2024-10-04
By Jordon Steele-John
Senator for Western Australia
As the Australian Greens’ portfolio holder for Health, Disability, Foreign Affairs, Peace and Nuclear Disarmament, this year has been such a significant year filled with deep community resistance against colonial, ableist systems and I am deeply proud of the work we have all done together to build toward a better future.
As the genocide in Palestine continues, our movement's persistence and protest actions become more and more important. Our Greens team continues to call for a permanent and immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the end of military trade with Israel, and sanctions on the State of Israel’s war cabinet. In the Parliament, we continue to take actions, including calling on the Government to formally recognise the State of Palestine. Labor and the Liberals continue to fail the community. We will continue to be in solidarity with Palestine until this genocide ends.
This year has seen significant changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme and the release of the government's response to the Disability Royal Commission Recommendations. Both of these have left our community feeling frustrated that Labor has broken their election promises of co-designing meaningful improvements to the lives of disabled people.
In April, the government released their changes to the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act. These changes put into action Labor’s $14.4 billion of cuts from the NDIS (that’s after cutting $54 billion the year before).
The government released its changes to the NDIS in April, and since then we have fought tooth and nail alongside the community. Together we ran a huge grassroots campaign making thousands of calls and sending over 11,000 emails to parliamentary decision-makers (and that was just through my webpage!) I know there were many other email campaigns and events with the same goal and a huge number of participants. Each of those actions forced additional time through the Senate inquiry process. Thank you to everyone who was involved!
In addition to the National Disability Insurance scheme our disability campaigns have included leading a Senate Inquiry into ADHD Support and Services - you can read more about that here.
As the spokesperson for Health, our work has focused on our Greens-led inquiry into Dental Services in Australia. You can read that here. I’m very proud that this committee made a recommendation that Australia needs to chart a pathway to universal access to dental care.
I’ve also had the honour of being the chair of the Parliamentary Friendship Group of Mental Health and the Parliamentary Friends Group of ME/CFS. We’ve been holding cross-party events in Parliament House to work to see improved outcomes for these communities.
We’ve been working on some exciting election announcements too, and I look forward to sharing those with you in the coming months!
It’s been a privilege to be one of your Greens Senators for Western Australia, in this role I have the honour of working with Greens volunteers in WA and all across the country; I’d like to extend my thanks and deep appreciation to everyone who has taken on a role in our Greens movement this year - I look forward to smashing our shared goals at the next election!
- Jordon