When people have been talked about and written about by others for most of their lives, it is an unusual, exciting and affirming experience to have the chance to talk about themselves and to be published in their own words. Such experience creates a sense of self, an identity. It develops autonomy and self definition.

We who have a disability do find a lot of others - health professionals, politicians, employment experts, welfare organisations - talking 'about' us, about our needs, our potential, our limitations. We appear in statistics to demonstrate lack of funds or the need for new programs. We find bits of ourselves, bits of our lives, illustrating cases or adorning requests for charitable donations. We are used as part of somebody else's work satisfaction, case management or problem solving.

In a way this is to be expected. All workers and researchers work with something, find solutions to some problem. When however, the 'something', the 'case', the 'problem', never has the opportunity to be a worker, a manager or a problem solver, things get out of balance. Identity is defined by others, problems are defined by others, solutions are found by others.

This publication begins to restore the balance. Working men and women with disabilities are speaking in their own words, voicing their own successes, identifying their own difficulties, arriving at their own solutions. They are expressing their own whole humanity.

The contributors to Ready, Willing and Able do not always agree with each other, they do not all have the same experiences of work, they do not all think the same thoughts. Each has taken the opportunity to convey something individual about employment, about being a worker, about sheltered workshops, enclave teams, mainstream employment, discrimination, money, satisfaction, transition, independence, isolation, belonging.

They demonstrate that fundamental fact about having a disability which is so hard for the general public to believe: the disability is not the centre of a person's sense of self. hat is central is the individual spirit, the unique way of being, of each person. A world in which the expression of this uniqueness is encouraged and valued is a world which will include people who have a disability in all its affairs - social, political and economic.

The importance of being so included is illustrated in this publication from the United Trades and Labor Council, through interviews, creative writing, portraits, photographs and other visual media.

The Disability Discrimination Act came into effect in 1993. It protects people who have a disability from discriminatory treatment in. among other things, employment, education, accommodation, goods and services, sport, and Commonwealth laws and programs. This new federal law is evidence that our community will no longer tolerate such unfair treatment, evidence of a determination that people who have a disability must be enabled to work and live to their full human capacity.

The humour, impatience, vision, thoughtfulness, variety and anger contained in Ready, Willing and Able, are evidence that people with a disability are just that: people.

Elizabeth Hastings
Disability Discrimination Commissioner, January, 1994