City adopts four-year disability access plan

The City of Greater Geelong has adopted a new four-year plan to support the full participation of people with disability in the community.

More than 20 per cent of people in the Geelong region live with disability and the Disability Access and Inclusion Plan 2024-28 sets out the steps the city will take to help reduce and remove the physical, attitudinal, communication and social barriers they experience.

The plan has been informed by extensive community consultation, with the community helping to identify six priority areas for the city to focus its efforts on.

They are physical access, inclusion and participation, employment, lived experience engagement, communication, and respect and understanding.

Each of these community priorities is addressed in the plan, now divided under four pillars – access, inclusion, employment and community attitudes – which each detail a series of strategies and actions that reflect those priorities.

Some of the actions outlined in the plan include:

• Incorporating accessible design in new capital projects and embed accessible design in the city’s guidelines for its public spaces
• Improve beach accessibility at high-use city-managed beaches
• Implement an ongoing Sensory Quiet Time at Leisurelink and other aquatic centres
• Establish a community event for the International Day of People with Disability, and
• Make it easier for the community to report mobility/disability access issues.

Geelong mayor Trent Sullivan said the new action plan aimed to build on the success of the city’s six previous disability access plans, the first of which was launched in 2002.

“We have made progress in improving the accessibility of buildings and footpaths as well as establishing more inclusive services, but there is always more to do.

“This new plan will help council create a city that is accessible and inclusive for people with disabilities.”

Deputy mayor and chair of the council’s access and inclusion advisory committee Anthony Aitken said for him, the city’s new disability access and inclusion strategy was very personal.

Mr Aitken is deaf and uses a cochlear implant.

“We actually have over 50,000 people living with a disability [in Geelong] and when you do have a disability, it is a barrier to participate in normal life,” he said.

“I’m one of the few people that actually can use technology to respond to their disability – so many people don’t have that privilege.

“That’s why society actually has to remove the barriers from them participating and actively being involved in life, and that’s exactly the principle of what this document is actually trying to achieve.

“I do genuinely hope that this document does make a change to people living with disability.”