On the Couch with Kevin Cocks OAM – on advocacy for inclusion
IPAA Queensland was delighted to have Kevin Cocks OAM, celebrated human rights and disability advocate and the former Queensland Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, join us as part of our 2018 ‘Stewards on the Couch’ series. In front of around 100 public servants, Kevin Cocks OAM shared his story and experience.
Q1. Thank you for doing this Kevin. That’s the headlines, can I start on a particular day? It’s July 1981, do you mind telling us how that day unfolded?
Kevin: Yeah Madonna, it was a Sunday and I travelled from Dalby to St George, which is my hometown, for a game of rugby league. About 20mins into that match we packed a scrum and in the packing of the scrum I dislocated my neck and I collapsed to the ground. And from that point on I’ve been paralysed from around the c5/6 level, which has affected a number of functional capacities. I was flown by the Royal Flying Doctor Service back to Brisbane that night. I spent 12 months in Rehab and the PA spinal unit and that was the beginning of me starting to enter a parallel world.
Q2. Let’s come to that parallel world and do you mind just going back on it a little bit? I mean because this was a defining 30 seconds in your life. Did you see the accident unfolding? Did you, when you lay there, do you remember people talking to you?
Kevin: All I remember is all I could feel is my head. I could see my left arm and people were talking, I can’t remember anything what the conversations were about. The local doctor came and realised it was quite serious and the game was basically held up probably for a half an hour until the ambulance and everyone felt they were comfortable enough to move me.
Q3. Did you have a friend, parents, anyone at that game?
Kevin: I had a number of my team mates. A lot of the blokes on the other side I went to school with and played football with were my friends. So it was a very safe place for me at that time, particularly I had played on that ground many times as a child right through to my adulthood.
Q4. And I should say that Kevin and I are both from Dalby and I probably was in a short skirt with the cheers, so maybe at one of the games at that time. So that was the day that changed the trajectory of where your life was leading. Can I go back then? You mentioned that you were born in St George, tell us about that. What did your folks do? Did you have brothers and sisters? Who’s the young Kevin Cox?
Kevin: Well I was actually born in Mitchelton, and I was the first child and the only child. My Mother died in birth because of a lack of doctors in the area, and you know it’s a story that many rural woman experience, and sadly still experience today. I was raised by my grandparents. My father, he owned a small property where he grew up and he sold that and probably couldn’t handle what was happening and my Grandfather and grandmother moved to St George or in between. My grandfather used to manage properties and shear, and so we ended up moving into St George because when I first started school we had to row across the Blonde River and travel about 25 miles each day by bus to and from St George. That is now known as Cubbie Station and so, yeah, we moved to St George.
Q5. So if you were going through your childhood photo album, what’s the childhood memory that stands out for you as a young lad?
Kevin: I think it was about freedom. It was growing up in a country town, especially in school holidays. I think everyone’s parents were pleased to see their kids leave the front doors…
Can I say that hasn’t changed.…at 8 o’clock in the morning and we would all hang out together and do things. Go fishing, riding around and come home for dinner and maybe if we’d catch a fish we’d bring some dinner home. And so it was a great, you know I might look at it through rose-coloured glasses but to me there was a lot of freedom and a lot of risk taking. Learning a lot about supporting each other, learning a lot about how to build a bike from going and raiding the rubbish tip and billy carts that you could drive into the river. All those sorts of things about being adaptive.
Q6. What would your report card have said about you? Be honest!
Kevin: Um, probably didn’t listen enough and I think, yeah, I tried. But it was interesting going to a convent, a Catholic school, where I first experienced discrimination was because my grandparents weren’t Catholic. And for some reason I wanted to be an alter boy and in grade three, they said no you can’t because you’re not a proper Catholic. And so from that day I was never a proper Catholic.
Q7. And do you remember thinking of that as discrimination or just being unfair?
Kevin: Just being unfair and you know, I had a lot Aboriginal friends who went to the convent and looking back, the way they were singled out for unfair treatment, it was discrimination.
Q8. But at the time as peers, that wasn’t obvious. You may not have known what the phrase human rights meant.
Kevin: No, no there no words ever mentioned about human rights or discrimination.
Q9. So what age did you leave school?
Kevin: Fifteen
Madonna: So the year before you left school, if you were sitting, and the way you painted it there probably wasn’t a school guidance officer, but if there was, what in your heart did you think you would be?
Kevin: I had no idea Madonna. In grade nine I won a leadership award and a scholarship for the next year in grade ten, but there was not you know, to get a job basically. An apprenticeship was the goal because we were very working class. My grandfather took up shearing again, I worked in shearing sheds, I worked in a bakery, I worked in a hotel.
Madonna: This is after you left school?
Kevin: I left school, I drove scrappers to dig dams for the cotton farmers to steal all the water from the Blonde River. But I was very you know, I could walk from one job to another because I had a reputation of working hard. But to give you some example, we had a very Christian believing headmaster and some of my mates went up and asked for a referee and he said, all you’re worthy of is a referee for stick picking. And so there was a very deficit based environment again which I wouldn’t have used those words, but later in life I started to understand.
Q10. So I will come to later in life in just a moment. Do you think now the path that you’ve led was as a result of what happened after that July 19 game of football or was it the impetus for it actually when you were much younger?
Kevin: A bit of both. Predominantly I think there’s no doubt after my accident, you know, for 21 years I’d been developing my identity as a young adult, a valued citizen. You know I was somebody who loved sport, a team player and interested in community, and the day I had my accident that was stripped away from me. Within 8 or 9 months, because I had a severe physical disability, I was told I’d be better off living with my own kind. And there were other people who had higher level quadriplegia, so I was pathologized, my identity was pathologized.
Q11. Is that what you were talking about a little bit when you referred to in your first answer as you began living in a parallel world?
Kevin: Yes
Madonna: Tell me about that part, because there would have been transport issues, where you lived, a whole lot of issues?
Kevin: That’s right. I could, there was no funding to modify my house. There was where I was working at the time at the Australian Wheat Board, they wanted to hold my job open but there was no funding to modify the work place. There was no funding to ensure that I got out of bed when I needed to. There was no accessible transport for me to be able to continue the work life. And what I took for granted in using public and private spaces, going to a pub, going to a play, going to any theatre or parks for that matter, I no longer could take for granted.
Q12. Could your grandparents continue to care for you?
Kevin: No, um, they, my grandmother died 6 months after with cancer. My grandfather died 12 months later with cancer.
Madonna: Good God. And so, where did that leave you? Where did you actually live?
Kevin: Well my uncle and aunty said I could live with them, but again that wasn’t fair on either of us in the long run because they had no support. All their children had grown up and they were starting to be grandparents. And where we were living, we jointly bought a property at the base of the Bunya mountains and it was great because I loved horses as well and I had a fantasy of breeding horses, and we did for a little while. But it’s still very isolating and it wasn’t, you know, what either of us signed up for in life. It was a beginning but.
Q13. So where do you go then if it wasn’t fair on them? Did you stay there, or did you go and live somewhere else?
Kevin: Well I took a risk. I went and booked myself into the Dalby Hospital in order to become eligible to go back to the Commonwealth rehabilitation. And that was at a phase in 1985/86 after the Hawke government got in, they started to reform disability quite significantly, and 1986 they introduced the Disability Services Act. And it was the first Act of its type about the delivery of services to people that also had human rights elements in it and it was the first of its type in the world I believe. And so there was opportunities, when I first went to rehab, I wanted to study social work and they said no you can’t do that because how would you go to people’s places? So this was the parallel world where the medical model, doctors and other allied health professionals were the authoritative voice in legislation, and what disability activists and academics call now is institutional ableism. It’s no different to institutional racism, sexism, ageism. It’s about the institutions that structurally exclude you from everyday life and says to society, you have no obligation to provide or welcome this person into society.
Q14. I can’t help feeling this was then the period where advocacy became a big, a driving force.
Kevin: It certainly was.
Madonna: But you were fairly uneducated, you had a very strong disability, you didn’t have a family support system, you were living in a hospital. How did you springboard, how did you actually do that? Where did you start?
Kevin: Well fortunately I got back to the Commonwealth rehab and then I found the world was my oyster.
Madonna: In what way?
Kevin: I could study anything I wanted to. I studied social sciences and I had another great piece of luck, I met my wife, and that made the difference about moving to Brisbane. And then I became involved in the newly formed advocacy movement in Queensland because I started studying at QUT. And I was part of the development of Queensland Advocacy Incorporated which is state-wide systems advocacy group. I got my first job working in government at Intellectual Disability Services at Ipswich. There was only four taxis in Brisbane at that time, so I had to get the taxi at half past six in the morning to get to Toowong station, which was accessible and Ipswich station was accessible, and I could get off the train there and go to work.
Q15. How did that make you feel? Were you angry about it or was it an opportunity to make people understand this parallel, this unfair parallel world?
Kevin: Well first I was just grateful that I was back in the workforce. I became angry because the morning getting picked up wasn’t a problem. I’d come home at five o’clock and I could wait two to three hours for a taxi to get home. One night it was raining, and I’d waited two hours and I rang up and they said, oh there’s no taxis working tonight. And so I had to basically walk home from Toowong station to Taringa in the wet on the roads. And that was, well, was probably the final straw
Q16. Final straw for what?
Kevin: That led me to writing to the new transport Minister in the Goss government and demanding a meeting to speak about the reforms needed in the transport system.
Madonna: And that meeting happened?
Kevin: That meeting happened. And they were just progressing the South East passenger transport study which I think was about 1990/91 and he sent me off to see the contractor leading that. He said he’d like to meet people so within a fortnight I organised a meeting. About 40 people turned up, I didn’t know half of them or most of them. This meeting was supposed to be for an hour and after 2 hours Bill Croft, who was an author stood up and said, I didn’t realise what such a cruel world I lived in. And he started another study called the Disability Access Study which I chaired and that led to the beginning of reform but also it started the transport lobby group.
Madonna: So at this time what did you learn about other people?
Kevin: I learned that through the power of story you could bring people with you. And even though some people might be a bit hard-nosed, once you could get people to understand the reality of the lived experience, people started to be quite empathetic and become champions in their own way within government.
Q17. What did you learn about yourself?
Kevin: I learned after a few years that I must have been an angry young man, because that’s what people kept telling me after I’d speak, and I didn’t think I was angry I just thought I was passionate.
Q18. So what was the first reform that you sat back and thought, I’ve made a difference, I’m going to make this bigger? Was it transport?
Kevin: Yes, transport’s part of that, was part of the first reform yes. Because as a result of that study Queensland government introduced a lot more licenses, up to 36. They were then starting to, we’d started to hold protests at the Brisbane King George Square and invite the Transport Minister of Brisbane City Council down. You know, it was very strategically planned and started lobbying for busses. I was involved at a national level in auditing all of the transport systems in Australia, from planes, trains, ferries and sea ship cruises, and provided the evidence of the failure of the transport system.
Q19. And that essentially then, if we just jump a little bit, you went through this period of advocacy and making reform, to February 2011, when what happened?
Well I got really lucky.
Madonna: You seem to say you’re lucky a lot
Kevin: Well to be appointed as the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, I should say privileged.
Madonna: And who appointed you?
Kevin: Cameron Dick.
Madonna: And do you remember that conversation?
Kevin: Yes, I’d applied for the job in July and early in December I got a phone call from the attorney’s office and they said the attorney would like to meet you at 9 o’clock in the morning at your office. He came in and I offered him a coffee and he said no thanks, but then said to me, I’d like to offer you the Commissioners job, but you realize it’s not being an advocate. And I said, that’s fine, but you realise there is a role to advocate for human rights.
Madonna: And he accepted that?
Kevin: He accepted that.
Q20. And you’ve actually made that role your own in so many ways, and I think, you finished up now after 7 years, 2011 – 2018, February to February. You’ve probably seen the best and worst of what society has to offer across disability, race, age, gender, political belief, pregnancy, I could go on. But looking back now after that period from 2011 – 2018, do you think we are a more tolerant society than we were?
Kevin: Look I think there’s, that’s a very difficult question. I think there are people who want to really engage in being inclusive and welcoming, but they don’t really know how to do that. And so one of the areas of work that the Commission does now is to identify where there are communities with the energy and work with them to empower them to try and engage in looking at how they can be more diverse, inclusive and welcoming in building social cohesion.
The Lockyer Valley is, it was the first big piece of work. One of my staff members went out promoting our training and heard about a post office worker denying African refugees a service in their post office. So we went out and held a well café, none of the African citizens turned up but police and some local members of the community who were supporting them turned up. And so from that first conversation it grew into a much bigger thing, more than just discrimination in the post office. It revealed the whole area of exploitation of 417 visa workers. And you’ve all seen the Four Corners story and those stories, well I have to say we were ahead of them in exposing it there. And as a result of it the police worked very closely with it, the Fair Work Ombudsman worked closely, because they could never get access to a 417 visa workers because they were too afraid. And these weren’t, or you know, oppressed third world 417 visa workers. These were English and Irish 417 visa workers who knew about their rights. But because they didn’t want to be exported because they failed to meet their obligations they were too afraid to speak up. And as a result of that, to cut a long story short, we saw the Contractors Legislation brought into place, where it regulated contractors and to protect those workers.
Q21. Do you think, or in cases like that, is it that the people charged with the discrimination, is it out of ignorance? Are they welcoming once they understand the issue? Is it driven by fear or ignorance, or evil?
Kevin: Well I think the majority, a lot of it is ignorance and convenience, and some of it’s pure evil.
Q22. So we’ve been seeing a lot about nursing homes and how the aged are cared for at the moment, and you often judge a community on how they look after their most vulnerable. What do you think about how we look after the aged and what have you seen in the last 7 years?
Kevin: Well I think one of the biggest problems is that we don’t respect elderly people and the way the aged care system is structured primarily, is to make money. And you cannot make a profit in the aged care system without mistreating and degrading, treating people in a inhumane and uncaring manner. Because, where people who really need quite a lot of care, you need to have the appropriate support and resources there on par to care for them. And quite often they’re so isolated, they have no family coming to visit them and they’re very vulnerable.
Madonna: So you think there’s actually a lot of discrimination that doesn’t actually get addressed because they don’t have a voice?
Kevin: Yes
Q23. Often we get law changes in the most unusual ways, tells us about the first statute relating to breastfeeding?
Well that was a very opportunistic and interesting one that Dean Wells, who was the attorney who introduced the Anti-Discrimination Act, was looking at the attributes and wondering what more he could put. And because Queensland was the last state to have an anti-discrimination act, so we could cherry-pick all of the good things from the other states and make it quite a strong act. And at the time, his wife had a new baby.
Madonna: Always helps
Kevin: Always helps. Personal lived experience always helps. And she was being hassled in public places for breast feeding and Dean said, one of his advisors said, well why don’t we put that in and make it discriminatory. And that’s how breast how breastfeeding got into the Human Rights Act.
Q24. So, can you tell us the worst case that’s come across your desk?
I don’t actually see a lot of the complaints, unless they are a very high risk. But the stories that came across my desk, and I think it was at the time when the heightened terrorist alerts were around in 2014/15. And our political leadership at a federal level, I have to say, was very lacking and it was poor. It was encouraging, almost people to take matters into their own hands, particularly against Muslim community. But what was happening, it didn’t matter whether you were Muslim, Sheik, Hindu or even a New Zealander. I’ll tell you about the New Zealander first. There was a New Zealander man sitting in his car when some young blokes pulled up next to him and called him all sorts of derogative names and told him go back to Iraq. But the worst thing was where a mother wearing a hijab was in a shopping centre with her children and two men ran up to her, pulled off her hijab, knocked her down and ran away and no one did anything about it.
Madonna: People just looked.
Kevin: People looked. And the other one was in the West End, a young mother walking past in a hijab and two blokes came pulled it off and set fire to it. And this just totally unacceptable.
Madonna: 2014 that was four years ago. Has it got better?
Kevin: I think it has because we work with the police and the Muslim community.
Madonna: And the police do a lot of good things here too don’t they?
Kevin: They do. And I think you know, they be more proactive in the community and working with the community and dealing with issues directly because we are having monthly meetings and 30 or 40 leaders form the Muslim community would come. They’d tell of issues and the police would take note. They could either respond immediately and say, no that’s not right, or, we’re dealing with that. But a lot of the things that are done, that were being done, like rocking somebody’s house, putting death threats in mailboxes, these sort of things, couldn’t be proven.
Q25. So the community engaged in that and hopefully that’s made things a little bit better. But I said earlier you’re in charge of, you know, across disability, race, age, gender, political belief, pregnancy, and a host of others. Is there a particular type of discrimination that is more prevalent or worries you now more than the others?
Kevin: Statistically impairment is the highest level of discrimination, it’s about 25% of received discrimination and it’s predominantly in the area of employment. And that is consistent right around Australia, except for the Northern Territory, where race is the highest level but I think last year impairment may have matched race as one of the highest levels of complaints received.
Q26. When you look at impairment and you look at race, and not long ago a two year old Aboriginal girl was raped in the Northern Territory. If that happened in the city here there would be just an almighty outcry. Will you be honest and tell us what you think of the political leadership we’re seeing in the area of discrimination?
Kevin: Look, I think there is leadership to some degree, but it’s varied. I think its varied because people don’t fully understand what discrimination means until you’ve actually experienced it and political leaders often are not in that position. But I think where we’ve seen probably the most political leadership is around mental illness because now we’re seeing Beyond Blue where its focusing on depression and anxiety and those sorts of areas. So it’s obviously, you know, more and more people are actually putting up their hand and having ownership and saying yes I have that.
Q27. So, what’s the best day been in your job?
Kevin: Every day was a great day in my job because as I say, it was a great privilege to work in the Anti-Discrimination Commission. It meant every day I had an opportunity to try influence somebody to understand what human rights meant.
Q28. So should we have a human rights act in Queensland, and if we did, what would be in that that’s not in the discrimination act?
Kevin: Yes, yes and yes. We need a human rights act. Now a lot of people think its very esoteric, its black letter law, its all about judges and lawyers. Well that could be how it could be. But for me its about the small things. It’s the things that make a difference in peoples lives, particularly through administrative decisions. I think the greatest power of a human rights act is about cultural change in government agencies, in the private sector and in community.
Q29. So my next question was actually going to be, how do you bring about cultural change, particularly in the public service? Can you do, presumably you can do that without a human rights act though?
Kevin: You could do but I think in seeing, particularly in Victoria, it helps…
Madonna: How?
Kevin: Well it actually gives the public service a framework to operate within for making decisions. To be braver, to be more courageous and to understand what the impact of not making, of making a decision in one way could be quite detrimental over time. And yes, there may need to be some challenges so that those decisions, those poor decisions, can lead to better decisions.
Q30. So presumably then you’ve been the Commissioner, have you had discussions with the government about the need for a human rights act?
Kevin: Yes. Yes we placed a submission to the inquiry and we also, obviously, wrote in support to the attorney. And we did information sessions around Queensland talking about what are the benefits of a human rights act.
Madonna: So is the answer no, or are you hopeful on is going to pop out of the pipeline?
Kevin: I’m hopeful one will pop out of the pipeline yes.
Q31. I want to go to your questions here in just a moment, so if you’ve got a question get ready and we’ll get a microphone to you. If you could go back to the young Kevin, the fifteen year old Kevin, what would you tell him?
Kevin: I’d tell him that the greatest thing is to face adversity with optimism because I think if you do that you will then find a way forward that leads to a life that you can never imagine you would have done otherwise.
Madonna: And that is your story isn’t it?
Kevin: That’s true.
Q32. What do you think is the best attribute a person can have?
Kevin: The best attribute, I think, is just to be a decent human being.
Madonna: Yeah, we certainly need them don’t we.
Kevin Cocks AM is currently the Executive General Manager of the Acceptable Transport Networks.
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