Well Said!

  by Helen Said, Autistic advocate, Melbourne Australia ING Bank appears, to me, to be knowingly disinterested and contemptuous towards elderly and vision impaired customers.  ING Bank no longer uses raised numbers or black fonts, and no longer uses both sides of their visa cards, to display relevant banking numbers. They have recently re-issued a visa card to an elderly person. The new card has extremely small white print on an orange background, which does not prvide enough contrast. The numbers are crammed, one under the other, on the back of the card while the front of the card is left blank. The elderly person concerned now has difficulty reading the numbers out when ordering home delivered medication from their local pharmacist and cannot easily copy the numbers while ordering products online. They never have been able to easily read their client number, when making inquiries at the bank, because it has always been printed on the back of the card in extremely small white...

 By Helen Said, Autistic advocate, Melbourne Australia Anti-discrimination provisions often fail us in staffrooms, lunchrooms and social venues attached to our workplaces and places of study. It is time for employers, employees and students with integrity to say "No more hate in the place" and to ban casual racism, sexism, trans-phobia and ableism from all property or social gatherings associated with their organsiation. Discrimination and hatreds are contributing to a divided society where many people feel unwelcome and unsafe. By keeping Human Rights provisions in a rarely used volume in the manager's office top shelf, and in a show bag of new employee induction material (destined for the recycle bin), we are not freeing our schools, unis, clubs or workplaces of hatreds. All human rights material needs to be included in new employee training and old employee re-training. "No hate in this place" needs to be part of enforceable workplace, study place and club po...

  by Helen Said, Melbourne Australia This is a page from my family biography, Five Egyptian Pounds - the story of George Said OAM  (published 2015, Equilibrium Books). This page describes the creation of the modern state of Israel, which occured when my parents were teenagers living in Egypt. The Arab-Israeli Wars that followed caused my parents to leave Egypt as refugees. This page is narrated by my father but written by me, and I filled in details using historical research. Looking back at what I wrote 20 years ago, I ask myself if it told the whole story. A t the time of writing about the creation of Israel, I felt compelled to appear impartial. I had interfaith, international family members, of many different viewpoints, who contributed family memories to my book and were eager to read my "family bible". I wanted to write an accurate historical account that would inform everyone but offend no-one, an almost impossible task. To do this, I downplayed some of the more ha...