Powerd NewsWrap 12th November 2025

Speaker 1 0:00

Welcome to a Vision Australia radio podcast. Love our podcasts. Why not listen to us live, tune in anywhere, anytime, ask your smart device to play Vision Australia radio, or visit va radio.org

Speaker 2 0:21

on the Vision Australia and reading radio networks. This is the Powerd news rep G'day.

Sam Rickard 0:26

I'm Sam Rickard. It's the 12th of November, and we're reading articles from the Powerd dot media website. Joining me, as per normal, is the amazing Emma Myers, hello, Emma. Hello. How are you? I am particularly good. I spent a relaxed afternoon at a spa yesterday to celebrate the 25th anniversary of me and my wife being together as it

Emma Myers 0:50

were. Sam, are you telling me you had them nanny? Paddy,

Sam Rickard 0:53

not quite. It was more, more standard manipulation as it were. So yes, I'm feeling loose and comfortable as it were anyway, lots been going on in your world as well. You've been very, very busy, and fortunately, I haven't had the time for to get all those articles read. But we will be touching that base in the next couple of weeks anyway. So in the meantime, we are going back to right at the beginning, where one of your very first articles maybe tell us about this one.

Emma Myers 1:21

Yeah, so it was the first collaborative article that I ended up publishing with the wire, and it's about this guy who that he's an engineer and and he kind of broached the topic of transforming a house into a place where it had all of the essentials needed for someone who may need hospital grade care a lot of the time. And he thought, well, there's not enough hospital beds in Queensland where this is taking place. And so he actually said, All right, we'll, um, we'll try it this way. And so it's actually, it actually ended up being 20 to 30% cheaper to convert a single room in the house to actually constantly going to hospital. That's

Sam Rickard 2:21

incredible, really. I mean, considering how much money is actually spent nowadays on hospital beds and how, how few there are of them. So,

Emma Myers 2:29

yeah, I dread how much. I don't even want to know how much my my hospital stay cost the six weeks. So it's in hospital,

Sam Rickard 2:41

well, it's, we live in a country where necessarily have to look at the builds in that way anyway. And now we will cross to Helen rice and Guillaume Vito with the news, and we'll be back on the other side and talk about a more recent article.

Speaker 2 2:54

Thank you. Sam, an Australian engineer, has developed a house with bedrooms capable of becoming hospital quality rooms for Australians who need them, the House, located in far north Queensland, has enough space to set up oxygen and filters to keep it as sterile as possible. Talking to the wire engineer, Julius Arnold janco, says he feels these rooms should become standard in every household. We have built a Category Five residential cyclone shelter with luxury finishes and a private hospital grade medical room to allow for hospital care in house. When Julius started this project four years ago, the construction industry said his ambitious idea was too costly and impossible to achieve at a residential level, he took these objections as a challenge. I embarked it on myself to see whether it was possible, and now, four years later, we've built a residential house. We were able to finish it with Italian marble. The high tech home has been fitted with a private AI system that not only monitors security video feeds alarms and deterrence in real time, but also has a privacy level similar to a government research facility. Even if you were in the building, you still wouldn't be able to hack it without eight to 10 hours of being in the system. Mr. Arnold janco says the reason why society needs to implement the project is due to high demand for medical treatment up here in Cairns with natural disasters, the government's never going to be able to build enough public hospitals to meet the demands of the public. Whenever you have a system that's not able to meet the demands, and it doesn't look like it ever will meet the demands, the solution is always decentralization. Julius reasons, he argues that putting more hospital rooms into residential houses would free up space in hospitals. People don't need to take up hospital beds for things like wound care and infectious diseases, these are things that can be treated at home. The Queensland based engineer says the cost of converting a single room in a residential building is 20 to 30% cheaper than staying in hospital, according to the mastermind behind the project, all that is required to transform a bedroom into a hospital grade. Base is a medical air system, an oxygen system and a suction system. You can convert a medical room to private medical care for anywhere between six to 10 grand in total. Mr. Arnold janco says that gives you the ability that if you have a natural disaster or there's no hospital room, it means you can tell your insurer you don't necessarily need all the health cover you previously needed. You really only need hospital care. Julius explains the layout was designed to fit anyone's house. This should now become a standard. If you've got a house that's 50 years old, it should work for that house. It should work for a modern house. It should work for a tiny home.

Speaker 3 5:40

The behind green Senator Jordan Steele John on disability advocacy and Parliament inclusivity, knew from very early that these systems were broken. He claims,

Speaker 4 5:53

I find myself now in the space that either can fix them or break them in 2017 Mr.

Speaker 3 5:59

Steele John became the youngest senator in the history of Australia politics, as well as the first person with a physical disability to be elected at the ripe age of 23 as a result of his position, Parliament House was renovated to include a fully accessible office for Mr. Steele John and a wheelchair accessible space within the parliamentary chamber. It

Speaker 4 6:21

took about eight months to build an office that was accessible to me. It took a bit to build a single space in the parliamentary chamber that worked for me and I could roll in. But then nearly 10 years since, a lot still remains to be made better, not just for me, but for the entire institution and for the public

Speaker 3 6:41

career wise senator, still, John was instrumental to the establishment of the disability Royal Commission and regularly brings attention to everyday issues faced by the disability community. According to his website, when asked about his thoughts on the federal government's recent announcement of Australia's first nation climate risk assessment and national adaptation plan, the disability advocate called for the major parties to heed the Greens warnings regarding climate action,

Speaker 4 7:10

labor and the Liberals need to put people before the profits of some of these big companies. We cannot keep opening new coal and gas facilities, and we must revoke some of the approvals of some of these latest, biggest projects that should never have been approved in the first place.

Speaker 3 7:30

The senator argues that climate change is a specific threat to the disability community.

Speaker 4 7:35

We will continue to live through climate catastrophes in a context where our emergency service systems so often let us down, so often think of us last, and therefore put us at high risk.

Speaker 3 7:47

He went on to claim that the Australian Government needs to improve the collaboration process with the disability community, specifically regarding the NDIS and the thriving Kids initiative,

Speaker 4 7:58

there should be services and supports for disabled people that are in place beyond the NDIS. Nobody's ever argued that that is a bad idea, but they must be, or rather and they must be nationally consistent in both their delivery and their quality.

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Speaking about thriving kids, the WS Senator believes the government states and territories need to provide more information and consultation on the initiative before its July 2026 rollout,

Speaker 4 8:31

we see a announcement from the government that was really strong on the community, without The necessary consultation or clarification, many disabled people are sharing with me that they are deeply frustrated that the consultation that they were feel they were promised is not being delivered to As

Speaker 3 8:52

for now, the green Senator remains both passionate and dedicated to elevating the rights of people with disability to the best of his ability

Speaker 4 9:00

when I think about getting to work and fighting, and the energy that I'll draw on is a combination of my experiences and the stories people have shared with me in my role in this job. That's often what fires me up and gives me energy to fight for people now.

Sam Rickard 9:16

All right, so we've been holding back on this interview for a while, and you spoke to our newest disability representative, as it were, but Jordan's been around for quite a while.

Emma Myers 9:29

He has, yeah, he's up until recently, he was the youngest Senator ever elected, so that's the feat in itself. But yeah, he's definitely been a pioneer for the disability community since 2017 so and even before then, I can imagine he would have done everything he could, even before he entered politics.

Sam Rickard 9:54

Yeah, exactly. I mean a lot of people. I mean he would have, wouldn't have just simply emerged from. Nowhere as it were, and we all know how hard it is to make a mark for yourself in politics, even in the greens, he strikes me as a very approachable person. Am I right in that one? He

Emma Myers 10:10

really is. He's quite easy to get along with. He's quite easy to chat to, and his passion for elevating the rights of disabled people comes across in everything he does. So it's just an incredible human being all around.

Sam Rickard 10:29

One of the arguments that he put at one stage was that really to have an effective disability Minister, that Minister has to have a disability themselves. I've always been two minds about that particular thing, because sometimes it helps that a minister is not part of that community, so they can actually learn about it is part of the actual thing there. But still. I mean, if someone's making policies that are affecting me, yes, I want them to know what I want as well. That's kind of what it was, what

Emma Myers 11:01

it is. I mean, I'm also in two minds about it, but I think that having lived experience allows that person to actually know what people are going through, but having someone in the role that that makes the decisions on behalf of the disability community, but doesn't have a disability. You write, they can learn from the community, but at the same time, they've learning about something in theory, and then they're learning about something through experience. And I think you'll agree with me that living with a disability is a unique experience.

Sam Rickard 11:48

Yeah, it definitely is. I mean, even your own family and people really close to you don't necessarily understand the full ramifications of it. It actually takes walking in those shoes to really understand that kind of thing,

Emma Myers 12:00

yeah. And as you say, like your family can be your biggest advocacy, biggest supporters, and that they can experience disability alongside you. However they try, they're never going to truly grasp what it's like living in a disabled body. Well,

Sam Rickard 12:20

I mean, I seem to remember Scott Morrison at one stage saying, I guess he knows all about disability because he has a disabled brother. And my thought of that one is, okay, you can argue the same thing by saying, I'm not sexist because my mother happens to be female.

Emma Myers 12:35

Yeah, it's really it's really odd. And just vacancy you have a disabled sibling doesn't mean that you're going to understand. You know, I've got a sibling, and he pretty much avoids the topic of disability all together because he doesn't know how to respond to it. So it's a really interesting kind of notion, indeed.

Sam Rickard 13:01

Well, that we have, once more run out of time that is a wrap for this wrap. Well, we have a number of interesting articles coming up in the next couple of weeks, but maybe you can give us a preview. Well,

Emma Myers 13:13

we are going to have a Center for Disease Control, which is great, seeing as how well the disability community fared during covid And oh, what else have we got? Oh, yeah, the upcoming social media ban for under 16 year olds. How is that going to affect teenagers and young people with disability. So yeah, it's gonna mean interesting show

Sam Rickard 13:44

indeed, and join us next week. In fact, join us in the next couple of weeks. And yes, you'll get to

Unknown Speaker 13:49

hear all about all of that. Bye, for now. Bye.

Speaker 2 13:53

You can find these articles and more by going to Powerd spilt, P, O, W, E, R, D, dot media, along with the podcast of this show, the Powerd news rap was brought to you by disability media Australia. This show was produced by Sam Rickard in the Adelaide studios of Vision Australia radio. Sam.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai