By Mitree Vongphakdi, Treasurer
“Impossible is only two letters from possible and you do not need sight to have vision.”
Paul, who you’ve probably seen around the halls of Forgan Smith with his furry friend Sean, is a leading international and comparative disability rights academic. He has held an academic fellowship with the Harvard Law School Project on Disability, as well as visiting positions with the Centre for Disability Law and Policy at the University of Ireland (Galway), the Burton Blatt Institute, and the College of Law at Syracuse University in New York. Paul is also a former Fulbrighter, having been awarded a Fulbright Future Scholarship for his project titled Universally Designed for Whom? Disability, the Law and Practice of Expanding the "Normal User”. This year, Paul was awarded a Future Fellowship with the Australian Research Council and he has also been named as the 2022 Blind Australian of the Year.
In addition to his truly impressive academic accolades and achievements, Paul continues to practice as an industrial relations special advisor in a national private practice, and he has represented Australia in the Paralympic and Commonwealth Games as a sprinter.
In celebration of the International Day of People with Disability this Friday 3 December 2021, and with Disability Action Week starting on 5 December 2021, I thought it would be nice to sit down and have a chat with Paul to discuss how he ended up where he is, what he is up to, and what he looks forward to in the coming years.
I guess unlike what may sometimes be presumed, you were not born blind. Could you tell me about how you lost your sight?
Before I lost my eyesight, I was your average middle class white boy. Happy and just cruising through life.
Then I was hit by an electric train at the age of 14. The 12th of October 1993 started as any other day for me. I had eyesight like the rest of my school. I rode my bike to school. I played basketball at lunch and came home. I changed and ran out to meet a friend. I took a short cut along some train tracks. I did not notice the fact an electric train was coming up behind me. I may not have noticed it, but I sure felt it! I woke up in hospital blind. The train has severed the optical nerves in my eyes, and caused a range of other injuries.
So the sunset on the 11th of October 1993 was the last sunset I will ever see. The books I read during class on the 12th of October were the last books I will read with eyesight. The signs I read on the way home from school were the last signs I would read with eyesight. This loss of eyesight was profound for me, but what was more profound for me was the way in which society disabled me.
Of course, learning to cope without your sight must have been very difficult. How did losing your sight affect you with your studies and beyond?
In 1993, technologies to assist blind people with accessing information did not really exist, and even when it was possible, unfortunately much of the technology was not being used. So when I left hospital in 1993 I found much of the information of the world was denied to me. Braille and talking books were of limited use to me.
When I started back at school, I had only been blind for a few months. Learning braille took years. Talking books were great for pleasure, but useless for study. Imagine sitting in a classroom with a pile of cassette tapes. The teacher asks me to turn to page 43 and read the second paragraph down. I have no idea which cassette tape that is on. Even if I found the correct tape, by the time I fast forwarded and rewound the tape to the correct part, well the rest of the class would have moved on. Perhaps even finished the lesson. So, this format was entirely useless to me. They would not give me the book on the computer due to copyright concerns. So, for me I found high school a massive challenge. I managed to top a few subjects at school and received a bunch of prizes, but it was very very very hard. I struggled through high school and got to university. This is when information became more accessible.
I started accessing journal articles. It was amazing to have journal articles online. Cases and legislation were more available. But some still published everything in badly formatted PDF. Access to books though remained a massive challenge. People with sight could walk down the street and get books, I could not walk down the street and get books. I had to have books scanned or contact publishers to get copies. To get a book could take hours or days of work, and this continued throughout my PhD.
Do you think accessibility for students with disabilities, particularly at university, has improved since your time as a student?
The digital age has transformed access to information. Let me explain this impact by reference to one of my university students that study law.
A library user who is able to read standard print can walk into their library and decide to either grab the hard copy law journal off the shelf or access LexisAdvance. A blind user walks into the library and they can decide to either flag down a librarian, then get help reading through print journals, then scanning a journal article, then editing the scanned copy, and after an extra thirty minutes or hour of work, start to read the journal article…or, they can just access LexisAdvance.
I am not saying there is never disability access issues with information platforms. Vigilance is required to ensure web access and usability. However, when web access is in place, and the information is in digital format, then I am able to access information on an equal basis as others. This gives me the chance to compete in education and work and life on an equal basis as others. For me, the digital age is empowering and transformational.
What were you like as a law student? Were you devoted to your studies, or did you try to juggle a few things at the same time?
I was quite busy for all of my undergraduate studies with international sport. This was a bit of a distraction. I started law school in 1998 and was selected to represent Australia for the first time in early 1999. So that took some time. Then the Paralympics in Sydney in 2000, the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002, the World Titles in both 2002 and 2003. I graduated from my undergrad studies in 2003. I kept being a fulltime elite athlete through to 2010 with the Paralympics in Athens in 2004 and the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in 2006. Sporting highlights for me. It was more than amazing, but it did impact on my grades and career hugely.
How did your career as an athlete shape you as a person?
The Paralympics started to help rehabilitate people who have disabilities and to help transform society. For me elite sports did both of these things. When I had eyesight, I was a reasonably good athlete. In primary school I won some gold and silvers in swimming, and did well in middle distances in running at high school. My basketball team won a regional competition in the year before my accident. I was far from being a top athlete, but I enjoyed it. I loved sport, and I dreamed of being a sporting star. I thought that would never happen, but could it? When I lost my eyesight, I took my sporting skills to disability sports.
Being suddenly blind is hard. You can imagine if you were in an accident later today and woke up blind you would not mark today as the best day of your life. So that was me at 14. I felt different, my teachers saw me as different, I was treated as different by my friends, I was different and not for the right reasons. Australians love sport. I gave disability sport a crack, and it turns out I was exceptional. Within a year I was in the State team and winning. For someone who was different for the wrong reasons, being a superstar made me different for the right reasons. This gave me enormous confidence. More than just boosting my ego, sport got me fit. It is very hard to engage in casual exercise being blind. With a white cane I could not just go for a walk down the street I could no longer just go for a ride or roller blade. Mobility was hard. Organised disability sport however gave me the opportunity to exercise. It gave me the chance to get fit. It gave me the chance to discover my body in ways I would not have done if I had not participated in sport. Sport helped me rehabilitate. It also had an impact on society around me.
With the Paralympics coming to Brisbane in 2032, I am very excited. The lead up to the games and their legacy after, will have profound benefit for disability sports in Queensland and for Queenslanders with disabilities. I have no doubt it will help create a more inclusive Queensland.
Earlier this year you were awarded an ARC Future Fellowship. Congratulations! Can you explain what issue you will be using your fellowship to focus on?
I am excited by the possibilities presented by my recent grant success. I have been awarded a 4-year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, starting next year, with the ARC contributing $994,942 and other funders contributing making the actual project valued just over $1.1 million. My project is entitled “Normalising Ability Diversity through Career Transitions: Disability at Work”.
This 4 year project, with PhD candidates funded, research fellows and (most excitingly) a buy out of teaching, aims to investigate how the higher education sector can better support people with disabilities to transition from economic exclusion to work. One in five Australians have a disability and of these people, 47.3% are not employed. This is a significant issue with regulatory failures and challenges often affecting rights to education and work being exercised on an equal basis. This project seeks to examine international legal norms, theories and strategic and operational practices in the higher education sector. Expected outcomes include advances in scholarship on ableism, informed policy reform, and transferable operational processes for the education and employment sectors, to improve the transition of people with disabilities to work.
I am working on this in close collaboration with my good friends at the Harvard Law School Project on Disability and the Burton Blatt Institute at Syracuse University, where I was privileged to visit on my Fulbright in 2020 and where I have long and productive publishing relationships on topics relevant to diversity in higher education in Australia and abroad.
This may be a difficult question to answer given your truly varied and impressive experiences. What is your number one career highlight to date?
Getting funding from Harvard University, the Fulbright Commission and the University of Queensland to run a workshop at Harvard Law School in 2020. Then after that, a group of UQ staff, along with Professor Michael Stein from Harvard, went across to his Harvard Kennedy School of Governance class to give a guest lecture.
Quick question before we close out, and potentially a good opportunity for you to embarrass someone you work with. Do you have a legal hero or inspiration you look up to?
Professor Michael Ashley Stein, who is the Executive Director of the Harvard Law School Project on Disability. He ended up in a wheelchair for life at about the age of 14 as well. My work and approach to life largely follows Michael. I have been lucky enough to work with him for some time now and have co-authored some publications with him as well. You can imagine what a thrill it is now to work with my hero.
And finally, if you had one message to give young people with disabilities what would that be?
Impossible is only two letters from possible and you do not need sight to have vision.
On a personal note, I can say without a doubt that Paul is the most inspirational person I have met in my (short) career to date. Working with him over the past year has not only been an incredible learning experience, it has truly given me perspective on the importance of resilience. In fact, I think its somewhat inappropriate to describe him as a person with a disability. He hasn’t let anything hold him back, and he clearly gets more done than most people.
If you would like to take a deep dive into Paul and his work, please check out the following,
Paul’s TEDx speech on Universities as Disability Champions of Change, and
Paul’s recent and upcoming published works with Professor Michael Ashley Stein:
Sheelagh Daniels-Mayes, Paul Harpur, & Michael Ashley Stein, ‘Strategic Human Rights-based Policy Reforms for Making Australian Universities Equally Accessible to Students, Staff, and Faculty who are Indigenous People with Disability’ – Submitted to an edited collection to be published in 2022.
For a throwback, this short interview with Paul before the 2004 Athens Paralympics Games.