Lived experience of disability discrimination in education, housing and insurance

Supplementary Submission – Disability Discrimination Act Review 2025

Author: Sharon May Holmes Preferred Contact: Email only (phone contact not suitable due to sensory and anxiety impacts)

1. Purpose and Overview

This submission provides lived experience evidence to support reforms to the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA). It highlights ongoing systemic failures to protect people with invisible or late-diagnosed disabilities, including autism, ADHD, PTSD, and complex trauma.

The examples below illustrate how discrimination continues to occur in education, private housing, and insurance systems, often through misuse of diagnosis, failure to provide reasonable adjustments, and the weaponisation of vulnerability.

I make this submission not only for myself, but for others who have been dismissed, pathologised, or harmed by systemic ignorance of invisible disabilities.

2. Case Study 1 – Workplace Discrimination:

From 2008–2018, I worked as a Learning Support Teacher at redacted, specialising in inclusive education. I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), ADHD, and Complex PTSD in 2017, after years of unrecognised challenges and covert bullying.

After disclosure, my diagnosis was weaponised against me. I was forced into environments that caused sensory overload, subjected to unrelenting micromanagement, and pressured into verbal communication despite documented communication differences. Colleagues, including redacted, engaged in harassment and gossip that undermined my reputation and well- being. redacted failed to intervene.

My hospitalisation in 2017 for acute depression followed months of unmanaged stress and humiliation. Despite strong performance, I was treated as the problem rather than the victim of an inaccessible and hostile system. redacted later denied appropriate redeployment or mentoring. I lost my career, my professional identity, and my sense of safety.

This experience reveals deep flaws in how the DDA is applied within educational workplaces:

• Disclosure of disability triggered stigma and exclusion rather than support.
• No enforcement mechanism ensured redacted implemented reasonable adjustments.
• Specialist recommendations were ignored or treated as optional.

If the DDA had imposed stronger positive duties and made specialist guidance legally binding, this injury could have been prevented.

Case Study 2 – Private Housing & Body Corporate Discrimination

As a homeowner with autism and a chronic health condition, I have endured years of mistreatment within my Body Corporate. Because I am a homeowner rather than a tenant, I fall through advocacy gaps. I cannot access the same protections available to social or rental tenants, yet I face the same power imbalance.

Key issues include:

• Repeated health and safety neglect (unrepaired gutters, water ingress, mould) despite being immunocompromised.
• Refusal to communicate in writing; instead, pressured into verbal and driveway confrontations despite known sensory triggers.
• Committee members redacted repeatedly provoked or minimised my concerns, leading to emotional exhaustion.
• My disability was used against me to frame me as “difficult” or “unstable,” rather than addressing maintenance failures.

The DDA currently provides little recourse for owner-occupiers who experience discrimination or harassment in community living settings. There is no independent oversight to prevent abuse of power by committees or Body Corporate Managers.

To ensure justice for people like me, the Act must:

• Extend coverage to private strata and body corporate governance structures.
• Require disability-accessible communication standards.
• Recognise provocation and reputational harm as indirect discrimination.
• Protect against the misuse of diagnosis as a means of dismissal or exclusion.

My situation illustrates how systemic discrimination thrives when invisible disabilities are misunderstood and there is no enforcement of an accessible process.

Case Study 3 – Insurance Discrimination:

In 2024, my income protection claim was denied by redacted based on an alleged pre-existing mental health condition. The insurer ignored that I was undiagnosed autistic for most of my working life and that my breakdown resulted from workplace injury, not personal failure.

They used outdated DASS test results and historical counselling notes to argue that I was already depressed, disregarding:

• The medical evidence of autistic burnout caused by discrimination at work.
• The gender bias and late-diagnosis gap that leaves women misdiagnosed for decades.
• The role of systemic neglect in causing my injury.

The insurer effectively punished me for self-awareness and seeking therapy. This demonstrates how insurers exploit the ambiguity around disability and mental health to deny claims.

The DDA should:

• Explicitly prohibit discrimination by insurers based on retrospective reinterpretation of undiagnosed disability.
• Require independent specialist review panels for claims involving neurodevelopmental or trauma-related disabilities.
• Recognize the cumulative harm of institutional disbelief.

5. Common Threads and Systemic Failures Across all three systems – workplace, housing, and insurance – the same structural problems repeat:

• Disclosure is punished. Once a disability is known, it becomes a weapon for exclusion or character defamation.
• Specialist input is ignored. Psychological, medical, and occupational recommendations are often treated as subjective opinions rather than authoritative evidence.
• Provocation and reaction loops. Autistic individuals are repeatedly provoked or pressured until a “non-normal” reaction occurs, then that reaction is used to justify further mistreatment.
• Administrative gatekeeping. Procedures are used to exhaust, confuse, or silence the complainant.
• No cross-sector oversight. Employment, housing, and financial sectors operate under fragmented frameworks that leave people with invisible disabilities unprotected.

The DDA must be modernised to address these lived realities through enforceable standards, accountability mechanisms, and recognition of late-diagnosed and invisible disabilities.

6. Closing Statement

I share these experiences not out of bitterness, but from a deep hope that others will not have to endure the same systemic harm.

For late-diagnosed autistic women, the world often discovers our difference only when we break. Then, that difference is used to erase us. The DDA must do more than prohibit discrimination — it must actively prevent environments that create it.

I urge the government to ensure that specialist voices, lived experience, and neurodivergent perspectives shape the next iteration of Australia’s disability discrimination framework.

Sharon May Holmes

Email contact only