People's experience of race or gender can politicise them. Has your blindness politicised you?
I'm a very political person: a labour relations lawyer from a left-leaning family. But disability: not so much. It sounds strange, but I tried to put my blindness in a cupboard and say to myself: "I'm going to succeed despite it." I was relatively successful, but I was kidding myself a bit. Because if you asked someone, "Who is Ron McCallum?", they'd have said, "That blind labour lawyer.
Are you confident the National Disability Insurance Scheme will be rolled out in the way it should be? Well, I see the government's appointed a new minister for it, and that my former student Bill Shorten is the shadow minister.Yeah! From the 1980s, when I was teaching at Monash University. I like to think he had some experience of disability given that I taught him. He invited me to his election party.Oh god, it was a very sombre affair. Most people thought he was going to win by a couple of seats or whatever. Things by 8.30pm didn't look so good.
When I was about three or four, I remember my mother was showing my older brothers and I a book about the coronation of Elizabeth II. I put up my hands to touch the book. She said, "Darling, remember? You can't see the pictures and you can't see the print." And I must have known, even at the age of three, when I fell over, that I didn't have something my brothers had.My body is slowing down. My knees sound like the guns at the Battle of Austerlitz.