Ghosted By Democracy

Have you ever wondered what it's like to be truly invisible? A ghost trapped between two worlds, haunting an attic, doing anything to get the attention of the living? 

Because I can tell you, it feels exactly like being disabled.  

Credit: Adobe Stock

We grow up in classrooms tucked away in ‘special ed’ units. We skip school excursions because of inaccessibility and get left off sports teams and birthday invites. 

As adults, our absence is expected. The same everyday expectations suddenly become headline-worthy achievements once a disabled person does more than what society believes they’re capable of. 

Many of us try to escape into stories. Turn on the TV. Sink into a film or scroll endlessly to try to find someone, anyone, who looks like us. 

One in five Australians has a disability but a quick glance at your screen might have you believe we don’t exist. According to Screen Australia, only 6% of Australian characters on screen are disabled. In the top 100 global films of 2023, just over 1% of speaking roles featured a disabled character, with nearly all of those roles played by non-disabled actors according to a 2024 study from USC Annenberg.

When we do appear, we’re the bitter villains, the dying patients searching for a cure, or poorly executed plot points meant to teach the protagonist ‘a very important lesson’.  

Other kids get to see older versions of themselves in teen dramas or superhero movies. They’re encouraged to save the world, go to parties or fall in love.

As a Deaf, ADHD kid, I never saw anyone like me - save that occasionally confused grandma from The Adams Family who couldn’t hear the punchline. 

Hannah Diviney is an Australian actor and disability advocate with cerebral palsy renowned for leading the successful campaign calling on Beyonce and Lizzo to address ableist lyrics in their songs.

Her work as the lead in black comedy movie Audrey and award winning SBS comedy series Latecomers has been praised for its authenticity and success in helping boost the push for better representation on screen.

"The impact of not seeing people like you is that you start to wonder if you’re meant to exist,” says Diviney. “I didn’t like the idea that my whole life would be defined by my disability, I thought I could metaphorically outrun it.”

“It’s a very dark, traumatising place for a child’s brain to land.” 

A  literature review conducted by researchers at the University of Virginia concluded developing brains are more susceptible to negative messages, especially when they’re repeated and come early. When these stereotypes are all you can see as a kid, you begin to believe and internalise that you’re abnormal, strange, or bad.  

The brutal reality is that suicide is the leading cause of death for disabled Australians aged 20-35, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare . In fact, we’re three times more likely to die by suicide than our non-disabled peers.  

“Once [that thought of not belonging arises], it continues to show up as you get older, at every new stage in life, every time people around you reach another goal you can’t,” Diviney says.   

But being an unwilling ghost isn’t just damaging personally, it’s also political. 

Journalism and the media determine whose voices are seen as valid and whose stories get told. But when it comes to disability, there are very few of us holding the pen, and our exclusion is writing us out of society's imagination.  

Professor Jennifer Smith-Merry, a leading expert in mental health and disability at the University of Sydney, argues the historical discrimination by the media is one of the main reasons disabled voices don't get a seat at the policy table.  

“Journalists aren’t that interested in people with severe mental health and disability,” she says. 

“Due to the discrimination and marginalisation, there’s been a lack of trust given to their voices in the past. Because of that, people don't believe they have a voice worth listening to.” 

This erasure fuels a vicious cycle of systemic neglect. The AIHW reported just 34% of disabled students finish high school. The National Disability Insurance Scheme only covers 600,000 people, leaving millions with limited to no support. The system is so broken d/Disabled people are also twice as likely to experience homelessness, even after seeking support.

“You can’t flourish if you live in a shit hole,” says Professor Smith-Merry. 

“But we’re not including people with disability as a lived-experience group in the way that we’re developing policy, and it’s having a massive impact on housing and support access.”  

Media academics at Glasgow University, described in 2023 report Bad News For Disabled People, the reporting of disability in newspapers as “symbolic annihilation”:  the absence or misrepresentation of disabled people that serves as an act of political erasure.

The narrative that people with disabilities are lucky to be alive, to be pitied, or incapable of independence becomes our political reality. This erasure becomes stronger when disability is treated one-dimensionally. We don’t leave room for the impact of gender, age, queerness, class or ethnicity. 

We forget that anyone can become disabled. 

Symbolic annihilation greenlights the media’s failures to hold governments accountable for creating equitable policy for everyone. The failings of the NDIS are the perfect example of disabled advocates crying out to be heard and the media giving too little attention, far too late. 

We cannot plan for a future we’ve never been shown. But more urgently, governments aren’t going to plan for those they see as statistical ghosts on a budget sheet. 

“People participating in life is the bare minimum relative to the freedom of able-bodied, non-marginalised people,” says Hannah Diviney. 

The government and policy are slowly improving over time. We’ve gained two openly disabled MPs, including Ali France who unseated former Opposition Leader Peter Dutton.

However, change depends on whether the media holds the government to account in its progress. Will they call out the outdated views, the jokes about Tourretts, and address the policies, the good and the bad? 

Will the media portray disabled people as the strong, funny, boring and capable we are?

Until more disabled people are in the writing rooms, holding the pen, or in front of the camera, even the strongest disability advocates will remain ghosts.  

Things have to change. No one is born to be a ghost.