John Simpson AM

Speaker 1 00:00

Owing to circumstances beyond our control, we will bring you this week a repeat from 2020. This episode is somewhat out of date, so please ignore any information about events upcoming. Hello and thanks for joining me this week on New Horizons, I'm Vaughan Benison.

Today we honour somebody who has been an executive officer, board member, vice president and president of Blind Citizens Australia and many other things besides. John Simpson was awarded an AM for services to the blind and vision impaired community. We're going to play an extract from a conversation with John. John Simpson, congratulations from all of us at Blind Citizens Australia on your recent award. Thank you. Tell us about you and particularly your early childhood and growing up.

Speaker 2 01:17

To start. I went to primary school born at a specialized school unit that was run by the Education Department in Victoria, which had the quaint name even at the time of the site -saving grade. The philosophy being that those children with limited vision should be protected about overusing their vision because they'd wear it out. And of course, we all know that exactly the opposite is the case. But the site -saving grade, as it was called, was located within a local primary school. And it was equivalent to a small country school in that all of the children from 5 to 1415 were all educated in the one classroom setting.

So the teacher, well, it was only a small group of perhaps 20 or so, the teacher had the task of trying to set lessons and bring the children on at their various age levels and so forth, all within the one setting. I went from that to my local high school, Oak Park High School, in the northwest suburbs of Melbourne, where I was one of the early children with a disability to be integrated into a state government secondary school. That was a fascinating experience, and one that taught me a lot about self -advocacy, I guess, because, of course, I didn't have the benefit of a visiting teacher. All of the innovations, all of the special needs I had to negotiate or my parents negotiated for me.

So we introduced things like I used a typewriter in the classroom and, of course, a great consternation to the other children who saw it as a suitable distraction and complained about the noise it made when it suited their purpose. I had a colleague who actually wrote notes for me in a duplicate carbon book and tore out the loose leaf pages and gave me those, and he kept the carbon copy. That system worked very well, in year nine, until the day that I was trying to do some study out in the school yard, and all the loose leaf pages decided to take off in the wind across the school yard, with about 30 or 40 of the school students chasing them down across the school yard.

I used tape recorders and my parents were a fantastic resource to me in pre -reading upper secondary school textbooks, history, and those sorts of things, but also school teachers who read for me and my students and so forth. This was in the days before cassette recorders, so I learned a Phillips reel -to -reel machine back and forward to school along with my Olivetti portable typewriter. Not every day, I'd left them there some days, but it was a regular trip for me to be counting that stuff backwards and forwards to school.

Speaker 1 04:35

Your first employment for the first few years wasn't really anything to do with blind or silver vision impairment, was it?

Speaker 2 04:42

I actually worked in the area of overseas freight handling and what's called customs clearance. In other words, dealing with imports coming into the country and arranging the documentation for their clearance through the customs and tax systems. I worked for answered airlines in that capacity and then with a company called Yellow Express who were one of the major customs agency companies working in the Melbourne area, particularly on the waterfront and so forth.

I developed some skills there in terms of clerical work in functioning in an office where there were expectations of other people that had to be met in terms of my job was in relation to dispatching and preparing consignment notes for the  shipment of goods after they had been cleared through customs. So there were other people dependent on me which again I think was a very good learning experience.

Speaker 1 05:49

But once again, we're talking prior to any form of anti discrimination law or any workplace modifications or anything like that.

Speaker 2 05:57

We're talking about the early 1970s here.

Speaker 1 06:01

You did move on a little bit later to work for the RVIB, which of course is now Vision Australia.

Speaker 2 06:08

Yes, I was fortunate to be involved in one of the major service club organisations called Australian JC's, originally known as Junior Chamber of Commerce. I was a member of the Essendon branch of that organisation from about 1967. That put me in contact with people at the Royal Victorian Institute for the Blind and we did a couple of community education projects and things like that with the RBIB people. I was invited to join the staff of RBIB in 1972 in the public relations and fundraising area, particularly as special events organised.

In fact, I spent a little over seven fantastic years there as the event organiser for Melbourne's Carols by Candlelight, which of course has known to many people now through Channel 9. In those days, all of the on -stage production and the supporting activities, the fundraising and so forth, was all managed through the RBIB.

Speaker 1 07:13

That would have been a really interesting thing to be involved in at that time.

Speaker 2 07:17

Ah, it was a great opportunity and it taught me to take advantage of the opportunities that you presented with. My first year in 1972, I worked as the understudy to a fellow by the name of Jim Duncan, who would be known to many of our long-standing listeners. And Jim took ill. He had a heart attack on the 13th of December. And as the understudy, I was suddenly strung into the role of organising Carol's Bike Handalight for that year. Now, I'd been involved as a volunteer for about two or three years before that, but really had no understanding of what lay between very early in the morning of the 13th of December and very late in the evening of the 24th of December.

And I think probably that was one of the major things that taught me about not only organisation, but advocacy in terms of making sure that I got the best out of the staff team around me in terms of what I needed to get that job done.

Speaker 1 08:28

And of course, most people would know you from your role probably as the executive officer, or I guess you could call it now CEO of Blind Citizens Australia, which I think you joined in what, 1986?

Speaker 2 08:41

Yes, after a stint of doing a consultancy project for the Victorian Equal Opportunity Board where I managed the promotion of the new disability aspects of their discrimination legislation, I joined the National Federation of Blind Citizens of Australia as it was called in those days as executive officer in what was it? April, 1996.

Speaker 1 09:09

Hmm. How was that organisation then compared with what it is now and particularly with regard to your role?

Speaker 2 09:18

Well, the role was almost a sole employee role. There were two clerical assistants who put in some part -time hours, particularly around the semi -commercial fundraising activities that the organisation operated at the time. But all of the advocacy and peer support, all of that work, was either done by members on a voluntary basis or by me as the executive officer.

Speaker 1 09:51

And of course, Blind Citizens Australia, or NFBCA at that time, hadn't been around all that long in 1986, about 11 years. About 11 years. I guess it would have been a much smaller organisation, particularly in terms of its profile within the community.

Speaker 2 10:05

very much so. I think the membership born at the time that I joined was somewhere between 5 and 600 and there was a constant argument and pushback from both the Blindness Service Organisations and from Government Departments and large corporations that we were seeing as one of several consumer based organisations. Now it is true that there were a couple of others operating but none of them were operating at a really national level and none of them had the even the limited infrastructure that we had at that stage. There was a convenient excuse to say I yes but you're only one voice in the sector and that was a very central part of the the advocacy that we had to push through at that time.

 

Speaker 1 11:01

And I guess even the service provider industry at that time was significantly different from what it is now, given that even in Victoria there were three or four separate organisations that looked after the needs of people who were blind or vision impaired.

Speaker 2 11:15

That's exactly right, 3 or 4 in Victoria, the Royal Blind Society and a couple of others in New South Wales and of course in Queensland, when we started to recruit members and establish an initial branch in Brisbane, I think there was something like 15 different service provision organisations in Queensland.

Speaker 1 11:37

What were some of the main work that you needed to do as part of NFBCA in terms of the community and in terms of advocacy for people who are blind or vision impaired?

Speaker 2 11:49

Well, there were two strings and we might come back to this one, but there was a lot of work to do in terms of stabilising a funding basis and so forth. But putting that aside for a moment, there were substantial issues around the continuity of the blind pension, what we now call the disability support pension blind and the age pension blind. There was strong resistance to the continuation of the specific provisions that related to those pensions, particularly among the bureaucracy and, of course, also among other peak organisations of people with disabilities.

And a lot of our work was in terms of, if you like, shoring up the need for and the importance of that pension. And the evidence was there because even in those days, the ability for a blind person to have employment and have the security of their pension as well meant that many more blind people, as a proportion of the population, many more blind people were in employment than people with other forms of disability. It had influence in terms of the levels of remuneration that were available to people working in sheltered workshops. The blind people were much better off than other people. 

But of course, with those successes came the inevitable pushback and the argument by many for the lowest common denominator that everyone should be on an equal basis. And that equal basis was never going to be the level of support that was available through the blind pension. It was going to be the disability support pension as it was means tested for other people with disabilities.

Speaker 1 13:48

John Simpson, AM, president of Blind Citizens Australia. Blind Citizens Australia, as always, can be contacted on 1-800-03 -060... 1-800-033-060. If you'd like to email, bca@bca.org.au, that's BCA at BCA - org - AU. In the meantime, I'm Vaughan Benison. I'll talk to you again next week.