The American author and journalist David Simon recently delivered a speech in the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in Sydney. He said: “The ultimate tragedy of capitalism in our time, is that it has achieved economic dominance without regard to a social compact, without being connected to any other metric for human progress.”
This is not so much a political statement but a sad reflection of reality.
Pope Francis was certainly not expressing a political opinion when in his encyclical Evangelli Gaudium said: “How can it be that it is not news when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news that the stock market loses two points?”
When society treats its weaker members – the old, the disabled, the unemployed and the sick –with disrespect, it has no right to claim that it is fair and just. Simply because 10 or 20 per cent of people in our society are no longer necessary to the operation of the economy because they are sick, disabled or no longer able to produce, is not sufficient reason to marginalise them.
The National Commission for Persons with Disability (KNPD) recently organised a conference entitled Inclusion, Participation and Accessibility as their contribution to World Disability Day. The aim of this organisation is to be the voice of conscience for our society that too often is more concerned with accumulating more material wealth to the detriment of ensuring fairness for all.
The KNPD agenda is a simple one: that of ensuring that the authorities do what it takes to ensure that disabled people enjoy the same rights as all other people in Maltese society. The first step that one needs to take to ensure that this basic human right is guaranteed to all is to take stock of how many people actually suffer from some sort of physical or mental disability.
The Parliamentary Secretary for People with Disability, Franco Mercieca, said there is a lack of comprehensive statistics that were necessary to ensure the necessary services were in place.
This frank admission of a glaring failure of past administrations is important because one cannot think strategically about how to guarantee inclusion, participation and accessibility to the disabled without first understanding the extent of the problem that disabled people face.
The challenges faced by the disabled are quite daunting. Possibly, the most important challenge is that of providing proper housing facilities for disabled people, especially the elderly who simply cannot deal with the physical barriers that they face when trying to live in standard built houses.
Homes for the disabled should be built to special standards that make mobility a manageable task for those with varying degrees of disability.
Disabled people also need to participate actively in the social and economic life of the country. This principle includes the right to be employed in jobs that they can handle despite their disability.
Even if there are legal obligations on employers to offer jobs to disabled people, many employers ignore this obligation. More needs to be done by the authorities to ensure that the rights of the disabled to be integrated in the workplace are respected.
The compilation of a register of people with disabilities is an important first step in the definition of a strategy to ensure inclusion, participation and accessibility to all disabled people.
The hard work will come when this strategy in favour of the disabled has to be implemented.