Episode 2: Universities and the Disability Discrimination Act

The Disability Discrimination Act review is happening right now - and it could fundamentally change how disability rights work in Australian universities. But only if the sector actually gets involved.

In this episode, Ebe unpacks four game-changing reforms proposed in the DDA review and why every person in our sector needs to engage with this once-in-a-generation opportunity for change.

What you'll learn

• How universities have historically been absent from disability law reform conversations
• Four key areas of DDA reform that could transform university experiences for staff and students with disability
• How a positive duty framework could incentivise proactive inclusion rather than reactive crisis management
• Why removing 'reasonable' as a qualifier for adjustments matters
• How inherent requirements are being misused as tools of exclusion
• Why disability action plans currently function as "insurance policies" rather than accountability tools
• The cost of inaction - and why proactive inclusion is more efficient than the current system

Get involved in the DDA review

• DDA Review Issues Paper - Attorney-General's Department
• DDA Review consultation page - Australian Human Rights Commission

Background reading

• Why the university sector must engage with the Disability Discrimination Act review - Ebe's original Substack post that sparked this episode
• Disability Standards for Education 2005 - Department of Education

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 6:08 The DDA Review and Positive Duty
• 12:24 Changes to 'Reasonable Adjustments'
• 17:04 Changes to 'Inherent Requirements'
• 22:48 Making Disability Action Plans effective
• 28:51 What this means in practice, and why the sector needs to be involved
• 33:23 The power of collaboration
• 38:43 Conclusion

Transcript

Speaker: 0:05

Welcome to Higher Hopes, the podcast raising the bar for Australian universities. I'm Ebe Ganon and I'm here for the bold conversations about what's possible when higher education lives up to its potential as a place for everyone to learn, connect, and thrive. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article on Substack about how and why the Disability Discrimination Act review is something that the university sector should be talking about and getting involved in. And that blog post sparked a lot of conversations about the DDA. People were genuinely surprised by some of the proposed changes and what they could mean for universities. So today I'm gonna unpack the current challenges with how the Disability Discrimination Act is working in universities, the proposed reforms in this review that might be game changing for our sector, and why every single person in our sector - students, staff, executives - need to get involved in this conversation. I am not gonna spend this episode talking about the experiences of staff and students with disability in detail, because I think a lot of us have spent a lot of time and energy over the years really pouring our hearts out about the experiences that we have, about the discrimination that we faced, about the neglect and about the low expectations that we experience from others in the sector. And there are lots and lots of places online that you can go to find these experiences. I especially recommend connecting with your disability employment network at your university or your student disability collective. They will have written and spoken about a lot of these challenges. But what I'm really here to do today is to unpack this legislative review opportunity and talk about some of the solutions and opportunities for change that our sector is currently faced with. Background: Universities under the DDA So as a bit of background, universities are covered by the Disability Discrimination Act as both education providers and employers. As education providers, the DDA requires universities to provide equal access to courses, facilities, and services for students with disability, and to ensure that adjustments are made to ensure that disabled students can participate on an equal basis to their non-disabled peers. As employers, universities have duties under the DDA around recruitment, workplace adjustments and creating inclusive work environments such that they can enable employment for people with disability, again, on an equal basis to non-disabled professionals and staff. And I think this is really important for us to think about because universities are huge employers and they span and reach a huge number of students across their life. So when universities get disability inclusion wrong or when perhaps they're engaging in behaviours that might be characterised as discrimination under the law, the impact is really, really big. And unfortunately, despite these legal obligations, students with disability consistently report the worst experiences across all, quote unquote equity groups in universities and staff with disability face similar barriers. Certainly in my own experience, both working on the student side of things, both back when I was working in universities and now that I sort of sit outside that remit supporting students to build their self-advocacy skills, I still see a massive gap in their experiences and I still see opportunities for universities to be doing much better when it comes to proactive inclusion as well as reactive responses to complaints and when things aren't going wrong equally. On the staff side of things, there is a lot of work to be done in ensuring the universities places where disabled professionals can thrive, where they can progress on an equal basis to their non-disabled peers and where they can be fully enabled to contribute their strengths to our sector. The review, which is the first review in over a decade of this discrimination act, could really fundamentally change how disability rights work in Australian universities, but only if the university sector actually engages with this consultation. Historically, universities haven't really seen it as their role to get engaged with reviews like this. The engagement of the university sector in the development of Australia's disability strategy, for example - which is our national level guiding document for the way that Australia should be implementing the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities - universities weren't well represented in that conversation or that discourse. Equally, we can see that in the Disability Standards for Education, which is a sort of subsidiary instrument underneath the DDA, a lot of the terminology and the discourse in that particular instrument is really geared around schools and the experiences of students in early primary and secondary education. There is a review of the Disability Standards for Education or the DSE coming up as well, and so I'm hoping that through the DDA opening up this conversation, we can also start to get universities involved in that conversation too. And certainly if the university sector does not get involved in these conversations, what we are going to end up with is reforms that don't meet the requirements of disabled staff and students in the DDA, but also potentially duties on universities that they haven't necessarily had a say in. And then possibly will quite struggle to implement. So I think this collaborative approach is really important and I'm gonna unpack how we can do that and why we should be doing that. Four key areas of reform The Attorney-General's Department together with the Australian Human Rights Commission have prepared an issues paper for the DDA review and this issues paper canvasses a whole range of areas of the DDA that they're currently looking to review, improve, and make changes to. So I'm gonna unpack four key areas of the issues paper today and the implications that they might have and those changes might have to the way that universities are operating and the way that staff and students with disability experience universities as both places of education as well as places of employment. 1. Introducing a positive duty The first key area I'm gonna talk about is something that in the university sector we are kind of already quite familiar with already in the proposal: we are looking to introduce a positive duty into the Disability Discrimination Act. And what that positive duty means is that not only will universities have a duty to respond to discrimination. But it means that they have a proactive duty to prevent it from happening in the first place. They need to proactively take steps to create environments that are inclusive for people with disability that are accessible, and to prevent any kind of barriers from occurring for a student or a staff member before it gets to the point of discrimination occurring and when a complaint is made. And this might be familiar for some listening who might remember the introduction of a positive duty under the Sex Discrimination Act. And when that was introduced, it gave universities the obligation to prevent sex-based discrimination. And this was really what supported a lot of the more recent changes around gender-based violence prevention in universities. And it has had quite a significant impact in the way that universities are prioritising that work. So with that background, I'm quite hopeful about this proposal for a positive duty under the DDA. So the DDA as it currently operates in universities, is essentially a complaints-based system, which means that institutions don't currently have a duty to prevent discrimination from happening in the first place. At the moment when something happens and when a student or a staff member has experienced a barrier or discrimination, the only way that they can really get a resolution, if they wanna take an independent path, is to make a complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission. And if you've never tried to navigate a complaints process like this, let me paint you a picture. It's lengthy, complex, and exhausting. Imagine being a university student who's 18, possibly just having left home, juggling a course load and trying to figure out adulthood and having to take on this additional burden just to access your education. From a staff perspective, imagine the kinds of workload pressures that we currently have in our sector. The kind of emotional labour that is needing to be undertaken by staff. With all of these restructures that are being proposed and needing to navigate a complaints process like this. The review is proposing shifting this reactive model to a positive duty framework. So instead of waiting for complaints, universities will need to be proactively responsible for preventing discrimination and promoting rights-based environments. So positive duty, what might sound like jargon to some is actually a real paradigm shift in my view. A positive duty requires universities to proactively identify and remove barriers in course design, in assessment methods, in built environments and in employment contexts. And I think it would incentivise genuine capacity building for staff and really force institutions to consider the experiences of both students and staff with disability in their strategy and planning rather than after an incident or complaint occurs. I've seen this becoming reality with the changes in work health and safety, as well as sex-based discrimination. Positive duty is a very powerful tool. And this feeds into conversations that we are having in the disability sector broadly in higher education inclusion around the implementation of concepts like Universal Design for Learning, as opposed to simply relying on adjustments being made for students engaging with their learning. So Universal Design for Learning is a framework for inclusive learning design. It effectively builds in a range of different ways that students can engage and express their learning. It provides a framework for learning designers to be able to ensure that what they are creating is accessible for people with a whole range of different strengths and communication requirements. If universities had a positive duty to prevent disability discrimination, Universal Design for Learning may become a very attractive framework, particularly in the learning context for universities to be able to prevent barriers from occurring in the first place. So positive duty could be a very important tool for those of us working in the advocacy sector to incentivise universities to create proactively, universally designed learning as opposed to relying on the system that we currently have where students need to approach the disability support service at their university and request, and advocate for themselves for the kinds of adjustments that they need. Certainly UDL is not going to eliminate all requirements for individual adjustments, but it means that we take the burden off the students to be advocating for themselves, and we give universities responsibility to actually need to do some of this work proactively. That saves so much time for students. It saves a lot of time for learning designers and academics as well. If we're building in accessibility proactively from the start of our learning design, it means that we don't need to spend so much time administratively and logistically after teaching periods have commenced to make things inclusive and retrofit accessibility. So it means that this positive duty starts to incentivise universities to have to proactively identify barriers instead of waiting for students and staff to find them and potentially fight them. 2. Removing 'reasonable' as a qualifier for adjustments This leads into another key issue that the review is looking at: removing reasonable as a qualifier for adjustments. So as a reminder, reasonable adjustments are used to adjust elements of the teaching, learning and assessment processes for students with disability, and also to adjust the workplace environment for staff with disability to make their jobs more accessible and to allow staff with disability to perform at their best. So a student goes to their disability support service, they request an adjustment. It might be extra time, it might be alternative formats. It might be providing recordings or transcripts or getting an Auslan interpreter, whatever that might be. For staff with disability or staff with caring responsibilities there's a whole range of different circumstances where you might be eligible for workplace adjustments. These adjustments might be changes to working hours. There might be the provision of assistive technologies, changes to some of the ways of working in a particular workplace. Physical changes to the environment that enable staff with disability to do their jobs better. So these are tools that we use to create equitable learning and working opportunities that accommodate the strengths and support needs of people with disability. But the way that this has been working in courts in practice is that the courts have recognised that reasonable adjustments as a concept essentially mean all adjustments up to the point of unjustifiable hardship. Unjustifiable hardship is simply referring to any kind of unreasonable impact on a duty holder that would result from the implementation of a particular adjustment. So that might be things like cost that can't be reasonably borne by the institution. It might be if the adjustment would cause significant disruption to the way that a duty holder's business is working. So for example, some of the smaller VET providers and RTOs who have significantly less funding allocated to disability supports they might more often be claiming that cost barrier. But what it's really pointing to here is that reasonable as a concept is somewhat superfluous. And what that actually results in is universities adopting this legislative slack to use reasonableness as an excuse to refuse adjustments without proper consultation. This is creating a system where students must prove why they need something rather than universities demonstrating why they can't provide it. And the burden of proof is sitting exactly with the student. That student is often supported by under-resourced disability practitioners. Those practitioners are required to limit their thinking due to narrow interpretations of what's reasonable, or alternatively, if students themselves turning to their peers to try to navigate these systems. Removing this reasonable qualifier would go some way to eliminating the loopholes that institutions currently exploit while maintaining appropriate protections for institutions through the unjustifiable hardship provision. But I think in my view, we need to go further than this. Universities should be required that they have genuinely engaged in collaborative problem solving before they're allowed to claim unjustifiable hardship. They should also be required to be transparent about their grounds for refusal as a basis for further negotiations. So if it's resourcing, if it's built environment constraints or funding limitations, whatever it is, we need to be able to tell staff and students what it is that's getting in the way of the way that their adjustment is being considered, and then engage in a meaningful dialogue about alternative solutions. Currently, when the system says no, or an academic refuses an adjustment for a student or a manager isn't sure how to facilitate inclusion for a staff member, that's often where the conversation is ending, and then that burden is falling back on the student or the staff member to reinitiate the conversation to advocate for their rights rather than the university coming back to the table with alternative solutions that meet their legal obligations to provide support. And it's really not good enough. These are not nice to haves. These are legal obligations that universities need to comply with and a lot of university practitioners aren't aware of the degree to which they are obligated to both provide these adjustments and also to engage in meaningful dialogue. 3. Reframing inherent requirements I commonly hear from students and staff about universities using this concept of inherent requirements as instruments to exclude students with disability from enrolling in and completing courses. So, inherent requirements - those who work in social work or in medical fields would be quite familiar with these - they're supposedly the essential skills needed for a course or the profession that it leads to. But these requirements are often developed with minimal consultation and are subject to broad inconsistent interpretation. And currently in higher education, we are often assessing inherent requirements in isolation. So I'll give you some examples. When we are accepting a student into a medical degree or a nursing degree, for example, we ask: Can this student take someone's blood pressure in the exact way that we think is acceptable? Can they do it in the way that we usually do it? Can they take someone's blood pressure using the same instruments that somebody without disability might use? Can the student lift a certain weight unassisted? Can they communicate with clients or patients in precisely the manner we've predetermined or in the way that we traditionally expect someone without disability to communicate? Most recently, I've heard from a deaf student who uses a combination of speech and Auslan to communicate that they've been denied access to a social work degree, for example, because those who are in control of the acceptance process for that particular program have decided without consultation with the student and without considering the actual supports that would be available in the workplace context, that that student couldn't possibly be a social worker because they wouldn't be able to reliably communicate verbally with a client. It's just mindless. The way these inherent requirements are being used are as tools of exclusion when students try to enrol based on assumptions about their capabilities rather than genuine and holistic assessments of professional competence. Students are being excluded on assumptions about their capabilities rather than assessments of how they might meet requirements with the appropriate adjustments in place. Universities are actually acting as gatekeepers to entire professions. Not because students can't do the work, but because of low expectations and inflexible thinking. And what I see happening in reality here is a lot of the professional accrediting bodies, so you might have a professional association - there's lots of them in allied health professions, for example, that sort of manage and maintain these inherent requirements. The way I see those acting is actually as lobby groups to universities. And then universities becoming Trojan horses for gatekeeping to these professions. So these professional associations are working with the universities and saying, "Hey, these are what we think the inherent requirements are, can you just make sure that nobody enters your university that wouldn't necessarily be able to do these in precisely the manner that we suggest?" And I've made a submission to the TEQSA review recently that kind of unpacks this really unspoken lobbying arrangement, so I won't go into it too much here. But what we've got is, as opposed to being places of education and lifelong learning, universities are now doing the dirty work of industry. To say to students, "Actually, no, you're not allowed to come into our program because your professional association thinks that you aren't necessarily gonna be able to do this job." And I think that in the way the higher education and tertiary sector works more broadly a lot of people would have an issue with the fact that universities here are not necessarily playing their role as providers of learning but they're playing a role on behalf of a lobby group and telling students based on what the lobby group has told them, that there are certain professions that are off limits to them. At any rate, the DDA review is proposing a reframing here. Considering inherent requirements in relation to how a person with disability would be able to meet them when reasonable adjustments are in place rather than assessing the requirement in isolation. So this shift would force universities and professional bodies to think creatively about what actually matters for professional competence rather than what we've always done out of tradition. So instead of asking, "Can this person take blood pressure in the standard way," the question becomes "Could this person accurately assess a patient's blood pressure using the available technology and reasonable adjustments?" Or in the social work example: when provided with an interpreter and the appropriate communication supports, can this student engage meaningfully with empathy and compassion with a client? This approach opens up possibilities rather than shutting them down and ensures that inherent requirements reflect genuine professional needs rather than arbitrary barriers. I think a final point to think about here is that the review is currently addressing school exclusion or student exclusion in a school context, so thinking about how students with disability in schools are being excluded, expelled, and suspended at much higher rates than their non-disabled peers. I genuinely think inherent requirements are the equivalent of exclusion for students with disability in higher education, and I think that improving how inherent requirements are considered is a way to frame reduced exclusion for university students. 4. Reforming disability action plans Currently, the Australian Human Rights Commission allows organisations to lodge disability action plans or DAPs to account for gaps between their legal obligations under the DDA and what they're currently capable of delivering. When I first started in equity and diversity governance in the university sector a couple of years ago, I was told by someone quite high up in the university at the time that the university's disability action plan was an insurance policy. It was a document that they had created as a result of not being able to fully comply with the Disability Discrimination Act. The Australian Human Rights Commission through the DDA offers this opportunity for institutions and duty holders to lodge a plan with them to describe how they plan over a period of time to ameliorate any instances of non-compliance. And that might be around the built environment. So in universities we have lots of very old - you know, sometimes heritage listed - buildings that aren't compliant with modern disability standards. It might also be around the technologies and digital platforms universities have. So a lot of our websites and website content are not accessible. And what these action plans do is they allow universities to say, "Yep, we're not compliant and this is our plan for how we're going to improve this." In theory, these plans should provide a roadmap for improvement, but in practice, universities, in my experience, treat them as get out of jail free cards. This is how the DDA currently allows institutions, not just universities, to sort of write off ways that they're not currently compliant. When I started, I noticed this real cultural sense that the DAP was being used as a way to just sort of push this work down the line. And when I unpacked not just the DAP at the university I was working at at the time, but also a range of disability action plans at a whole range of different institutions, I realised that the governance instruments set up around these plans were not actually set up in a way that was going to allow them to really be fulfilled. Usually these plans were owned by a kind of niche area of the university, or perhaps they were kind of hidden under a few layers of management in HR when they were approved or developed. The budget required to implement some of these actions hadn't also been developed at the same time, so the different work areas that were responsible for potentially paying for some of these, for example, building remediations, had not been consulted. They had not actually approved the budget that would be required to do these things. And so what you have is very genuinely passionate and enthusiastic people sitting on disability working groups, sitting on disability action plan implementation committees who genuinely believe in the things that were being proposed by the action plans, but were not actually given any kind of budget or authority to see them happen. And that's really disappointing because when a student is looking at the place that they want to enrol in for their education, or when a staff member is selecting the next place of employment that they would like to move to these documents are things that come up online. And these documents contain a whole range of motherhood statements and a whole range of, I suppose, cardboard commitments that the universities have made to inclusion that signal institutions that are so much more committed, I think, to disability inclusion than what we experience in reality. When I last audited university DAPs, admittedly last year, about half of institutions didn't have one, and a significant number of published plans were expired or expiring in 2025. The ones that did exist, they painted pictures of institutions I didn't recognise. They described lovely places to study and work if they were actually compliant, but bore no resemblance whatsoever to the universities staff and students with disability actually experience. And this becomes really frustrating when we consider recent increases to the Higher Education Disability Support Program funding, or DSP. Universities are now receiving significantly more Commonwealth funding specifically to support students with disability, which presumably should substantially reduce their ability to claim resource constraints as barriers to compliance or ability to plead unjustifiable hardship. Yet many institutions are continuing to under deliver on accessibility and lack the capacity to systematically dispense this funding. The DDA review is proposing crucial reforms to make DAPs actually work, so stricter timelines for implementation, mandatory renewal requirements and robust evaluation and reporting mechanisms. Most importantly, there would be genuine monitoring and compliance action against duty holders who fail to meet their commitments. And that transforms action plans from aspirational documents, gathering dust to genuine accountability tools. Universities would no longer be able to write something that looks impressive and demonstrates awareness of compliance gaps without actually delivering the change. They'd be required to show measurable progress within defined timelines with real consequences for failure to deliver. Combined with positive duty requirements, reformed action plans would create a system where universities must proactively prevent discrimination and demonstrate concrete progress towards full compliance. No more insurance policies for inaction. Addressing the "more regulation" concern Now, I know some of you will be listening, thinking, "Great, more regulation, more paperwork, more admin. We're already overburdened. We don't have staff. How are we going to do all of this?" And you won't be the first to say this to me, and you won't be the last. But here is the reality as I see it, and the way that students and staff with disability see it. Our current system is incredibly inefficient. You are already dealing with complaints, academic appeals, student dissatisfaction, possibly lawsuits. You're dealing with staff who aren't having their needs met, that potentially has flow on effect for capacity and productivity. You're losing students and staff who could succeed with appropriate support. And that means less government funding on the student side of things too. And you're facing potentially expensive legal action when things go wrong with huge reputational flow ons. A positive duty framework actually provides clarity and creates systems that benefit everybody. Proactive inclusion is way more cost effective than reactive crisis management. Students who feel supported are more likely to succeed. Staff who feel supported are more likely to be retained, and that reduces attrition costs. Staff who understand their obligations are more confident and effective educators. And staff who are able to embed inclusion and accessibility, particularly into their teaching and assessment activities are saving a significant amount of time. You already have these responsibilities under the DDA, senior executives - I'm talking to you - even if you weren't aware of them before. This is nothing new. The DDA review is just better framing and closing up loopholes and providing incentives for proactivity. So I really am calling for you to get involved in this conversation because what I really don't wanna see is reforms happening to the DDA, them getting passed, going through Parliament and then universities coming back and crying poor, and suggesting that they're not able to meet these obligations and complaining about the amount of red tape that is being enforced on them. If you do not get involved now, if you do not participate in this conversation I will have no time for the complaints that happen once these positive duties and once all of these additional changes are implemented. Because staff and students with disability are sick and tired of being told by universities that they do not have the time or the resources to support us, or that they didn't know what their legal obligations were here. Universities are full of incredibly smart people who are paid a lot of money, and we are tired of needing to do this work ourselves from the disability community we need everyone to come to the table. A once-in-a-generation opportunity This review represents a once in a generation opportunity to reshape how disability rights work in Australia, and I really want universities to be on board with us here. The current consultation period will not last forever, and if the sector doesn't engage meaningfully, we're gonna end up with reforms that don't address our unique context. Students with disability deserve better than their experiences consistently ranking worst out of all student cohorts. We deserve education that builds our aspirations rather than crushing them. We deserve to be partners in creating solutions rather than having to fight for basic access. Academic staff with disability often struggle with inaccessible venues, inflexible teaching and employment arrangements and assumptions about their capabilities. Professional staff face barriers in career progression, exclusion from key meetings and decision making processes and workplace cultures that treat disability as a problem to be managed rather than diversity to be valued. They deserve better too. Research shows us again and again, the diverse teams make better decisions and produce more innovative outcomes. And yet too many brilliant minds are excluded from academia or forced to hide their disability to survive in exclusionary systems. A positive duty framework requires universities to consider the full employee lifecycle for staff with disability. Just as students shouldn't have to fight for basic access to education, staff shouldn't have to battle for workplace adjustments or inclusive environments. The power of collaboration Finally, I want to talk a little bit about the power of collaboration in all of this. I was at a Canberra based DDA review event a couple of weeks ago, and when I was there I was really intrigued by the fact that it's the same community members with disability who were present in the room who have been present in these conversations for many years and for some of them many decades. What I saw was a real underrepresentation of duty holders under the DDA in that room. And what I'd really like to see is duty holders like universities, but all employers and education providers, collaborating with people with disability and people with disability organisations as well. In the university sector, that could look like partnerships between student disability collectives and university management, it could look like authentic student representation and student voice in disability working groups. It could look like student disability collectives and staff disability networks coming together to create solutions together. It could look like universities partnering with disability representative organisations to have these conversations about both the value and the challenges that some of these new duties might be posing to duty holders. I genuinely think that we need to approach this in partnership, otherwise, the changes that will be made will not meet the requirements of all parties and stakeholders to these challenges. Equally, I wanna acknowledge that a review to a discrimination law instrument like the DDA, is not the place for everything and the kitchen sink. There are lots of challenges in disability inclusion, in higher education that won't be solved by changes to the DDA. We need to acknowledge that we need to prioritise and consider that the Disability Standards for Education are shortly up for review as well. The TEQSA Act is also currently under review, and I encourage you to engage with that and see if there are opportunities to improve disability inclusion in there as well. I'll be posting in the next couple of weeks around the submission that I've made to the TEQSA review. So there are lots of opportunities and spaces in which disability inclusion needs to be foregrounded and spoken about, not just in the disability context. So my challenge to you is the next time that you see a new university strategy, the next time that you see a review or an engagement, or a consultation process or an investigation, consider how disability is or isn't being represented in that conversation. Because it's not just disability specific law and programs that need to consider disability. It's everything. We need our perspectives elevated across all domains in our sector, not just remaining in our little box, in our little action plans and in our little working groups. We need to be everywhere. And finally, consider in your work area how disability lived experience is being positioned in decision making. If you don't have any disabled managers - or if you think you don't have any disabled managers, because you probably do - why? If there aren't people with disability on your university council or your university senate, why? If your student association doesn't have a disabilities officer, why? These are all places where disability leadership is fostered and where lived experience can be integrated into decision making, and they are all crucial to ensuring that disability isn't seen as a niche issue, but something that we all need to consider and elevate. I am genuinely hopeful about the proposals that have been made in the DDA review issues paper, and I think that they will have a real impact on the experience of people with disability on the ground here in Australia. But I also think that traditionally the university sector has been very quiet or not even present in a lot of these conversations. And we can see it in the way that the current Disability Discrimination Act and the current Disability Standards for Education are framed. The discourse is really schools based. Early education to some extent as well, but university discourse is really absent from these conversations. I mean, even in the issues paper itself, the word school appears over 40 times in the paper, the word university barely makes it into the single digits and most of these mentions are in citations and in the reference list. And this disparity is really telling 'cause it reflects this broader pattern where higher education gets overlooked in disability reform conversations. I'm seeing a shift. The Department of Education and the Attorney-General's Department are starting to see the importance of considering tertiary education in these conversations. I spoke at an online DDA review round table on education where higher education and where it fits in this conversation was given a very similar amount of time and space to conversations about schools and early childhood education. If you wanna find out how to get involved in the review, I'll leave some information in the show notes. I think things are shifting and we need to grab this energy and run with it. We may not have another opportunity to do this again. If you believe Australian universities can do better, I wanna hear from you. Head to higherhopespod.com. Follow us on our different platforms. And importantly, you can also support this independent podcast that's not afraid to ask hard questions. If you're keen to back the project, go to higherhopespod.com and consider pledging your financial support on Patreon. I also hang out on Substack these days. I post a little bit about higher education inclusion and a few other related topics, so if you are interested, you can go and find me at Higher Hopes by Ebe Ganon on Substack. You can also go to higherhopespod.com and express your interest as a future guest on the pod if you want to shape the conversations that we have on this platform. Until next time, stay hopeful. The Higher Hopes podcast is produced on the traditional lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. I pay my respects to elders past and present, as well as any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people listening today. Sovereignty was never ceded, and this acknowledgement extends to wherever you are listening from. I encourage you to learn about the traditional custodians of your own country. It's our job to support First Nations perspectives and knowledges in the higher education sector as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the original teachers, learners, and researchers on this land.