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I would like to acknowledge the Kaurna People, the traditional owners and custodians of the Adelaide Plains and pay my respects to their elders past and present. Thank you Uncle Lewis O’Brien for your warm and generous welcome.

For thousands of years, Aboriginal groups, who might spend much of their time living far apart in the expanses of this land, pursuing separately the business of survival, would come together at times to meet, to trade, sometimes to resolve differences, but also to exchange knowledge for mutual benefit.

When I was discussing this event with Jenni Huon we talked about whether the theme should be "transition" or "transitions". At the time I thought it did not matter much, but as soon as I started to write this address I realised that I am going to talk about "transition". "Transitions" (plural) suggests one discrete thing after another, a beginning, middle…

I’d also thank the Human Rights Week Organising Committee here in Tasmania, and congratulate them on their 20th Anniversary. Human Rights Week has been successfully and continuously marked with a number of events each year over the past 20 years in Tasmania. And that in itself, is a remarkable achievement.

I congratulate EOPHEA for organising this discussion. Although, of course, your focus is primarily on employment in the university environment, the conference program is clearly designed to address equal opportunity issues of much more general significance. I have approached my own paper in the same spirit: I hope it will be particularly relevant in your own context as equity practitioners in…

I would like to thank the Australian Network on Disability for inviting me to speak about the work I have been doing. As many of you would know, I have recently concluded the Willing to Work National Inquiry into Employment Discrimination against Older Australians and Australians with Disability. The report for which was released by the Attorney-General last week. The report is available…

International Human Rights Day falls on 10th December each year. It marks the occasion on 10th December 1948 when the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Dr Sev Ozdowski OAM Human Rights Commissioner and Disability Discrimination Commissioner Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission, Sydney, Australia

I am particularly pleased to join in opening this international conference on mobility and transport for elderly and disabled people and to be discussing accessible transport here in Western Australia. The Government of Western Australia deserves recognition for the commitment it is showing to making public transport accessible: a commitment adopted in principle, policy and plans and increasingly…

Set against the wreckage and the unthinkable horror of the Second World War, the Declaration was something of a phoenix rising from the ashes, a document which sought to rekindle a human dignity which had been gravely debased in the preceding ten years.

I'd also like to acknowledge, as I have done at similar conferences previously, what I have owed personally to people in education in NSW. Education with the support of many great education professionals together with support from family and friends to achieve my goals is why I am in the position I hold now. I compare that to the position of many blind and vision impaired people, facing over 80…