World Sight Day

Ms WORTLEY (Torrens) (12:19): I move:

That this house—

(a) recognises that 13 October 2016 is World Sight Day;

(b) acknowledges the opportunity World Sight Day provides in raising awareness of blindness and vision impairment for many South Australians; and

(c) recognises the advocacy and contribution of Vision 2020 and the Royal Society for the Blind in South Australia through assisting people living with blindness or vision impairment, as well as the funding of programs to help eliminate blindness or vision impairment.

It is a privilege today to move this motion with World Sight Day approaching us on 13 October. World Sight Day gives us all the opportunity to reflect on the fact that thousands of South Australians live with blindness and vision impairment. People who experience blindness or vision impairment report a range of barriers to full participation in the community. These include barriers created by a lack of accessibility to the physical environment, information and services which do not take into consideration the specialist needs of people who are blind or vision impaired.

Importantly, the NDIS will provide many South Australians with blindness and vision impairment with greater levels of support. We are proud that South Australia was one of the first states to sign up to the National Disability Insurance Scheme. It is excellent news for the more than 32,000 South Australians who will enter the scheme, as well as their families and carers. The NDIS will give people living with blindness and vision impairment greater choice and more control of the services they receive.

Children up to 14 years of age are continuing to move into the scheme this year. Young people aged 15 to 17 will begin entering the scheme from 1 January 2017, and adults aged 18 to 64 will begin to enter, based on where they live, from 1 July 2017. I would also like to take this opportunity to recognise the advocacy and contribution of Vision 2020 and the Royal Society for the Blind in South Australia (RSB) for the work they do. Vision 2020 was established in the year 2000 and plays a key role in promoting World Sight Day across South Australia.

The organisation is part of Vision 2020: the Right to Sight, an initiative of the World Health Organisation and the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. Vision 2020 Australia's key role is to ensure that eye health and vision care remain on the agenda for Australian governments. I had the honour of co-chairing the Parliamentary Friends Group for Eye Health and Vision Care, Vision 2020, in my role as a senator in the federal parliament. I acknowledge the support that they continue with their work.

Members would be aware that the Royal Society for the Blind is a not-for-profit organisation that provides services to South Australians across South Australia, with offices located in Smithfield, Noarlunga, Victor Harbor, Mount Gambier, Port Augusta, Kadina, and in my electorate of Torrens in the suburb of Gilles Plains. In the 2015-16 financial year, Disability SA provided approximately $2.9 million to the RSB for specialist disability services. I am advised that they provide services to over 12,000 South Australians.

The RSB's important services include orientation and mobility training to assist people to travel independently in the community, occupational therapy and assistance to independent living, adaptive technology, equipment and training, in-home support, counselling, employment services, recreation, community-based services, mutual peer support such as youth camps and blind cricket, and of course assistance dogs. We are privileged that we have many organisations that are involved in the blind and vision-impaired space in South Australia and I would like to take this opportunity to commend these organisations.

I move that this house recognises that 13 October 2016, World Sight Day, is significant, that we acknowledge the opportunity World Sight Day provides in raising awareness of blindness and vision impairment for many South Australians and recognise the advocacy and contribution of Vision 2020 and the Royal Society for the Blind in South Australia through assisting people living with blindness or vision impairment, as well as the funding of programs to help eliminate blindness or vision impairment. I commend this motion to the house.

Ms SANDERSON (Adelaide) (12:24): I rise to support this important motion, also recognising 13 October as World Sight Day. As a proud member of the Prospect Blair Athol Lions Club, I want to put on the record and congratulate the Lions for their Saving Sight program.

The Lions Club International was founded in 1917. The Lions Eye Health Program is a community-based program that aims to prevent vision loss and blindness by promoting early detection and timely treatment of eye diseases. The program encourages people to visit an eye care professional. The program was launched in Australia in 2000, and since that time more than 60 per cent of all Lions Clubs in Australia have undertaken some type of Lions Eye Health Program promotion. The program is a national multidistrict category B project funded by voluntary donations received from Lions and Lioness Clubs throughout Australia.

Recycle for Sight Australia has collected thousands of pairs of used spectacles and sunglasses and new frames and other equipment. The program distributes regraded spectacles to many parts of the world, to Lions Clubs, Rotary Clubs and other humanitarian organisations, for distribution to poor people in need at no expense or obligation on the recipient. Over the 15 years that the Australian program has existed, it has delivered 2.5 million pairs of glasses to countries in Africa, Europe, the Middle East, India, East Asia and the Far East, including China, the countries of the Pacific Rim, southern Asia and Oceania.

How can you help? You can donate glasses or sunglasses and change someone's life. Imagine if you could help a child to read or an adult to succeed in his job or a senior maintain their independence and provide a community with more opportunities to thrive and grow. Drop in your glasses to any Lions collection box; generally these are at sponsored areas, such as libraries, schools, community centres, places of worship or coffee centres.

My office is one of those drop-off points, and I would like to thank and acknowledge the people of the Adelaide electorate for dropping off so many pairs of glasses and sunglasses. They have all been passed on and put to good use. I welcome more of them being dropped in. We have regular contact with the Lions, of course, so they are easy for me to pass on. To arrange to become a local drop-off point, I encourage you to contact your local Lions Club and I expect they would be thrilled to have that contact.

On the topic of vision and disabilities, I note that the state government made a pledge to double, originally, the number of people employed in state government offices who had disabilities. I call on the government to honour that pledge. I would like to highlight the matter of a constituent I recently helped who is vision impaired. She had a social work degree and was very keen to get out into the workforce. Obviously, she could read well enough with equipment used to enhance reading and she completed her whole degree. However, her vision is not good enough to hold a driver's licence.

It was extremely disappointing that both a reception position and a call centre position on the Child Abuse Report Line (which is answering phone calls) at Families SA required a driver's licence, and this excluded her from even the possibility of applying for those jobs. It is really disappointing that a government that states that it wants to employ more people with disabilities excludes someone on the basis of their not being able to have a driver's licence. I call on the government to make sure that it looks at its individual policies in every department to ensure that it is easier, particularly regarding this motion, for a person with a vision impairment to be employed and be a productive part of our society, as all people with disabilities would like to be. I commend this motion to the house.

Ms DIGANCE (Elder) (12:28): I am pleased that the member for Torrens has brought this matter to the attention of the house on behalf of the member for Little Para. To recognise World Sight Day, which will be 13 October this year, is something that we as parliamentarians and the general community do need to stop, to consider and to take time to think what it would be like to be a person with partial vision or, in fact, blindness.

Here are just a few statistics to consider. Around the world, 285 million people live with low vision or blindness; of these, 39 million are blind and 246 million have moderate or severe blindness, and 90 per cent of blind people and those with impairment live in low-income countries. I think that is a significant statistic. Yet, for 80 per cent of visually-impaired people, their situation could have been avoided, meaning that their eye issue was treatable or preventable.

To this end, it is commendable that many programs have actually recognised this and have begun to treat eye infections that are actually treatable. For instance, we are very delighted to claim as an Australian Fred Hollows, who recognised the significance of eye infection in Australia, particularly in those in lower socioeconomic demographic areas. He took his work to the Aboriginal communities and assisted so many Indigenous children, in particular, and adults who suffered from trachoma, which is an avoidable eye disease. He turned their lives around.

For that work, he received an Australian of the Year award in 1990, and rightly so. He did a lot of this work passionately and for the love of seeing people be able to see. This work continues to be undertaken today by the Fred Hollows Foundation. Not so long ago, when I was in Hong Kong, I was pleased to see that a company is championing the Fred Hollows Foundation in Hong Kong as well. That seems to be gathering momentum, as they realise the value of addressing this preventable and treatable eye infection to prevent impairment and blindness.

The other day I was at Marion shopping centre. A blind couple was trying to get through the crowds. It was a really busy day because the weather was quite poor, so seeking shelter in Marion was something that many people were doing, including me. I saw this blind couple—a mother and a daughter, I think it would be fair to say—walk one way and then walk back again. Then as I walked, I saw them again. I thought I would take the time to help because they had their sticks with them and were feeling their way. To my disappointment, many people were not making way for them; they were obstructing their passage.

I stopped them and said, 'Do you need some assistance? Are you lost? Is there something you need to be pointed in the right direction for?' They said, 'Well, we're trying to find a particular shop.' They were trying to find Woolworths. I said, 'What about if you just turn around and we'll walk in the direction of the Woolworths?' and we walked in that direction. They were so grateful and it was a simple thing for anyone to do. I steered them onto the pathway to Woolworths, and before we were anywhere near the actual shop entrance, they said, 'We know where we are now.' From the sounds and the design of the shop and from what was under their feet and what they could feel with their canes, they could actually work out where they were, so off they went to Woolworths.

They were going to meet the husband/father of the family and have lunch together. A bit later on, I saw them again. They happened to be at the same food outlet as I was, and the fellow they met was trying to read the menu to them. He was also visually impaired, and he was holding the menu very close to his eyes, trying to read the menu to his wife and daughter. Again, I thought, 'I can give him a hand.' There were so many things listed on the menu that I thought this might take some time. There, but for the grace of God, go all of us. To the credit of the owner of the food outlet, she came over and assisted them in choosing what they wanted for their lunch.

There are all these everyday simple tasks that sighted people take for granted. It is a good exercise to stop and reflect on what people who do not have full vision or who are, in fact, blind, go through. When you are walking around a busy shopping centre, how do you find the shops you are looking for, when you do not have any indicator of when you are actually at the front of the particular shop? Having some sort of indicator that you are outside a particular shop is something that, as parliamentarians, we can turn our minds to. Maybe there is an opportunity for a phone app, for instance, connected to a cane. I am really not sure how that would pan out, but there is an opportunity there. Reading menus is something we all take for granted. To their credit, these are the everyday tasks that people who are of low vision or blind do to get through life every day, and they experience so many obstacles.

In my professional life as a child health nurse visiting families of need, there were occasions when I visited many families with many different needs, and a couple of families stand out for me in this particular situation. Those who had poor sight or were blind, and the way in which they were able to care for their children, were absolutely outstanding. One family had a dog that would indicate to them when they needed to attend to their children. The dog had been trained to assist them in the care of their baby, and that really was astounding and very innovative.

I lend a lot of support to this motion, and I would like to consider that we all lend a lot of support to it. As the member for Adelaide pointed out, it is not just about one particular section of the community with needs, but in this case we are talking about World Sight Day, a very important issue. I defy any of us to perhaps go blindfolded for a day and see what our lives would be like. I think it would be very challenging; our simplest and smallest tasks would be made extremely difficult and we might have to rely on the support of others to aid us.

The Lions Club does a lot of good work in this space, as does the Royal Society for the Blind and the Fred Hollows Foundation, and there are probably many more I have not mentioned. To all those who work in this space to support those who have impaired vision or who are blind, I commend you for your work. I would like you to keep reminding us all of the important work you do and the support you give to those who are in great need of our support in this area. With that, I support and commend this motion to the house.

Mr TRELOAR (Flinders) (12:36): I rise to speak in support of this motion:

That this house—

(a) recognises that 13 October 2016 is World Sight Day;

(b) acknowledges the opportunity World Sight Day provides in raising awareness of blindness and vision impairment for many South Australians; and

(c) recognises the advocacy and contribution of Vision 2020 and the Royal Society for the Blind in South Australia through assisting people living with blindness or vision impairment, as well as the funding of programs to help eliminate blindness or vision impairment.

I speak today as one who has reached middle age and requires spectacles now.

Mr Duluk: Well and truly

Mr TRELOAR: Well and truly—thank you very much, member for Davenport.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: That's a harsh interjection, member for Davenport.

Mr TRELOAR: Particularly from one so young.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Shall I call him to order?

Mr TRELOAR: Please do. I speak today as one who has reached middle age and who enjoyed good eyesight throughout my youth and early adulthood. However, I have now reached the point where I can read the scoreboard at the football but cannot read the budget, so it is very important to have spectacles. I see a few nods of agreement, so I think a lot of us are in the same situation, but we have the opportunity to have access to spectacles. Of course, initially, many of us buy a pair from the chemist and ultimately go on to prescription glasses.

This motion is about more than that. It is about those who have significant impairment, either through disease or through inheritance, and a motion such as this gives us an opportunity to ponder and recognise the importance of the work that groups such as the Royal Society for the Blind and Vision 2020 do in their work. The member opposite mentioned Professor Fred Hollows and the Fred Hollows Foundation. He was a very famous Australian, who has been dead for some years now, but I understand that through his foundation his work continues bringing sight to those in impoverished parts of the world who would otherwise not have the opportunity to have their sight repaired and would have a lifetime of vision impairment.

Each year, Vision 2020 Australia uses World Sight Day to talk about the importance of eye health and vision care. Building on last year's inaugural campaign, Vision 2020 Australia's #snapforsight is a fun social media initiative encouraging Australians to focus on capturing their moment and raising awareness about the importance of eye health and regular eye examinations. For those of us in this place who are on social media, and I suggest that is most of us, I urge you to take the opportunity to hashtag that.

The majority of eye conditions have no symptoms or pain in the early stages. Regular eye examinations are essential to ensure early detection and treatment of many eye conditions to prevent avoidable blindness and vision loss. As with most aspects of our health, regular check-ups are important. I probably have not had an eye test for some time, but glaucoma is an issue that can impact Australians, particularly those of us of European ancestry who live in this climate and who are often out working in the hot, hard sun.

I digress for a moment, but I remember going along at the start of each school year and having to have an eye test and read the eye chart. Of course, all of us were petrified that we would not be able to read the bottom line and so wear glasses. None of us wanted to wear spectacles at school, but some kids did, obviously. I got to the stage where I memorised the bottom line of the eye chart so that I was never going to have any trouble passing that one. In fact, the bottom line was D-N-B-L-U-P-H-T-O. I did know it backwards as well, but after all these years I have forgotten it.

The Royal Society for the Blind is a not-for-profit organisation providing services to Australians who have a severe vision impairment. These services are delivered by a professional, committed and highly qualified team supported by volunteers drawn from all age groups and walks of life. The other speakers have indicated what a severe impact blindness or vision impairment can have on a person's lifestyle. The Royal Society for the Blind is there to assist people to overcome their vision impairment and participate independently in the community. Ultimately, that is what we all strive to do. The quality and effectiveness of the Royal Society for the Blind is assessed annually through independent client surveys. The results show that that organisation has continued to provide a high level of client satisfaction over a sustained period.

The member for Adelaide spoke about the good work the Lions do. We have half a dozen or so Lions Clubs in my electorate; in fact, I am an honorary member of the Port Lincoln Lions Club. Even although it is not my home town, I am pleased to take up the honorary membership and get along to the handover meetings at least, when I can. They do a lot of good work. Their program is a community-based program that aims to prevent vision loss and blindness by promoting early detection and timely treatment of eye disease. Once again, it is the same theme of monitoring and prevention.

The Lions program, in particular, encourages people to visit an eye care professional. That program was launched in Australia in 2000, and since that time more than 60 per cent of all Lions Clubs in Australia have undertaken some type of eye health program. Their program is Recycle for Sight Australia and is part of the Lions Club International worldwide eyeglass recycling program, which is, in fact, headquartered in Queensland but operating throughout Australia, overseas and of course here in South Australia.

Recycle for Sight Australia has collected thousands of pairs of used spectacles, sunglasses, sometimes new frames and other sight equipment. The program distributes regraded spectacles to many parts of the world, going through the Lions Club network, the Rotary Club network, and other humanitarian organisations, for distribution to poor people in need at no expense to or obligation on the recipient. So, that is lots of good work by a lot of very worthy organisations, and it is timely that we acknowledge World Sight Day through this motion. I support and commend the motion.

Ms WORTLEY (Torrens) (12:44): I would like to thank members for their support of the motion recognising World Sight Day and recognise the advocacy and contribution of Vision 2020 Australia and the Royal Society for the Blind here in South Australia.

It is estimated that by 2020 more than a million Australians over the age of 40 will be blind or vision impaired. It is estimated that almost 85 per cent of all vision impairment will be among those aged 50 years and over, and the growing diabetes epidemic is also expected to dramatically impact Australian eye health. Importantly, 75 per cent of blindness or vision impairment is preventable or treatable. We need to continue to work towards eliminating avoidable blindness here in Australia, particularly amongst our Indigenous communities, as well as around the world. I thank members for their contributions.

Motion carried.