Disability and Screen Work in Australia: Report for Industry 2023
Image shows Ade Djajamihardja, an Asian Australian man in a wheelchair, who speaks directly to camera. He’s in a lounge room surrounded by lights, lightboxes and microphones.
Co-created by A2K Media and The Melbourne Disability Institute, University of Melbourne
At A2K Media, we know that screen content informs the way we conceptualise the world around us. We also recognise that screen content is a cornerstone of Australian society. We all love stories and learning about the world through the media.
Unfortunately, we’ve also realised that the all-too-often negative portrayals of disability on our screens have had a particularly insidious effect on our culture. As a result, we live with segregation, oppression, low expectations, and radical misunderstandings.
As an audience, we may not always critically engage with our screen stories, and it can be easy to absorb the idea that disability isn’t part of “normal” every-day life. Because we’ve been repeatedly used as clichéd examples of tragedy, and as lives not worth living. Or worse – we’ve been erased entirely.
Except we know that disability is absolutely normal. Statistically, each and every one of us will personally experience disability for an average of 7 years of our lives. In fact, 1 in 4 adult Australians experienced mental ill-health in 2022, alone.
Our screens just don’t tell that story very often.
…How did we get here? What are the attitudes, behind the scenes? For years, we have felt that there appears to be an enormous issue of Disabled inequity within our industry. We believe that this injustice may be perpetuating those harmful narratives and continuing the lack of authentic on-screen representation.
We realised back in 2021 that it was time for a real temperature-check of the industry. We knew that we wanted to dig deeper and learn about the experiences of Disabled creatives, and their suggestions to overcome the barriers to authentic, diverse screen content.
We knew that we had to prioritise access and inclusion in the process of finding out more about our industry. We wanted to ensure that participants were treated with dignity and respect – we needed to centre Disabled screen creatives, and not have a discussion “about us, without us”.
Most importantly, we wanted to avoid the deficit discourse surrounding disability. We know that Disabled participation is so much more than unskilled, green, up-and-coming, or early-career practitioners. We couldn’t let Disabled expertise hide behind the bare statistics. We felt certain that we needed to investigate the barriers, not the outcomes alone.
We also wanted to understand the ‘how’. How do non-disabled people work with Disabled people? Or, why do they choose not to?
We wanted to present a compelling and memorable report to a creative, innovative industry. We wanted our peers to use this research to diminish the stigma surrounding disability and make some informed positive changes. So we reached out to the folks at Melbourne Disability Institute with a research proposal.
Meeting Dr. Radha O’Meara and beginning the research project was an exciting process. We knew we had the broad idea, but with her keen eye and wealth of experience, the study was brought to fruition. We co-developed an accessible industry-wide survey and Dr O’Meara conducted a number of in-depth interviews.
Fast forward two years, and our co-created report, Disability and Screen Work In Australia: Report for Industry 2023 has now been released. It is available as a PDF, PDF summary, Easy Read summary, and as a Word Document optimised for screen readers.
The report found that Disabled people working in Australia’s screen industry face prejudice and systemic discrimination – including lower pay, greater casualisation, stigma, and stereotyping.
According to our research, Disabled screen workers are paid substantially less than their non-disabled colleagues. Most Disabled screen industry workers earn less than $800 per week, while most non-disabled screen industry workers earn more than $1250 per week.
The Australian screen production industry employs over 200,000 people, but the report found that Disabled screen workers are more likely to be employed casually or on short term contracts, to perform unpaid work, or to be unemployed, compared with non-disabled screen industry workers.
More than one-third of Disabled respondents surveyed recalled experiencing discrimination at work directly related to their disability status in the past year, such as being insulted, threatened, excluded from groups or denied access accommodations.
“What came up repeatedly in our research was the discriminatory attitudes that disabled workers in the screen industry face, from both their colleagues and their bosses,” Dr. O’Meara said.
Despite experiencing prejudice and discrimination, close to half of Disabled screen workers report that their lived experience of disability impacts their work in positive ways, including the potential to bring unique skills and perspectives to their screen work.
Ade Djajamihardja, screen producer and co-founder of A2K Media, says, “Upon acquiring disability and realising that Disabled people were the most underrepresented section of our community, it brought to the fore, the urgency and time critical need for profound and holistic change.
I have personally experienced the importance of overcoming “the soft bigotry of low expectation” that had quickly surrounded me by the majority of friends, peers, and contemporaries.
As an Asian Australian from a Muslim family, I experienced my fair share of bullying and discrimination. And I thought, together with the allyship of my wife, that I was equipped enough to endure the discrimination that would face me as a Disabled screen professional; however, I did not realise the extent of both discrimination and exclusion that I would be confronted with.
The industry was no longer accessible for me. The first five meetings I tried to attend, I could not even get in the door, let alone think about working again. As strong as I thought I was, I considered leaving the industry that I had loved my entire adult life several times, and in fact I did leave for a short time. It was too difficult.
I love this industry, so I dug deep and decided together with the A2K Media team, to forge ahead and use this experience as motivation to make positive and progressive meaningful change.”
Disability and Screen Work in Australia: Report for Industry 2023 is the pre-cursor to a wider project by A2K Media called Disability Justice Lens. This eLearning programme – due to be released in May – is designed to educate and empower employers to do better.
Disability Justice Lens is supported by major partner Screen Australia, major state funding partner VicScreen, other screen state funding bodies, Screen NSW, Screen Queensland, South Australian Film Corporation, Screen Tasmania, and Screenwest. The project is also supported by Independence Australia, Hireup, and The University of Melbourne, through their Melbourne Disability Institute, and received in-kind support from AFTRS.
It incorporates many of the solutions suggested by Disabled screen workers in the survey.
These include increasing understanding of the social experience of disability by employers, easier access to reasonable adjustments and accommodations for Disabled screen workers in workplaces, and targeted funding for Disabled creatives.
Bill Shorten, Minister for the National Disability Insurance Scheme said, “I don’t think that the majority of Australian employers are ungenerous. But sometimes, they don’t know what they don’t know. And if you have no familiarity with disability, you sort of think, “someone in a wheelchair is contagious”. It’s an unconscious sort of prejudice against people with disability – that you somehow think you’re going to have to have a whole HR team. Or that suddenly, someone with a disability might just get “ill”. So I do think that part of the answer is encouraging good employers to take up people – and then showing other people how it works.
The dial hasn’t really moved – in 30 years – on disability employment… Changing attitudes is a constant battle. I want to see more people with disability in the media. If we can make the invisible visible, it gets everyone thinking.”
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A2K Media recognises that within the disability community, there are many different perspectives on what ‘disability’ means. Within the Disability and Screen Work in Australia: Report for Industry 2023, we use the term ‘disabled’ to describe the effect of discrimination and barriers created by society. This does not identify disability as an impairment or a deficit of the individual. Instead, it highlights the attitudinal, physical, and systemic barriers maintained in our society that prevent full and equal participation. It also reminds all people of our responsibility to remove these barriers.
‘Disability’ also represents the experience of impairments, which may be physical, mental, cognitive, intellectual, developmental, or sensory, as well as any chronic illness, injury, or condition, which may be visible or “invisible”. Impairments may be temporary, acquired, or permanent, and a person’s experience of them can vary over time. We also include lived experience of neurodivergent, Autistic, Deaf, deaf, and hard of hearing people.
For many Disabled people, disability is an enriching cultural identity, with its own history, community, and political and artistic movements. This definition aligns with the Social Model of Disability and refers to the Human Rights and Disability Justice movements.