A member of Parliament from the opposition party, DAP, blogged about the Act for Persons with Disabilities, and there some things that I still am not convinced that the Act will be strong enough.
I am questioning the Act although a lot of people are excited about it, including myself, I would like to know - How much teeth that the Act has to enforce things? The government must also start a commission to help monitor that act, but we have to give the government some reasons to get that commission going. One thing which I kept hearing / reading is less than half of 1% of the population is disabled people, and they estimate at 1%. And then when they build the infrastructure, they allocate only 1% for disabled people, ie accessible carparks, accessible housing etc. Imagine for 100 carparks only 1 is accessible. I have sat in meetings and witness that's how they do it. Based on population. But I read somewhere that the estimated number is 6-10% of the population. So how?
I think one priority that we must push for is the census taking done properly for disabled people, and the registration process by JKM. UNESCAP gave guidelines on how government should do this in their website.
The definition of disablities as well need to be enshrined somewhere. Hopefully the Act will be a good one, if not back to square one again… here's hoping and praying…
(I commented this on Peter Tan's blog)
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