Russell Edwards

I received a goodbye message from a disabled woman this morning. She told me ‘she couldn’t take any more’. She had no hope left. Having someone like us in Parliament, someone who fought tirelessly for us, had been one of the things keeping her alive. I searched her Facebook wall, found her CoS, who called her and contacted police. An ambulance was sent. Her Facebook page has since entirely disappeared. I don’t have her number. This is the third incident like this in 2026. I don’t know whether she’s alive. I don’t know whether she’s going to spend six months in hospital, like the last disabled woman who reached this point. I don’t know what happens next. But I know what happened this week. A disabled man who sent Facebook messages to two women a decade ago, women who did not even make any kind of formal complaint to the Greens, a matter investigated by the WA Greens at the time, has been dragged through the political sewer and publicly compared to Bruce Lehrmann on Insiders. A man found by a Federal Court judge, on the balance of probabilities, to have raped a woman. Jordon has also been dealing with relentless stalking, has an AVO in place (as do others, against the same woman), and serious related matters are before police. Apparently, none of that warrants the slightest consideration from the self-appointed guardians of decency. And then there’s the particularly filthy business of ‘feels on wheels’. An insult coined by Labor in 2022 because Jordon cried in Parliament over dead disabled children, now being twisted into something sexual. What sort of miserable, grubby little bastard takes a man’s grief over dead children and repackages it as a sexual smear? And what sort of journalist repeats it without establishing where it came from? There is a special place in the political gutter for people who manufacture moral outrage out of somebody else’s suffering, then congratulate themselves on their integrity. These grubs couldn’t recognise due process if it walked into Parliament wearing a fucking name badge. They’ve confused cruelty with courage, public humiliation with justice, and political opportunism with principle. Their compassion is a theatrical production with a press release and a remarkably convenient list of people who don’t qualify for it. And while this circus was consuming every available inch of political oxygen, Parliament was getting on with the business of dismantling disabled people’s lives. The very changes Jordon had been fighting. The ones you’re not talking about while you’re talking about this. Cuts to essential supports. Data matching and surveillance. People being shut inside their homes and shut out of life. Disabled and aged Australians facing terrible harm at the hands of a government that treats us as disposable commodities. Fuck that. You can find an unreported complaint of an inappropriate Facebook message from ten years ago, but apparently you can’t find your conscience when disabled people are begging you not to destroy their lives. What a thoroughly rotten collection of political cowards. You have mistaken the absence of consequences for the possession of principles. You know every word. Trauma-informed. Safeguarding. Human rights. Procedural fairness. You can pronounce them all beautifully into a microphone. You just don’t give a fuck about practising any of them when doing so might cost you a headline, a preselection - yeah, looking at you, WA Greens - a dead cat on the table or a convenient political scalp. And spare me the lectures about protecting women. Where was this righteous fury when disabled women testified about being raped, beaten and abused in institutions? Where is it now, when disabled women and carers are trapped in violent homes because they cannot get the support they need to leave? Where is it when women are telling you that the loss of their disability supports will put their lives in danger?