary, it's hard to get an advocate or work out how to go through those systems. Sadly that's problematic in that that is often the stuff that's really exciting for people outside but generally the university's processing tend to run straight through the silos of faculties. So thinking about around of involving others around that how to do will be very important.

ANNA ARSTEIN-KERSLAKE: We definitely hope to continue having those conversations and figure out how best to do that because it's definitely not always easy, I'm sure Thas and Brendan, you have the same experiences operating across faculties. Our last panellist was born in Malaysia and migrated to Melbourne when she was 8. She lived in Darwin for 15 years. Her first job was a prosecutor but moved into human rights law and continues to research in this area. She is also a painter holding exhibitions in Australia and overseas. Last year she finished a novel. She now lives in Melbourne with her partner and son and works across disciplinary arts law PhD at Melbourne university concerning disability rights. We're very excited to have you here today and really interested to get your perspective as a new PhD student, and a new member of our community here at the University of Melbourne, on what is needed to stimulate

disability research and support the capabilities that we have to undertake disability research here at the University of Melbourne.

MICHELINE LEE: Thank you. I'm going to approach this at the lived human experience. I've only just started my PhD and I think Bernadette McSherry, who is one of my supervisors, who is aware and has helped me through some of the access problems I've had at the university, wanted me to speak and I think perhaps it is a good contrast to focus now on some of the nuts and bolts. So my thesis is on the NDIS and the need for it to be underpinned by the concept of substantive equality. I felt it important that the voices of people with disabilities are heard on the NDIS. The art school offers a creative writing PhD model which can lend itself to a cross-disciplinary approach so I split my PhD into two. One part would be a creative writing piece on the lived experience of disability, and I would also talk about my experience of being registered on the NDIS earlier this year, and the other part would be the legal dissertation on the NDIS where I would focus on the substantive equality issues. It was to be a wonderful way to combine legal research and the voice of the person with a disability.

I'm sorry to say that my experience since starting has been rocky, because of access issues. Although it's several months into the year, instead of getting down to work on my thesis, my time is still being dominated by navigating access. If it weren't for the support I've received from my supervisors and from some individuals at the university, who have stepped in to help, I'm not sure I would have continued. So I would actually love to be able to speak at a higher level, and for my recommendations for stimulating disability research to focus on the more advanced issues of proactive strategies, however it appears that more needs to be done at the university at square one.

So these issues that I'm going to - these recommendations I'm going to bring up, they really are Access 101. First of all, providing a suitable premises. So my classes - some of my classes were held in inaccessible venues and so, rather than having an opportunity to be singled out for my academic stardom, I was singled out in one of my first classes for having to interrupt the class because I couldn't get into the class and I had spent all this time detouring the way to get to the old arts building, the accessible route. So that's why I was actually a couple of minutes late and when I got there I saw I couldn't actually get into the lecture room because it was inaccessible. And so I just yelled out, "Is there an accessible entrance"? And disrupted the whole class and there was an accessible entrance but it was locked and it was behind the podium. So they had to all stop and let me in. Another accessible premise issue that I've found is that wheelchair accessible bathrooms often do not comply with access standards. The doors have these heavy spring loads and it's impossible to open if you've got a mobility disability and they simply just don't comply with the access to premises standards, which is law.

Secondly, my recommendation would be - provide access to information right from the start. So filling out the enrolment form, and it asked me if I had a disability and what adjustments were needed. I filled this in and - which was writing out what some of the adjustments were required, but none of that information was actually acted upon. I wasn't contacted, and when I spoke with student equity they did say, "Yes, we haven't developed a way of actually accessing that enrolment information". I subsequently found out that in order to be provided with disability assistance, you have to be registered as having a disability but no information had been actually provided to me that this registration was required. Once I did find out that I needed to be registered as having a disability, I found out that you had to meet with student equity and go through some form-filling, but then no meeting times were available at student equity for at least the first six weeks. And in the end I could only get a meeting time by complaining and when I did

get a meeting, the disability officer wasn't actually available, but I met with the general student equity officer.

And the third recommendation would be to provide a support co-ordinator to assist a student with any access issues. So since I've started, I've had to deal with building managers in relation to building access issues, I've had to talk with administrators in relation to holding classes in accessible rooms, to library staff for library support, to the OHS officer in relation to adjustments to my desk, to access and equity for other access adjustments. Also to the Melbourne City Council in relation to disabled parking being obstructed by bicycle racks.

So that's just some of the detail, but I do hope that this feedback will lead to improvements so that postgraduate researchers will to be able to take part in the university and people with disabilities want their voices to be heard, we just need some of these obstacles removed.

ANNA ARSTEIN-KERSLAKE: Thank you very much. Thank you to our entire panel. I think we've had a really great cross-section of different perspectives and guidance on what needs to be done to stimulate research - disability research at the University of Melbourne. I think, as we can see, it really does need to start from the ground up. We need to figure out how to create a university that fosters people with disability 's participation from students to early career researcher to senior academic and we definitely haven't achieved that. I think we have a long way to go and it's really great to get the more theoretical and bigger picture insights from the panel, as well. As to where we can go in terms of that broad social change research.

I think I might go ahead and close. Because we have come to what we told everyone would be the end of the day. And if anyone has specific questions for the panel, they might be willing to hang around a bit, for a moment, and you can come up afterwards. I just want to, again, say thank you to everyone for being here today, and briefly go over some of the key points that I've heard, both from the plenary sessions and the concurrent sessions.

Basically, I think what we have been talking about today is the importance of the participation of people with disabilities in the research process, from the beginning, in the design, in the leadership of that research, and as recipients of the output of that research. I think we've also heard that there needs to be more people with disabilities included in academia. Finally, I think we've had some really important insights which I feel like we do repeat frequently, but are always important to remember - that our theory and our research needs to be influencing policy and that policy then needs to be influencing practice, and it is an ongoing sort of circle and exchange of information and we always need to come up with new and innovative ways to make sure that circle is continuing.

I think that's all I'm going to say today except that we will include some of these key points in our newsletter and also in documents and conversations we have about the continued life of the Disability Research Initiative here at the University of Melbourne.

Finally, I just want to say thank you to a few different people. All of our speakers, panellists and chairs, and especially everyone had a hung on till the last moment here this afternoon. All our event partners, the Melbourne Social Equity Institute, the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and the DACS centre. Andrew Normand, who has been helping us throughout today, for coordinating the speech-to-text, which I think quite a few people commented has been very useful. So thank you very much, Andrew, wherever you are. And Kristina Harrison at the DACS centre, very importantly Charlene Edwards and Katherine Cutterson for their ongoing support and assistance for the Disability

Research Initiative and of course today. And Bernadette McSherry at the equity institute for all your guidance and support. Probably most importantly are Cathy Chen, the DI administrator, the research fellow of the DRI, and Claire who I believe is popping in here... there she is! I really wanted to say thank you to them and give them these small gifts because the forum couldn't have happened today and most of the activities of the DRI couldn't happen without their very diligent and detail-oriented assistance and support. So thank you very, very much. (APPLAUSE).

And we also have small gifts for the panellists, which I will just give you in a moment, but I just wanted to say a final thank you to everyone and also to our steering committee. And please get in touch with us if you have any questions about any of our projects or would like to collaborate or just have a chat. Thank you very much.

(APPLAUSE).

(End of session.)