Vanity, vanity. They name is ... Dougie

Busy day at day two of the NDS ACT conference, chairing three sessions (one delivered by my good friend Barbel Winter of Futures UpFront). But darlings, it's all about ME!!

Karen Southgate.  Pic by NDS

Here's me chairing a session on risk management presented by Karen Southgate, employee of NSW Ageing Disability and Home Care Agency and mother of a young man with disability who wants to jump out of an aeroplane.

Daniel Kyriacou. Pic by NDS

And there's me chairing a session on the crucial role of front line staff as marketeers in the new world of service delivery presented supremely well by the excellent Daniel Kyriacou.

Final panel discussion. Pic by NDS

And here's the stuck live-captioning screen recording for posterity my final words of the previous session (led by Barbel) while the important final panel discussion got underway.

I paid for all this vain bad karma later on.  Rolling up the ramp of my car in the convention centre car park I tipped over backwards, banged my skull on the tarmac and rolled out my chair.  Meg Savage, a former colleague from the National Disability Insurance Agency had to collar a passer-by - a conference delegate as it turned out - to help lift me back into my chair.

Nothing damaged but my pride we drove to Manuka where we met Spike and fellow former colleagues at the NDIA, Vanessa Attridge and Nigel Baker at Public Bar where we enjoyed a lovely, laughter-filled evening.  Drink was taken ... as we say in Scotland.

If it's in the paper it must be true ...

You forget, after a while, the gentle but unmistakable boost it gives your ego to be quoted in a media outlet - to be 'in the papers' (so to speak) because some reporter thinks you have something worth including in a story.  Today, after a prolonged period of absence from the press, I'm in the local rag, The Canberra Times.

My speech this morning kicked off the content part of the two-day National Disability Services ACT conference on the National Disability Insurance Scheme.  I'm pleased (and relieved!!) that the speech went over well.  Conference participants - from the conference organiser, through the NDIA Board's Chair (who was up speaking straight after me) and members of the audience to folk on Twitter - told me I did well.  That's always satisfying.

Some of the Twitter feedback read like this ...

At the #NDIS conference in ACT, @dougie_herd is rallying the troops by using Hawking's theories to show transformative nature of the @NDIS
— Evan Wallace (@evwallace2) March 22, 2015

this ...

A fantastic presentation by @dougie_herd at the NDS #ACTconference #NDIS
— Source Kids (@SourceKids) March 22, 2015

and this ...

Wow @dougie_herd that was an amazing speech on the #NDIS at the #ACTconference. Follow the live blog here http://t.co/6LQNkdcggs
— NDIS campaign (@EveryAustralian) March 23, 2015

Later in the day I was interviewed by Clare Colley of The Canberra Times.  Her article in the online version (I doubt it made the print version) with my couple of positive quotes can be read here.

Not a bad day's work, all things considered.

And just in case the newspaper culls old links, here's the text of the story.

People with a disability would be at risk of poor quality support and struggle to find a place with providers if service prices remain too low, a disability peak body warns.
Pricing has been just one of the problems identified in the rollout of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in the ACT, National Disability Services chief executive Ken Baker said.
About 650 NDIS participants, carers, and providers are meeting in Canberra for the NDS's two-day conference this week – the largest of its kind in the ACT.
When the NDIS roll-out began in the ACT last July, the territory's pricing was the highest in the country, but Dr Baker said the NDS felt service pricing especially for one-to-one support was inadequate across the country and negotiations were continuing with the National Disability Insurance Agency.

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"The price underpins service quality and choice, if the price is too low there won't be enough providers to offer services or the quality of service they will offer will be inadequate," he said.
"In general across Australia the new prices [under the NDIS] are less than providers have been receiving."
Transitioning from the ACT government funded system had also proved problematic with some providers forced to carry the financial burden when there was a gap before NDIS funds began, Dr Baker said.
The planning and assessment for NDIS participants was another area that needed improvement, with Dr Baker advocating for the role to be handed over to the non-government sector rather than the NDIA.
"I think it's reasonable the agency [NDIA] would want to check people's eligibility and allocate them an individual budget, but much of that discussion about what's the best way to support this person to achieve their goals is best taken place outside the agency with their family and service providers," he said.
Rather than the desperate lack of cash that strangled the sector previously, disability advocate Dougie Herd from Every Australian Counts said the new challenge was taking feedback from NDIS participants to ensure the scheme met their justifiably high standards and eased their anxieties.
"It's better for us to work to solve these problems of new support, growth and development rather than the old system in which the problem was really about when will we ever get enough money to meet people's needs," he said.
"All jurisdictions have been rationed by available dollars over the last 10 years or so."
Mr Herd said before the roll-out there were about 2500 people with a disability accessing the ACT system; the extra money made available under the NDIS would allow the number to double by the end of 2019.
While Dr Baker was confident all the issues will be ironed out as the ACT trial site transition continues, he said many questions surrounding the NDIS rollout could not be answered while the design of the scheme was still evolving making it difficult for organisations and individuals to plan.
"At present it feels like a construction site, it has all the promise and excitement… but all the frustration, disruption and problems of building something new while the plan is still evolving," he said.
Dr Baker said unlike other trial sites the NDIS roll-out in the ACT offered an opportunity to examine how people with a disability who missed out a full NDIS package could still access support.
While the number of providers in the ACT was sufficient for now, Dr Baker said as the scheme expands there will be room for more with interstate organisations already expressing interest.
Mr Herd said he expected new forms of service support to cope with the increasing demand.

I thought I left 'all-nighters' when I left university!!!!!

So ... big speech in the morning, making the opening address to 650 conference delegates at the National Convention Centre, Canberra.  I finally started to get an idea of what I might say and how I might say it early this afternoon.  It's a sign of how (uncharacteristically) nervous I am about tomorrow's presentation that I decided to write a text.  I usually don't.  I started writing around seven-thirty this evening.  I'm maybe half way through and it seems to be holding its themes and structure together, so that's a hopeful sign.  

Here is one thing for sure.  No sleep for me tonight.

Reading The Observer's 100 Best Novels

Two books arrived today - Neil Gaiman's new collection of short stories, Trigger Warning: Short Fictions & Disturbances and an edition of The Pilgrim's Progress, parts I & II with the original illustrations.  I'm very pleased to receive the latter.  Neil Gaiman's book is for Spike.  I may read it sometime.  Or not.

I've decided to read all the novels on Robert McCrum's list of the 100 best novels ever written in Engish.  Such lists are, of course, arbitrary; a fact readily acknowled by Robert McC in his introduction to the series here.  That's neither here nor there, IMHO.  We all compile lists - favourite this, most disliked that, the tedious 'bucket list' and many more besides.  We pick and choose.  

Each week I read the article introducing The Observer team's pick of that week.  This week in a list that's ordered chronologically we've reached book number 78, To Kill A Mockingbird.  I've read 25 of the list announced so far which strikes me as pretty poor form; about one-third.  So I've decided to read or re-read the entire list in the chronological order it has been suggested to us.  Hence the arrival of the Bunyan, which I read a very long time ago - as an early teenager - perhaps in an abridged format.  I have a vague recollection of a children's version which, I speculate, my parents would have thought educational and improving for a child of still tender years (I may have been ten or eleven, so not even a teenager).

I flicked through the pages of the edition I received today (I remain surprised that anyone makes deliveries on a Saturday but I'll stop talking about that rather dim-witted surprise some day soon).  The illustrations are familiar.  They must have been in the children's version I read maybe 45 or more years ago.  And when I read the first paragraph (before setting down the book to return to reading the Guardian online over breakfast) I had an unmistakable and strong sense of having been there before, inside Christian's head, hearing his voice speak to me 300 years after the author set them down on paper.  I guess it's that sort of literary power that makes any writing a candidate for appearing on lists.  We'll see as I read it.

And the Oscar goes to ...

I'm preparing a speech to make at a conference on Monday.  This thread may appear in what I say.  Or not.

If you want to win an Oscar in the leading man or leading woman categories it does you no harm to 'do' disability.  Eight out of 58 women since I was born have played characters with disability.  Twelve out of 58 men playing characters with disability in the same period have won.

Only two of the actors, both women, have had a disability.  That's 10% of characters with disability were played by actors with disability.  Less than 2% of all 116 of those Oscar winning roles have been played by actors with disability.

Oscar winners - Best Actress

• 1957 Joanne Woodward in Three Faces of Eve playing a paranoid schizophrenic
• 1986 Marlee Martin in Children of a Lesser God as a deaf cleaner.  Marlee Martin was deaf.
• 1993 Holly Hunter in The Piano playing a mute Scottish woman.  Holly Hunter is deaf in one ear.
• 1994 Jessica Lange in Blue Sky playing a mentally ill army wife.
• 2002 Nicole Kidman in The Hours playing Virginia Woolf.
• 2004 Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby playing a quadriplegic former boxer.
• Meryl Streep in The Iron Lady, playing Margaret Thatcher during her years with dementia.
• 2014 Julianne Moore in Still Alice playing a university professor with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.

Oscar Winners - best actor

• 1968 Cliff Robertson in Charly playing a man with intellectual disability.
• 1969 John Wayne in True Grit, playing the one-eyed US Marshall Rooster Cockburn.
• 1977 John Voight in Coming Home playing a paralysed veteran of the war in Vietnam.
• 1988 Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man playing a man with an autism spectrum disorder.
• 1989 Daniel Day Lewis in My Left Foot playing Christy Brown an artist with quadriplegic cerebral palsy.
• 1992 Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman playing a blind retired army general.
• 1993 Tom Hanks in Philadelphia playing a man with AIDS.
• 1996 Geoffrey Rush in Shine playing David Helfgott, a concert pianist with a history of mental illness.
• 1997 Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets playing a writer with compulsive-obsessive disorder.
• 2004 Jamie Foxx in Ray playing Ray Charles, blind musician.
• 2014 Matthew McConauchey in Dallas Buyers Club, playing Ron Woodroof who died of AIDS.
• 2015 Eddy Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, playing Professor Steven Hawking who has Motor Neurone Disease.

And today's word is ...

Volatile  

Sometimes it's just how things are.  If you don't look closely enough or deeply enough you'll get your arse kicked.  Today is one such day.  Thank goodness it was not for real.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

Mid-March and only now have I managed to finish reading my first novel of 2015.  Shame on you Douglas Herd.  It's also my first Alan Hollinghurst book. I'm not quite sure how I reached my grand old age without having opened anything by an author universally acclaimed as one of England's finest.  Better late than never (which may be my motto ... or an inadequate apology).

The Stranger's Child is a compelling read, superbly constructed around five episodes taking place at key moments of social, cultural and personal transition, loss or recollection in the lives of characters connected directly and indirectly over a span of 90 years.  I had my doubts at the outset, 1913 upper middle class England, thinking, did not Virginia Woolf get there first and better?  But I hadn't grasped the point.  As we move from each carefully constructed, beautifully written scene to the next the novel's scope expands and diversifies and yet the individuality of the human stories at the heart of the novel don't get lost.  As the novel's driving force - Alfred Hitchcock invented the idea of the McGuffin to describe the force that propels the narrative, like the Grail in a Grail quest - Cecil Valance, the handsome, lost war poet, recedes from view Alan Hollinghurst opens up a fascinating and entertaining examination of loss, memory, secrets and lies, artistic endeavour and changing tastes, reputation, social status, mores and change.  And if all that makes the novel sound dry and literary that only tells you I'm not a very good critic.

Much more accomplished reviews of a fine novel are available here in The New York Times and here (as you might expect) in The Guardian.