Australia’s Disability Strategy National Forum 2026: Health, safeguarding and accessible participation

We are at the Adelaide Convention Center for Australia's disability strategy national forum and we have got two chalk full days of community members, policy makers, government and service providers coming together to talk about all things health and safeguarding.

lLved hearing all of the other speakers talk um connect with community. A lot of other um diros and advocates in the space are here.

It's a such a great opportunity to all come together. Doesn't happen that often and it's we, you know, we really appreciate the effort everyone's made.

Um and there's so many people that we see online all the time and to be able to connect uh face to face is just wonderful.

It's been a remarkable opportunity to connect with peers, friends, community, and to really hear some ground breaking work that's happening across Australia in terms of disability.

I've enjoyed it very much. There's been um a lot of really interesting presenters, a lot of really passionate people, um and a lot of amazing accessibility I've noticed like around this, you know, conference area in general. And I've thought it's Yeah, it's been really amazing.

This is a really important conference because we don't get opportunities very often to bring our communities together and bring all of these different stakeholders into one room. Policy spans so many different sectors, industries, levels of government. And the ability to bring everyone together into one place to really talk about what we need to do to advance outcomes for people with disability is central to the success of the strategy.

Um, I think it's really nice like come here and meet other people and like talk about what confluence they love and about health and all sorts of stuff and and yeah, um, I love it.

I think the session we just came out of with Professor Sally Robinson was really really incredible. I think that she spoke a lot of truths and a lot of things that hit home for a lot of people with disability, myself included, um that sometimes you can you can miss out on in conversations like that.

It's an important conference because Australia's culture and inclusion of people with disability is shifting and the conference lets us be at the forefront of those changes to make sure that people with disability are front and center and ensuring that things are happening in a way that um is meaningful for us and works for us.

The last few days have been amazing. The feedback has been incredible, particularly from community members.

We've been able to make connections across different state and territory jurisdictions, across local work, state level work and government work, and really learning a lot about where we need to go next in all of these outcome areas so that we can really make effective change in Australia.