Unfortunately the Human Rights Commission can only operate under the legislation as it stands.

The use of "risk" as a get out of jail card is not limited to service providers. Many schools use the concept of "risk" to over ride family preferences in provision of integration support? You want ramps and access to buildings? Sure, sure, after we have paid for a member of staff to follow your child around the school yard full time, to make sure they don't fall out of their wheelchair.

As the writer says, there is dignity in being able to determine one's own risk taking, as there is in being free to socialise as any other teen. The difficulty is as soon as there is a "risk", we accept that others can set the agenda. There is a risk that every child in the schoolyard will get hurt - and they do all the time. We don't follow them all around like celebrities.

Until we accept that people with a disability have the right to participate in the community, and start to adjust the community to fit, we will continue to limit inclusion by people with a disability. Sure, sure, come in, but don't hurt yourself is insulting when you don't say it to anybody else.

"Dignity of Risk" is a highly problematic term used by cheapskate disability systems and/or irresponsible service providers to abandon our most needy and fragile people with insufficient care. You may allow your six-year-old the risk of playing on the equipment, but not the risk of being left alone for twenty-three hours per day. Yet this is what happens in our country to the person with disability who has a cognitive age of a six year old. The writer claims that people with disability are in the best position to instruct their own support services. This statement denies the largest group of disabled, those with cognitive impairment. Their support services are often inadequate and negligent and their disability reduces their capacity to complain. This group of people, the ones who will never get a PhD, need to be discussed in terms of society's care, protection, guidance and fostering, not in terms of how much risk can be permitted. Once again, the all-embracing term "disability" is seen to be too wide, because when addressed within a whole-of-disability framework, the people with intellectual disability always miss out.

I agree with Estelles wholeheartedly. Even when we accept that children in a playground will get hurt as part of life, we usually are also thoughtful about designing/monitoring the playground so that risk taking is proportionate to the child's abilities to judge.

It is very important that people with physical disabilities (I am one)in articulating disability issues bear in mind that the spectrum of disability includes cognitive impairment, and altered states. Rights and individual choice for the first can mean abandonment and disaster to the second.

We don't know what the issue is that the writer experienced in allegedly limiting his rights as a competent adult. But it seems no general conclusions can be drawn from it in terms of any rights to an unqualified 'dignity of risk.'

wouldn't it be up to the carer to assess degree of disability and establish what amount of 'risk' is necessary and what not?

oh, I forgot, most carers don't have letters after their name, they're just ordinary people, like you and me, who aren't really recognised as competent to assess risk, they need the assistance of the caring industry to articulate themselves in order to get some standing to be heard, let alone given any financial remuneration for all their unpaid work for the cheapskate nanny state.

With all due respect, you are missing the point if you think this is about not taking sufficient care of people with a disability. Or in fact, maybe you are emphasising the point.
Whilst appropriate levels of care and support are required, we should not assume that people with a disability can not make their own choices about acceptable levels of risk. For point in case Google Aaron Fotheringham.
Point taken that those with an intellectual disability may not have the capacity to speak for themselves and need care and support, but they too have the right to decide what is an appropriate level of risk for them to take.
Every human being has the right to determine how they will live their own life.
No agency or government is able to tell you not to take a chance on falling in love, trying a new activity, taking a risk. There needs to be more robust discussion around the difference between risk decisions and risk situations. They are not the same thing.
And it is important to remember that the category of people with a disability does include those who are capable of earning a PHD.