KEEP on swimming — it’s the joyful slogan that Dory, the popular blue tang from Finding Nemo, expresses over and over again in the box office hit from 2003. The chirpy fish faces obstacles but floats around them. She has chronic short-term memory loss but can read written English and speak whale. She talks to characters others would avoid and remembers solutions when vital.

And Dory is not alone. Nemo, the main character in the Pixar animation, has a “deformed” fin that is a congenital result of a fatal attack on his mother and sibling eggs. He calls it his “lucky fin”. He goes to school with a squid who has a lazy tentacle and a seahorse with H2O intolerance.

Celebrating differences is not unique in children animations: Hiccup, the unconventional hero of the successful 2010 franchise How to Train Your Dragon, has had his left foot replaced with a prosthetic after losing it in a fight. And Frozen captures Elsa’s battle to accept the differences she was born with.

But it is rare. “More classic animated fairytales have been known for their dubious, and sometimes publicly criticised sexist and ethnocentric biases,” writes Professor Ann Millett-Gallant, a disability studies scholar at the University of North Carolina, in the Disability Studies Quaterly.

“The princesses are stolen property, properly saved and wed, while evil characters are laden with non-Western, non-white stereotypes. Further, malice is often embodied in physically deformed, and otherwise visually abnormal characters, marked, like Nemo, by displayable difference and often specifically placed on display to provide a counter-example to normal.”

THE PROBLEM

Much of reality seems to be stuck in a classic fairytale, if the findings of the Shut Out: The Experience of People with Disabilities and their Families in Australia report, released in 2009, are anything to go by.

The strategy report, prepared by the National People with Disabilities and Carer Council, is the result of 750 submissions and discussions between 2500 people who attended consultations in capital cities in every state and territory in Australia over three years.

More than half the submissions received, or 56 per cent, identified exclusion and negative social attitudes as critical issues. More than 39 per cent of submissions identified discrimination and rights as a vital issue.

The report found people in wheelchairs cannot access the public facilities taken for granted by others in the community, such as playgrounds, swimming pools, cinemas, restaurants, hotels and cafes. Children with disabilities are excluded from local kindergartens and schools. People with mobility aids have difficulty regularly accessing public transport.

The Shut Out report was released a year before the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ranked Australia 21 out of 29 developed countries in employment participation rates for those with disability.

It also found about 45 per cent of Australians with disabilities live near or below the poverty line and educational attainment is poor.

“People with disabilities and their families, friends and carers reported daily instances of being segregated, excluded, marginalised and ignored,” the strategy consultation report says.

“At best they reported being treated as different. At worst they reported experiencing exclusion and abuse and being the subject of fear, ignorance and prejudice.”

THE HISTORY

For decades, people with severe disabilities were out of mind and out of sight in Australia.

They lived in large residential institutions, and away from the mainstream, since the 1880s. One of the first, attached to the Kew Asylum in Melbourne in 1887, was called the “Idiot Ward”.

One of the aims of institutions was to keep its residents safe. But all too often, they had the opposite effect. Horrific reports of sexual, physical and psychological abuse in institutions have triggered several groups, including Labor, to call for a Royal Commission on violence and neglect in the disability services sector — a call Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is yet to support.

Dignity Party MLC Kelly Vincent, who supports a Royal Commission, says abuse of people with disabilities happens “everywhere”.

“They almost have a flashing light above their heads saying, if you pick someone it may as well be us,” she says.

Ms Vincent, who has cerebral palsy and attends parliament in a wheelchair, says society is yet to be fully inclusive and institutions never fixed the problem.

“I has many things said to my face, like I’m lucky that I have a boyfriend; that I’m lucky that I have friends; that I’m lucky that my dad didn’t leave me,” she says.

“The disability or the difference whatever it might be is not the issue. The issue is how society responds to that difference. Institutionalisation actually doesn’t fix the problem in the same way that we don’t fix racism by getting black, Latino and Chinese people and putting them all in one house where they live together. We actually fix racism by changing people’s attitudes, so that all those people with all those differences can exist and live well in society.”

Associate Professor Caroline Ellison, the head of disability and community inclusion at Flinders University, agrees. “For a long time as a society, we’ve over-professionalised supports to people with disability,” she says.

“We’ve basically taken people with a disability out of mainstream society and therefore sent a message to the community that it’s too hard or too difficult or not possible to be inclusive. So we’ve got generations of people growing up not understanding what impairment or disability is.”

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability, aimed at changing attitudes towards disabilities and only adopted in 2006, argues against large residential institutions. All people, it says, have the right to “full inclusion and participation in the community”.

In 2013, more than 500 people lived in small and large institutions in SA, including Strathmont Centre in Oakden, Highgate in Fullarton and Minda Inc in Brighton, although resident numbers are dropping due to the state’s deinstitutionalisation reform agenda.

“It is widely recognised that Strathmont is no longer a suitable setting for people with a disability in the 21st century,’’ then treasurer Jack Snelling said in 2012 while announcing the building would be closing.

THE CHANGE

Federal Treasurer Scott Morrison declared during his Budget speech in Parliament in May, that disability was the responsibility of all of us.

It was his pitch to convince voters to agree to a Medicare levy increase to fully fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme. “Yes, it’s an insurance levy on all Australians,” he said. It’s our responsibility — we can all potentially be a recipient.

“But it’s our responsibility. We can all potentially be a recipient.

“That’s the fair thing to do.”

Embarrassing figures, repeated reports of abuse and neglect in the media and costs threatening to blow out meant change had become a necessity, not a choice.

The Productivity Commission, which proposed the $22 billion NDIS, found in its report in 2011 the stresses on the previous system were growing. “The current disability support system is underfunded, unfair, fragmented and inefficient and gives people with disability little choice and no certainty of access to appropriate supports,” the report says.

Hailed as “the opposite of a welfare model”, the NDIS invests in Australia’s largest minority — people with disabilities. It is expected to improve the future wealth of Australia’s economy and society by giving people with disabilities more choice and a pathway into workforce participation wherever possible.

Professor Ellison says excluding people with a disability is “a waste of resources”.

“If 25 per cent of your population lives with impairment and you’re not including them and not making reasonable adjustments to give them access, you’re wasting 25 per cent of your country’s human resources,” she says. “What country can actually afford to do that? Not many.”

THE EXPECTATION

The NDIS is a mammoth project that requires strong policy, whole-of-government accountability and culture change to be successful. It’s implementation process has had some hiccups already, but much of it is expected, considering its size.

Professor Ellison says the principles behind the scheme are innovative and widely supported but she says, like with any other major reform, the NDIS has risks.

“The NDIS has really great potential to be innovative, to be flexible and to right some of the wrongs of the past where we’ve really disempowered people and taken away people’s choices and opportunities based on money and resourcing,” she says.

Professor Ellison dreams of a world, much like the one that Dory the blue tang calls home, where people celebrate their differences.

“There is actually no such thing as disability,” she says. “It’s a social construct that we made up. It doesn’t exist. You can have two people with the same impairment but depending on where they live and which country they live, one may be very disabled and impacted on and the other may live a very independent life.”