It's all part in parcel of the issue. Getty Images.
COMMENT:
Last year in September I started my column with this:
"Sitting in the Invercargill airport, I kept on wondering why people were giving me stranger looks than normal. Oh, then I remembered it might be the bloody big bandage wrapped around my head.
''The night before I had fallen over backwards and clipped the back of my head on a wall heater. Wall heaters are very common in Invercargill, I reflected as a cheerful Irish nurse stapled my scalp. Jon my colleague and friend had taken me in to the A & E from our hotel in a calm no nonsense manner. We were down in Invercargill to look at an alternative model of employing disabled people that we could possibly replicate in a hybrid fashion in Whangārei".
We were down there visiting Southland Disability Enterprises (SDE) who employ disabled people to sort the recycling needs of the region. My most vivid memory of the recycling plant was how loud it was. We had been asked by the Whangārei District Council to submit a proposal engaging disabled people to run a recycling sorting plant – a social enterprise type model. The contract was coming up for review in April this year.
Southland Disability Enterprises (SDE) have recently been in the news. They were on the brink of losing their contract which enables them to employ 83 disabled people. WasteNet, which is an entity that deals with waste from the Southland, Gore and Invercargill councils, had declared that SDE were not the preferred contractor.
The organisation went into survival mode. They publicly announced that they would have to close and lobbied the Invercargill City Council. Much gnashing of teeth and letters to the editor ensued. Public meetings and protests were staged. Twenty thousand signatures were collected on a petition.