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The taxation treatment of Graduate Research (GR) scholarships is determined by the Australian Taxation Office (ATO), not the Research Training Program (RTP) Guidelines or Deakin University. Under current ATO legislation, part-time scholarships are deemed taxable, whereas full-time RTP stipends are generally tax-exempt. This distinction sits outside of Deakin’s policy or discretion. It is something Deakin and the sector have lobbied the government about over many years. It is a genuine challenge for the sector and for all current and prospective candidates who cannot study at a full-time rate.
In relation to awards and prizes, eligibility criteria may be set by either external funding bodies or by Deakin, depending on the award. In the case of PhD stipends Deakin’s own award (DUPR) align with the RTP awards (set by Commonwealth legislation) with restricted criteria for enrolment load, duration or progression requirements. We acknowledge that these criteria can have unintended impacts for part-time GR candidates, including students whose enrolment status reflects disability or other equity-related circumstances. Tim’s reflections highlight how these settings can be experienced as barriers in practice.
More broadly, we recognise that the legislative and policy frameworks surrounding RTP stipends, enrolment load and taxation can create genuine challenges for some HDR candidates. While Deakin administers scholarships within parameters set by the Commonwealth Government and relevant tax law, these broader settings do not always align well with the diverse circumstances of HDR students.
Stories of Wonder platforms and celebrates the real impact Deakin students, alumni, researchers and staff are making in the world, right now.
Deakin University CRICOS Provider Code: 00113B
Tim Harte is a Deakin researcher
working at the intersection
of materials science
and disability advocacy.
From lab breakthroughs to taking center
stage at the United Nations.
Tim shares how his lived experience fuels
his drive for impact and change.
Oh, and he's also nominated
for Young Australian of the year.
From the lands of the
Wudawurrung people,
this is Stories of Wonder.
Tim Harte, welcome to "Stories of Wonder."
- Thanks, it's great to
be on the podcast today.
So you're currently doing a PhD
in sustainable energy storage materials.
You've recently addressed
the UN on disability,
but up until 19, you were a
professional ballet dancer.
Can you tell us a little bit
about your journey to now
and how you got here today?
- Yeah, definitely.
I think in summing my journey
to, you know, doing a PhD in,
I guess sort of academia is
certainly not a linear one.
It has been a little
convoluted, you could say.
Yeah, so basically I started
ballet when I was three
because it was part of school in England,
and there was a choice
where I could go outside
in the cold and play soccer,
or I could stay inside in the
warmth with nice piano music.
And I quite liked the warmth
and I liked piano music.
I thought it was a pretty good prospect.
- Yeah.
- Pretty good idea.
Yeah, so that's kind
of what got me hooked,
basically being in the warmth.
- Yeah.
- Instead of the cold
English winter outdoors.
- Where in England are you from?
- So I was born in Nottingham
and I kind of mostly grew up in Kent,
so sort of in southeast,
kind of from London.
- Right.
- Yeah, but then that's kind of,
I guess what got me started was sort of,
oh, you know, ballet's offered in school.
I did it and then my family moved out
to Australia when I was five.
And I kept going with
ballet initially in Woodend,
actually, because we lived
in Kyneton at the time.
And then moved to the Geelong
area in sort of 2003-ish
and started at Geelong
Ballet Centre for years.
So I was there for many years,
and really the turning
point I think happened
when I was about 11 where
I did a summer school
at the Australian Ballet
School in Melbourne.
And it was pretty cool that my sister
was 18 months older than me,
and we'd always do this together.
So basically every day
of the summer school,
we would catch the train up by ourselves.
We were sort of 11, 12, you
know, bit of an adventure,
seeing the big city and then, you know,
do ballet for the whole day
and come back at the end of the day.
And at the end of that
week, I told my mom,
I said, "You know what? I
want to do this every day."
And basically my mum was very supportive
and she put in place what I needed to do
to get there, basically.
So all through my teenage years,
I actually did distance education.
So I completed my secondary schooling
through Distance
Education Centre Victoria,
which is now called
Virtual School Victoria.
- Yeah.
- I do have reservations about the name,
(Dom laughs)
but I won't go into that now.
- Yeah, it sounds like a fake school.
- I prefer Distance Education
Centre Victoria, DECV,
which-
- Yeah, we'll let them know.
- Yeah. I can give them some
feedback on that definitely.
Yeah, but basically I did, you know,
school by correspondence all
through my secondary schooling
from grade six to to year 12.
And that was basically because I was doing
over 20 hours a week of ballet.
- Wow.
- And I did that until I was 17.
And then when I was 18,
I went to the Australian
Conservatory of Ballet.
I was accepted there-
- Wow.
- To do an Advanced Diploma
of Dance, elite performance.
And I did a year and a quarter there,
and then I transferred
to the National Theatre Ballet School,
and I sort of did two
years of full-time ballet
training at a tertiary level.
And that was before I
acquired disabilities,
which was sort of at the
end of that two year period.
And I did get a diploma
of Dance Elite Performance
qualification from that,
thanks to our great, you
know, higher education system.
And I do really enjoy putting
that on my email signature
and confusing professors
when I email them.
I emailed one about four months ago
with a collaboration idea and sort of,
you know, I do hope the
collaborator in Michigan
sort of read my email signature and went,
"Wow, he's got a Bachelor of Science
and diploma of Dance Elite Performance.
What? This guy's got skills."
Like yeah, yeah.
- Uniquely qualified, I'm sure,
for something that requires both.
- Yes, yes.
And as you might see from some of the
Institute of Frontier
Materials' social media-
- Yes.
- We do combine
some of the diploma of dance-
- Yeah.
- Your transferable skills, I would call.
- Yes, yes. Definitely.
- To the social media of the institute.
- Yeah.
- And so basically, yeah,
I acquired disabilities
at the end of that year.
I started passing out,
I started having weird
neurological symptoms.
- Wow.
- The joke I always say is, you know,
you know, started dropping girls.
I didn't.
I didn't actually drop anyone, luckily.
I was just dropping myself.
And I sort of presented to
the emergency department
at the end of that year with
weird symptoms, had an MRI,
and then I took a gap year
where I was supposed to get better.
Initially, I planned to do other study
and I think I even planned
to do Pilates course
at one point, sort of as an interim
before getting back to ballet.
And yeah, I just kept getting
worse symptom wise that year.
And it took about a year and a half
before I got any diagnoses.
And that was quite a complex journey of,
I'll touch on it later,
but quite often with these
complex medical conditions,
you get so focused on,
"Oh, what's wrong with me?
What's wrong with me?
What's the diagnosis?"
But just because you get a diagnosis
doesn't mean there's
a treatment or a cure.
So in my case, there's no
treatment for the conditions.
There's treatments for
symptoms, which does help.
- Yeah.
- And you know,
it does make my life a lot
better than it would be,
but there's no magic bullet.
There's no golden pill that,
you know, just fixes everything.
Yeah. So that obviously,
you know, took a while.
A year and a half to get a diagnosis.
And then after that,
there was quite a period
of about two years where,
you know, at one point,
with my light sensitivity, for example,
I tried a medication that
made me almost blind.
- Oh my goodness.
- So you know,
in many of these things,
you could kind of try
everything under the sun,
which sometimes, like one
of the medications I had,
the main side effect was vivid dreams,
so I had a very interesting,
I don't think you quite know
what a vivid dream is until
you have a vivid dream,
but it's very vivid,
which when I had the vivid dream,
I was like, "Oh, yeah,
that's a good morning."
It was very vivid.
Yeah, so very weird too.
- And so if you're comfortable.
- Yeah.
- Like what was the diagnosis?
- Yeah, so part of the
issue for me symptom wise
was that I was having dizziness,
but I was having two forms of dizziness.
So I was having dizziness
from a low blood pressure heart condition
called postural orthostatic
tachycardia syndrome,
which is quite common in young
women presenting in puberty,
but less common in men.
And then that was combined
with a blood pressure,
low blood pressure initial
orthostatic hypertension,
which is basically where you stand up,
your blood pressure drops extremely.
And there's not that much regulation
of your blood pressure by your body.
So there was that kind of, you know,
if I stand up, I'm on medication now,
so if I stand up, there's
going to be less of an effect.
But if I stood up suddenly now,
if I've been sitting for an hour or so,
I would have a blacking of
vision sort of top down.
- Yeah. Okay.
- That was different though
to a neurological condition
that was also impacting dizziness.
So I was having, I have
vestibular migraine,
which is a neurological condition linked
with inner ear and balance,
and that is kind of,
you feel like you're on a boat,
so you're kind of like
the world's going round.
So there was sort of two
different forms of dizziness.
And in some ways, I was kind of stuck
between the cardiologists
and neurologists.
And it wasn't until they
sort of de convoluted things
and sort of said, "Okay."
You know, I had to do a tilt table test,
which I'm not sure if
you're familiar with them.
- Yeah. What is that?
- Basically,
they stand you up on a
table until you pass out.
It's kind of a interesting technique.
- What a fun test.
- Yeah, I know.
Not the greatest test.
And then of course, when you pass out,
they pump you full of fluids
to sort of bring you
back to consciousness.
And from experience, the
fluids are not warmed,
they're quite cold, so it kind of feels
like a bit of a shock to the system
where you have a bunch
of sort of cold fluids
going in your veins.
Yeah, but basically they
were sort of different tests
that they did that finally
worked out what was,
what was, yeah, what was
causing my main symptoms.
And then there were also
other medical conditions
that were kind of causing some side,
what I call sort of secondary impairments
and sort of experiences that
I was having difficulty with,
but weren't really impacting my life.
You know, the main two were
having a massive impact
on my life before stabilisation.
- Wow. How long did it take them?
Like how much of a process
did you have to go through
to get that all figured out?
- A very long process.
So to figure out what it was,
it was another probably year and a half
after I actually got
into the right people.
- Right.
- And then even then, there were,
sort of the best medication
for my neurological condition
is Botox injections,
which I know it sounds,
you know, most people associate that
with cosmetic procedures, but-
- You're looking great, by the way.
- Well, I actually stopped Botox last year
and tried a new medication,
and I do have a wrinkle
here that reappeared.
So I had a cosmetic side
effect of the Botox,
which I did find quite funny
because obviously, you know,
every time I was getting
sort of 40 needles in my face
every three months or so,
and it's not really something
that you do by halves
for no reason without quite a, you know,
good reasoning and good motivation for it.
So I did laugh about the single wrinkle
that would disappear on my head.
But you know, to do be
eligible for the Botox,
I had to fail three medications.
One of them really messed with my sleep.
One of them had weird vivid dreams.
Another one, the side
effect was that you would,
so most of these
medications are repurposed
antipsychotic medications.
So they're not really
designed for migraine
or vestibular migraine, but
they can work for some people.
And variable, you know,
some people, you know, swear by them.
They didn't really work for me.
And you know, one of
them, the side effect was
that all your hairs would stand on end
and you feel like there
was a ghost behind you.
You know, like that feeling,
I've forgotten the term, but
basically you'd feel like-
- I think that's what it says on the-
- You're like, I feel
like feel there's going to
an earthquake in-
- There's a ghost behind you.
- Yeah, I feel like there's
going to be an earthquake
in like Samoa or something, you know,
or you know, like you'd feel a bit of a...
Anyway.
And then even in the last two years,
I've tried another three or
so different medications.
So I tried two different autoinjectors,
which are designed sort of for antibodies
related to the migraine.
And even recently with my
nerve block injections,
I've tried a new mix of nerve
block and corticosteroids.
So it's an evolving space.
I'm very lucky that my
neurologist or neuro otologist
is actually an associate professor
at the University of Melbourne,
so it's well leading in this area,
and you know, really
knows, "Oh, you know what,
this literature said this,
do you want to try this out?"
And I'm always very willing to, you know,
because I do have significant impacts
on my functional capacity
from just the amount of pain
that I'm in all the time.
And you know, surviving
a day is sort of going
through four or so
neurological exacerbations.
Yeah. So it is tough.
But you know, without medication, without,
you know, the substantial
support from my medical team,
I really wouldn't be where I am now.
- Yeah. Shout out to them.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, so I guess if I
reflect on my journey,
adversity has shaped me,
but it has not stopped me.
So that really is my,
I'm sort of trying to
work on concise messaging
with the nomination that
you might be aware of.
And this is something that
I really have reflected
in my story, you know?
I have encountered many
barriers in my life.
I survived domestic and
family violence as a child.
I struggled a lot with my
mental health in my late teens,
which coincided with a lot of ballet,
you know, being very intensely
focused on something,
which is, you know,
and I think that was
probably a good outlet
for my mental health in
terms of being, you know,
really focused on something.
But you know, and then I
had obviously the journey
of acquiring disability.
And I often sort of, I think I mentioned
in some of the pre-discussions
before this that, you know,
at one point, I sort of realised,
"Oh, I think I'm disabled now,"
after I kind of, you know,
I was on the disability support pension,
I was in national disability
insurance scheme participant,
I had a disabled parking permit.
And I sort of thought,
"Oh, I think society's
telling me I'm disabled now."
And I think you know,
because for the first
few years I was sort of,
"Oh, you know, I just
got chronic illness."
And then I kind of came
to terms with, okay so,
and understanding sort
of the different models
of disability a bit more.
And initially, you know, the
social model of disability,
which really frames disability
as more a sort of societal construct.
That for me, I think it was beneficial.
But I did clash with that
a little bit at first
because I sort of thought, "Well,
that doesn't really take into account
the effects of my
impairments on my every day."
You know, that every day I am
pushing through impairments
and pain, that has nothing
to do with society.
That's just a reality of
what I go through every day.
So I did find another model of disability,
the bio-psychosocial model,
which kind of does, you know,
it does sort of still place
quite a lot of onus on
society and those barriers,
and particularly sort of both perception
and sort of social
barriers of sort of stigma,
discrimination and such as
separate to structural barriers.
But, you know, for me, for example,
at the recent conference
that I went to in Fiji,
we had a pair out twice
during the conference.
And I turned to the person next to me
and I said, "Oh, Helen, I think
it's accessible for me now
because it's nice and dark.
Of course, no one can see anything."
And, you know, she laughed about it.
And you know, like, you know,
yes, there are lighting
conditions that can work for me
with my glasses off,
but at the end of the day,
you kind of still need
to have enough light
to sort of see something on paper.
So, you know, there is
limitations to how much society
is a barrier for my
impairments personally.
- Mm, yeah.
We'll touch on that a
little bit more later again,
and as well as that nomination
that you mentioned there.
But let's roll it back a little bit.
And so you kind of had to stop ballet.
- Yeah.
- You had a year off by the sounds of it.
How did you end up at Deakin?
- Yes, so, because through my year 12,
I did year 12 over three years.
So I did two subjects early in year 11,
which was math subjects, some math methods
and specialist maths.
And then I did, once I started
the two years of full-time,
I did just one subject
because obviously I was doing
full-time study in the day
and I was just kind of had
enough time for one subject
because ballet was my
priority at that point.
I chose to do non-graded VC,
which at the time it wasn't
quite explained to me
that I wouldn't get an ATAR from that.
So I kind of, you know, I made that choice
to sort of do non-graded
because it was less pressure
and I had other priorities.
But then when I went
to start a new career,
I did encounter some barriers
because I didn't have an ATAR.
- Right.
- So I initially applied for
a Deakin Bachelor of Science
to I guess, you know, start a new journey.
And that there was much
encouragement from my mum.
I probably wouldn't have
taken that step of sort of,
or that leap of into a new area
without my mom's encouragement.
But she was very strong and
sort of, well, you know,
you can't take a gap year
for the rest of your life.
You know, you have move towards something.
You have to build a passion in something.
- And did you have an interest
in science before that?
- Yeah, I did.
So all through, like even in year 10,
I think at distance education,
I think I won the science prize
for my year or something,
you know, so obviously
there was a passion there
and I always, you know, got good marks
in lower secondary there.
And so I actually,
because I didn't have an ATAR,
I was directed by the
Deakin enrollment team
to Deakin College,
where I was able to enrol
in a diploma of science,
which is equivalent to the first year
of a Bachelor of Science,
but slightly different.
So for example, the
lectures weren't recorded.
We had compulsory lectures,
which in some ways I actually think
developed more of a team
culture in our unit.
Yeah, and basically, I
completed that part-time
over a year and a half.
And of course, because of
the Deakin trimester system,
it wasn't exactly double the
amount of time doing part-time.
It was kind of one and a third
kind of, which was great.
And then I went into second
year Bachelor of Science
in the second half of 2017.
No, sorry, I'm losing track,
the second half of 2018.
So I started the diploma in 2017,
and I finished up end of tri one, 2018.
And then I went straight into...
So my hard chemistry subjects, I remember,
I think my first subject
at Deakin University
was a chemistry and analytical chemistry
second year subject,
and an organic chemistry
second year subject.
And that, I would have to say
that organic chemistry subject
is the hardest one I've ever done.
- Wow.
- It just had so much content.
I remember one lecture,
the advice was that every slide
that had a red border was important.
And out of 70 slides, 65 had red borders.
So that, you know, that kind
of gives you an idea of kind
of the volume of content in that subject,
just sort of, "Wow, this
is some heavy stuff."
- How is your transition from the college
to the full on kind of university course?
- I think it was really good.
I think the college really
supported, you know,
it's the same as first year effectively,
but with a little bit more
support, I would say, you know,
a little bit more one-on-one
time with lecturers.
And obviously those face-to-face lectures
that weren't recorded,
I think really made a
difference with building a team
that you are part of.
I did struggle all the way through,
so I did my bachelor's
part-time and I struggled.
And my diploma part-time,
I did struggle with building that sort of
sense of connection with
fellow students and peers
because you'd be with them for a subject
and then they'd sort of
have a different schedule.
Because they'd be full-time
and you wouldn't see them again
unless you've sort of ran
into them in the corridor.
So that was kind of something
that in the first two terms
of my diploma of science,
I was in the same units
with the same people.
And I really, that I
think was the first time
I'd really found community
again since my ballet days.
And it was really nice to-
- Yeah.
- To find people.
- You wouldn't have really
had it so much in your studies
with school for a lot
of it, because you were-
- Yeah, yeah.
With it was a little bit lonely, yeah.
I will say, you know, had
its benefits, definitely.
But at times, you know, you
have to be very self-motivated.
And I think that did set me up
before university study quite well,
because, you know, you are
responsible for your own study,
and if you are behind, then it's on you.
- Yeah, yeah
- Yeah. Definitely.
- You're responsible for your
own learning, as they say.
- Yes.
- Well, you obviously did
well in the course eventually
and found the hang of
it and found your groove
because you're now sort
of completing a PhD.
Can you explain how that came about
and why you chose what you've
chosen to do your PhD on?
- Yeah, so I guess all the way through,
I will say, so even in my diploma,
I graduated with the
top marks in my subject
for that graduating, sorry,
not subject for the diploma,
for that graduating cohort.
- Nice.
- And then I had various academic awards.
So I had a scholarship
for, I forget the name,
I think Deakin Scholarship
for Excellence or something.
- Sure.
- I forget the name.
It's almost EV somewhere.
- Yep.
We will pop up with CV here.
- Yeah, okay.
Yes, yes. Make reference, yes.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, and even graduating
from my bachelor's,
I got the John Clark Prize,
which is prize for the
highest chemistry grades
from bachelor's going
into a chemistry honours.
I think it's a little bit of a niche,
I'll admit a niche award, I'll say.
- Well, you got it.
- And obviously acknowledging John Clark,
who clearly has some
connection with chemistry.
I'm not quite sure of the history there,
but you know, undoubtedly
probably a great person.
Yeah, but basically,
so I finished my bachelor's degree in,
trying to think of years, 2022.
I had tried to do two majors initially,
so I tried to do a plant
biology or botany major,
and I did a chemistry major as well.
I ended up kind of finishing with a minor,
which Australian
universities don't really do.
But, you know, sort of,
I finished three subjects
short of a major in plant biology.
It just didn't quite work with
scheduling with part-time.
And also one of the subjects
I actually did during COVID,
which had a big place, a big road trip
where you had to go and collect samples,
which for me would've been
quite inaccessible, you know,
going to the other side of
the bay to collect samples
for a whole day and do botany.
That thanks to COVID actually
was accessible for me,
which is a little bit ironic.
But yeah, basically I had
hoped to sort of somehow
end up somewhere in between
and sort of looking at
sort of pharmaceutical
products in plant extracts,
and with the idea of kind of, you know,
looking at plant conservation
and sort of the best way
to conserve plants is
by conserving the ecosystems,
which is quite common.
But I kind of realised
that the chemistry aspect
of that was analytical chemistry,
which I won't insult
analytical chemists here,
but I personally, I was very
good at analytical chemistry.
I very much enjoyed learning about it.
I didn't enjoy doing it.
So I kind of, you know,
and this is part of the advantage
of a Bachelor of science
and even the diploma in that first year,
I got to do everything from
chemistry, biology to ecology,
to an elective math subject.
You know, really, really great broad
sort of span of subjects to
really see what I wanted to do
and what I enjoyed.
Yeah, so I graduated my
bachelor of science part-time
with a chemistry major.
I then went into a honours,
Bachelor of science Honours
is the full name in chemistry.
I don't think honours is
really well understood.
But basically it's 75%
in the case of science
is 75% research and 25%
coursework for a year, basically.
So each term you basically
do three units of research
and one unit of a subject.
- Right.
- So in my, because I was
doing chemistry specialisation,
one of the subjects
was a science comm unit
in the first semester.
And then in the second
half it was a chemistry,
sort of advanced chemistry topics subject,
which was pretty heavy, I will say.
That was pretty hard.
And luckily the last exam
I did was in that subject,
and I'm looking forward
to not doing an exam
for quite a while.
Thanks.
Yeah, but that really,
and I did say, you know,
many people, I think employees
and students don't really understand
the benefit of an honours.
And basically it's an
extra year of undergrad.
You pay effectively an
extra year of an undergrad.
But in my particular personal case,
I basically learned the
same amount of material
that I'd learned in all of
the bachelor's in a year.
- Wow.
- But obviously
additional material like and
yeah it was a really great
growing experience for me
in terms of really solidifying
how you do research,
how you implement the scientific method,
how you control variables,
and understanding that there are always
variables that you can't control.
You know, that's just
a reality of research
and setting planning.
So you don't, so those variables
don't impact your data.
It was something I really
learned from that year.
Yeah, so it was a great experience.
And I actually got a scholarship as well
for that year as well,
which covered three quarters of my fees.
- Amazing.
- Yeah, basically,
it was, you know, almost a free,
and I think I got a couple of prize,
I think I got a prize from Golden Key.
I think I brought in about
eight grand in prizes that year.
It was pretty good.
So basically I paid for my course fees
with prizes, basically.
- Yeah, you're lousy with prizes.
- Yeah, I know. I haven't
brought in many recently.
I know. It's just-
- Yeah. What's going on?
- I need to work harder.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, we'll get to that later on.
- Yeah.
- So tell me how you got to the PhD
and it focuses on sustainable
energy storage materials.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, how did you get to
that being the sort of topic area?
- Yeah, so my honours project
kind of started in this area,
but I really couldn't say even,
I think six months into
my honours project,
there was quite a funny example where
for the first six months,
I had thought that two acronyms
that were TFSI and TFSA,
I thought they were two different things.
Turns out that one stands for, well,
one I is imide and one A is amide,
they're exactly the same thing.
It's just different terminology.
So, you know, for six
months I've been thinking
these were two different things.
And then I kind of went
to write a paper about it,
and I realised they were the same thing,
which is pretty funny.
- So you got all the way to that point.
- It kind of shows that
learning journey of research
that sometimes you can go
and I will say a little
bit half, just sort of,
yeah, okay, I know, you
know, I've read, you know,
20 papers on this, I kind of have a clue.
And six months down the track
you can go, you know what,
I realise I was quite wrong.
And, you know, that's part
of the journey of research
as well, is understanding that
it's a learning journey of understanding
and nothing is kind of
set in stone as well.
Yeah, so that year, I actually,
the project was on these electrolytes,
which are called sulphate ionic liquids.
And they're a class of ionic liquids,
which are effectively
a molten soup of ions,
aerium temperature.
So they're non-flammable,
which is really desirable
in terms of electrolytes,
because traditional
electrolytes are basically
a lithium salt in a solvent,
and the solvent is flammable.
So this kind of changes
the dynamics of that system
to being far more viscous,
which is a disadvantage because
you have lower conductivity,
but the advantage is that
you have no flammability.
So, you know, there's
pros and cons of this,
but yeah, they're great systems.
You can, they're used in a
whole range of applications,
everything from electroplating,
sort of materials or metals extraction.
So electro deposition
all the way through to,
I think the funniest
application I found was,
oh, I think it was as a
detector for invisible ink.
So I got a literature
review published earlier
this year in March.
And that was the funniest application
was that you could use these
electrolytes as invisible ink.
And I thought, I just thought,
"Okay, so wading through
all of this sort of
200 or so papers in the field,
and I find one that says invisible ink."
And I just thought, you know,
"I need to put that in my review
because that is hilarious,
You know."
- And important.
- Yes, yes.
I know, I know, definitely, yeah.
How else am I going to write
my hidden notes, you know?
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
So that's kind of how it started.
And then my honours project
was on kind of optimising.
So these systems are sort
of three part systems.
And my honours project was optimising
one part of the system,
which was only changing
two things basically.
And then my PhD went on to do
much more with those systems.
So I looked at the lithium salt ratio,
so increasing viscosity,
what happens there,
it kind of, it's a little bit predictable
that if you increase the viscosity,
eventually you get to a solid, anyway.
You know, I-
- You all know.
- Some things are a little bit obvious
when you've already done
them and you kind of,
you've written a paper on it, you're like,
okay, this is obvious.
I probably should have
seen this a bit earlier.
Yeah, and then I went into the second part
of the system is the anon,
which you can do a whole heap with
because there's heaps of
different anon under the sun.
There are some limitations there.
So I think a big learning
curve for me in my PhD
was understanding that
just because something
is a gap in literature
doesn't mean it's a gap in
research that you can exploit.
So some of these things didn't work
and clearly had been tested,
but no one had put a paper on them,
you know, no one had published
on it because it didn't work.
So I do hope that by the end of my PhD,
I will actually put a
paper out that sort of says
what didn't work?
- Yeah.
- How do we advance
the field from here?
Because I think that's a really
responsible way of saving,
you know, saving a lot of resources
because these aren't cheap, you know,
lithium salts are pretty pricey,
you know, some of them, I think
the last 25 grammes I bought
was like $250 or something.
So, you know, and you
know, more environmental,
if everyone's trying this
and it all doesn't work,
then you kind of save time,
energy, the environment,
if you just publish and say,
"This isn't going to work."
- Yeah. Don't bother.
- Yeah, yeah.
But basically my whole plan
for the first year of my PhD didn't work.
So I was lucky that there were a couple
of three side projects
basically that did work.
- Is that common as well for
people doing a PhD that like,
there's probably a whole chunk of it
where you're going to be
doing things that just like,
are going to lead you back
around at the beginning?
- I think you're quite right there.
And in some ways in the
PhD you have to balance,
you know, it's original research,
but the more groundbreaking that is,
the higher the risk that it doesn't work.
But at the same time,
the higher the payoff,
because if you get a paper
that basically starts a whole new field,
then you are going to be the person
who's cited for the next 50 years.
But then if you work
on something, you know,
I've probably gone the other tack
where I've worked on something
that is quite well established,
but I've kind of gone, "Oh, I
feel like there's a gap here."
I'll do that.
I feel like there's a
gap here, I'll do that.
But it's not a terribly big field
in my particular area of electrolytes.
Where has your research led you
and what's the kind of potential impact of
what you've been researching?
- So I think throughout my whole research,
I've really been understanding
the concept of trade-offs.
So the whole pitch of my research is
that you have what's called
structural energy storage.
And structural energy
storage basically is where
if you imagine a car that
has carbon fibre components,
you can, you know, say you
have a door that's carbon fibre
and you know, it's desirable to be made
of carbon fibre because it's much lighter.
You can have that door not
just as a structural door,
but you could actually incorporate
a structural energy
storage system in there,
which is part of the actual structure.
So it's not as a separate
battery in the door,
it's actually the battery is the door.
It's kind of the pitch.
Of course, there's practical
limitations of this.
You get into an accident,
the door smashes,
what happens to the electrolyte.
You know, I will admit
there's limitations to this,
you know-
- Not foolproof just yet.
- Yes, yeah, but basically in my area,
when we incorporate these
electrolytes in polymer systems,
we make what's called a
bio continuous electrolyte,
which is a two-phase electrolyte.
So it's effectively a liquid electrolyte,
which is my systems that I work on
trapped within a resin matrix,
trapped within a solid.
So you could almost imagine a little bit
like a, a cottage cheese,
kind of with a bunch of holes,
but there's kind of liquid in the holes.
I don't know.
Yeah, so, and of course, obviously
one of the first side projects in my PhD
was this idea that, okay,
so we've got this liquid
trap within a solid system.
Theoretically, we can recover
the liquid solely through
breaking up that solid
matrix, basically, you know,
and I use a blender,
basically, to mash up,
basically cut up the matrix
and recovered over five cycles,
88% of the electrolyte
that had been put in.
So that previously was kind
of only a theoretical concept
of kind of, okay, this is
a bio continuous system.
Oh, maybe it's recyclable,
but no one had proven it.
Whereas I kind of took it
to that next level of going,
you know what, why not try this?
And basically over five weeks,
I got a paper out of this project
and I showed the
electrolyte was integrated,
and a key part of that was
that the electrolyte wasn't flammable.
So I was able to dry it
and remove water from it.
And it was, you know, stable, you know,
I was blending it and it was
obviously heating up a bit
through blending.
There wasn't any explosion risk, you know,
so, you know, there's
other electrolyte systems
that you couldn't do that with.
So there's, yeah.
But that was really cool.
And it kind of really showed that
sometimes a random idea can turn into,
I mean, basically that will
turn into a chapter of my thesis.
- Yeah.
- You know, because,
and it really was just
an idea of sort of, well,
we've got a liquid
trapped inside of solid,
can we get the liquid back?
Can we recover that?
And I reincorporated the liquid
in the solid five cycles,
recovered it over five cycles.
I definitely pushed the
blender to its limits.
I gave it many ice baths,
and we definitely probably
shouldn't be using
that blender fill any-
- Yeah, is the blender okay?
- Any margaritas in the office?
Definitely, it's in the lab for a reason.
Yeah, so I wouldn't recommend dropping
by from margarita from
the lab, but anyway. Yeah.
- That's really, really interesting
and amazing how your
curiosity in seeing gaps
has led you to those discoveries.
So let's change gears a little bit.
So you mentioned before that
you acquired a disability
when you were about 19, I think.
And you've spoken about how this was
sort of like a crossroads or a reset
for sort of the direction of
your life and your studies
and what you were going to do.
What was it like to start
working through this change,
and how did you sort of know
that this was the right path for you?
So drastically different from
what you were doing before
and where you wanted to be?
- I'm not sure if anyone ever finds out
if anything's the right path.
I think you just sort of start enjoying it
and develop a passion
for doing things well
and the small things.
But I think for me,
so obviously I had been in the dance world
since I was three.
But obviously-
- Three, yeah.
- You know, I think I
remember on my YouTube channel
when I was 19, I sort of said,
"Oh, you know, I've
danced for 87% of my life
or something," you know,
some stat like that.
And I was, you know, that
was my whole identity.
That was who I was, you know?
People would introduce
me as, you know, Tim.
Oh yeah. You know, Tim,
the dancer, you know.
So that community really
only exists in dance.
So if you're not dancing,
you don't see your friends,
you don't see, you don't
listen to the music.
You don't do dance routine, you know.
So I did have quite, I
think a grieving process
of kind of coming to terms with,
initially I was sort of
maybe in denial a bit of sort
of thinking, oh, you know,
this is just a pause.
This isn't something that's permanent.
And then, you know, it kind of hit me over
probably about five years or so
to coming to terms with sort of
"Okay, I think this is sort of a passion
that clearly isn't going to continue."
- Wow.
- Or maybe,
and I think it's probably only
maybe in the last three years
that I've kind of reinvigorated
that passion a bit more
of sort of, oh, you know,
maybe it can continue
with the odd TikTok dance.
- Yeah.
- You know, and-
- Which you've done to grade acclaim.
- Yes, yeah.
- On the Deakin channels.
- Yeah, yeah so.
- But like that's a massive kind of penny
to sort of drop over
a long period of time,
especially when it's not
something that you've had
a lot of choice over
actively stopping doing
that there's something,
there's a bit of a barrier
in the way there.
- Yes. It wasn't an
easy journey, certainly.
There are ups and downs,
and I think it was took a fair
bit of resilience to come out
on the other side of it
with a positive approach
rather than a sort of, you know,
like even just this year,
I think it was the
third week of September,
I had the 10 year anniversary
of my last dance show.
- Wow.
- At a professional level.
And I was really tempted.
I'm like, "Oh, I'll do a
Facebook post about it."
And I ended up just mentioning
it to my mom and that was it.
That was all just a little conversation.
And, you know, sometimes,
you know, I think I was
conscious of sort of,
yes, I still feel a bit of
grief about this, you know,
and, you know, and loss, you know,
because it was a passion
that I'd had for so long
a dream, something I
enjoyed, something I loved,
and, you know, such a part of me.
And, you know, that
doesn't go away overnight.
Yeah, so, but I think one
of the things that I did
probably within six months
of that gap year basically
of sort of getting more ill
was I really sought out
volunteering activities
because I'd volunteered in my teens
quite a bit before going sort
of professional with a dance
initially, like when I was 15,
I volunteered with Gateways,
which is a great local
organisation in Geelong.
I volunteered with Emotions 21,
which is the dance group
for Down Syndrome kids.
And I think that was, at
the time was completing the
Duke Member Silver Award, which
requires community service.
And I think that was a really great prompt
to sort of get me.
- Wow. So you're already
kind of, you know,
in this field a little bit
even when you were dancing.
- And it's kind of funny,
sort of reflecting,
kind of thinking, okay, so
how have my views on
disability changed from
when I was 15 volunteering with kids
where I was sort of there so
that they were interacting
with another young person
who would make a joke.
You know, like I remembered
one of the kids, Josh,
who'd, you know, make a joke
and, you know, pull a
booger out of his nose
and, you know, it was just hilarious.
And, you know, just
stuff that teenagers do.
And, you know, like I
do reflect on that now
and sort of think, "Okay, so
how's my view of that changed?"
And I think the overall perspective of it,
of kind of viewing the person
first over any disability,
you know, they're a person
and of course they have
feelings, they have motivations,
they have aspirations, they have thoughts.
And I think that, you know,
that crosses through to the
work I do now. Well and truly.
But I will say that that
work when I was a teenager,
really was driven by examples from my mom.
So I had seen my mom from
even just the age of 13
volunteering in many organisations
like Geelong Youth Choir,
Landcare, she was on the board
of Geelong Landcare network
for a number of years.
Yeah, so I really saw that example
of community services being
something that is important
to give back to your community.
And, you know, basically from the age
that I could get a job, I didn't,
but I went and volunteered
basically with my time, yeah.
- And so what are you doing today?
And I guess, like how did you
end up at the United Nations,
you know, advocating for this stuff
on one of the biggest
platforms in the world?
- Yeah, it's been quite a journey.
So probably over the last five years.
So I joined the Board of
Physical Disability Australia,
which is a disabled people's organisation.
So I describe disabled
people's organisations
almost as a union for
the disability community.
So we advocate for our members.
You have to be a member to join.
So you have to be a disabled
person to have a full vote.
And all of our governing bodies
of disabled people's organisations
are made up of at least 50%
people with disabilities.
Most are actually 90% plus.
But in terms of governance documents,
you have to have at least
50% people with disabilities.
Yeah, so that was a real
eye-opening experience
with joining Physical
Disability Australia.
And in some ways that was kind
of really prompted by COVID
that so much had gone online.
I kind of had wound back a little bit more
of the more face-to-face voluntary stuff,
and I had a little bit
more time to sort of go,
"Okay, where do I want to go to next?"
I'd kind of done a lot of climate activism
with Australian Youth Climate
Coalition before that,
and kind of crossed a little bit
into the disability space with that.
And I kind of had a little bit of an urge
to learn more about disability space
and understand, I guess a little bit more
about the systems that
I'd interacted with.
Obviously, you know, I'd
interacted with Centrelink,
I'd been on hold, I think
for two and a half hours once
I made the mistake of
trying to take a screenshot
of the time I'd been on hold.
And of course, when you do
a screenshot on a phone,
it hangs up.
- Oh no.
- So, you know, I'd had those experiences.
you know, in can barriers.
I've been in Centrelink before
and had that experience of
almost passing out at Centrelink
and feeling pretty damn terrible.
You know, and I kind of wanted to
not just share those experiences,
but learn from others in
the disability community,
about their diversity of experiences.
And I think that was,
2021 was such a great
learning curve for me.
I think every month of that year,
I learned about a new thing
that the NDIS funded that,
and sorry, that's the National
Disability Insurance Scheme,
which is sort of a support scheme
for people with disabilities in Australia.
And yeah, I think so much of that,
you kind of read a government website
and you go, "Okay, so
what does this mean?"
- What does that mean?
- But until you actually
talk to the people
who are accessing these systems,
using them, navigating
the community every day
based on being reliant on
these systems, you know?
Yeah, until you really
listen to those people,
you don't really understand these things
and these systems in society.
So that was when I really
condensed some thoughts
around the difference
between individual advocacy
and systemic advocacy
and conversely the difference
between individual issues
and barriers that someone encounters.
And when that becomes systemic.
So for example, you know,
if I have an issue navigating the
Public Transport Victoria app,
you know, journey planner,
that's an issue I'm encountering.
But if that's actually
an issue with the
accessibility of the app,
that's not an issue.
That's not my issue.
That's a systemic issue for
every person with disability
and every person who's
not disabled as well,
who's accessing that app
who may be utilising some of
those accessibility features
of larger font, for example.
Or different contrast.
Yeah, so that's kind of, I think,
a good learning curve journey.
And that's a bit of a journey
in disability advocacy
where you understand that
everything you've experienced,
yes, it's valuable.
Yes, it's relevant,
but it's not relevant to be discussed
at every point in time, you know?
Yes, you're there because
you've got lived experience,
but the issues you're
talking about is systemic
and the focus of those
is not you, kind of,
and that's kind of,
sometimes you have to kind of
take a step back and sort of think,
"Okay, this is a systemic issue."
And yes, you know, I can
talk about 45 minutes
about personal experiences on this,
but what the conversation here is
about how we deconstruct
this systemic issue
or address it in a positive
way for our community.
Yeah.
- And so how did you end
up speaking at the UN?
What was the process to like?
Do they email you?
Hi, it's the UN here.
- Yeah, pretty-
- Advocacy has been noted.
Come and do a speech.
Like how did that happen?
- Pretty much it was a
surprisingly casual process.
- Really?
- I will say.
So I think the biggest
hurdle is actually being able
to register for one of these conferences.
So the organisation you're
registering with has
to have a special status with UN,
so it has to have
consultative status with the,
I think it's economic affairs and economic
and social affairs of the UN department.
So it's called eco stock status.
That means you can register people
as non-governmental observers,
basically, or participants.
I first heard about this conference,
so the United Nations
Conference of State parties
for the UN Convention
on the Rights of Persons
with Disabilities,
which happens every year
in June in New York.
I first heard about it
about three years ago,
and I sort of thought, "Oh,
okay, this would be great.
I'd love to go."
And there were opportunities
that sort of opened up.
And it wasn't until last year
that I had a few domestic meetings
with Physical Disability Australia,
our board team met for the
first time since pre COVID.
And that was just great just
to see the whole, you know,
we have two directors in every state
and territory of Australia.
So it was massive team, sort of 16 or so,
just in our governance team.
And that was just fantastic
just to meet face to face.
And I really, I think
I'd really missed that.
And I really realised the value of that.
And after that, I sort of thought,
"Okay, I've got meds kind of
a little bit more stabilised.
I've got, you know, plenty
of value for the flight."
You know, I kind of worked
out a little bit more
of a routine with flying
and things kind of aligned
with joining the Australian Federation
of Disability Organisations.
So I was initially there on their board
as a delegate from Physical
Disability Australia.
And last year when I was
filling in its president
for Physical Disability Australia, PDA.
And then I actually was co-opted
to the board in December,
and basically for
international engagement.
So this year I represented AFDO,
the Australian Federation
of Disability Organisations
at the Global Disability
Summit in April in Berlin,
which was great.
And in usual Berlin, the
last day of the conference,
they had a club night,
which was just great.
And, you know, people doing
wheelies in wheelchairs
at the front of the dance
floor in an accessible club.
I just thought it was just the best ending
of a great conference.
- Nice.
- Yeah, and then the
opportunity basically arose
to go to the UN in June.
I kind of thought, you know,
I can't pass this up, really.
This is, and in some ways
it was kind of funny that
there's a lot of processes at the UN.
So I did find the event,
not like there were aspects of the event
that weren't as good as what
I'd been told they were.
But there were other,
like the side events were
just fantastic, you know,
listening from the head of
inclusion at the World Bank.
You can't listen to them just anywhere.
- Yeah.
- You know,
and, you know, even just
the UN security guy,
at the front who I used to
always go up the ramp to enter,
and the guy would always say,
"Oh, you need to go back to the queue."
And I'd say, "No, I can't stand the queue
because I've got a heart condition.
Can you let me in please?"
And you know, like those
barriers that, you know,
even at the UN we're
encountering barriers around
invisible disability and
non-obvious disabilities.
You know, and of course if someone went
through in a wheelchair, they'd be fine
because they'd be assumed
they need the ramp.
- Yeah.
- But someone who, you know,
takes their time walking up the ramp
and, you know, says, "Oh, I
can't stand in the queue."
There's those sort of
perceptions around sort of,
"Well, what do you
mean? You look healthy."
Yeah, but a lot of the UN proceedings
is a little bit pompous, so, you know,
it's country statements sort of saying
they're two cents on what
a great job they've done,
when in reality they probably
could have done a lot more.
I will say, you know,
and I'm not picking out any country here,
I'm just sort of saying
that that's, you know,
it's their pitch to sort of say
how great we are to the world.
- Yeah.
- But yeah, how great they are
and how much they've achieved
is obviously debatable.
Yeah, but basically, yeah,
I had the opportunity,
there was a Google form, I think
a week before that went out
and I emailed my boss at
AFDO and I sort of said,
"Oh, hey, is anyone
else putting into speak?
Because this year we had
quite a small delegation."
He said, and I sort of
said, "Oh, you know,
I reckon I might speak about this topic."
And I didn't find out I
was flying out Friday.
What day was that?
I think I was flying out Friday evening
and I didn't find out I was speaking
on Tuesday the following
week until Friday morning.
And basically I got home
and I said to my mom,
"I need to write a speech"
- As in on Friday morning.
- Yeah, so basically-
- Like the day
that you were to leave.
- Well, three business days,
if you call it that way.
- Oh, wow.
- Yeah.
So it was quite short
notice and I was kind of,
"Okay, great, I need to put a
speech together pretty fast."
- Oh.
- It had to be three minutes.
And I did cut in, I think
I got to 2 minutes 40
or something, which was
popular because with the person
who was facilitating the session.
Yeah, but it was quite a pinch me moment
and quite a, I don't
know, I think quite a,
I sort of condensing
of much work, you know,
I think we do a lot of voluntary
work in the sector that
never gets recognised or
never gets talked about.
You know, for example,
with the Commonwealth Children
Youth Disability Network
in 2022, 3, I'm losing track of years.
2023.
I wrote their Commonwealth
Youth Code of Practise,
which was all about how
basically we could elevate
the voice of youth in
decision making bodies
in the Commonwealth Secretariat
and all the various Commonwealth networks.
It's been signed on by about 19 or so
different Commonwealth
bodies, which is fantastic.
And it doesn't have my name on
it, so, you know, I wrote it.
- Interesting.
- And yeah, anyway.
Yeah, so there's sort of
those things that, you know,
you contribute to, you
put a lot of time into,
and then it can be kind of nice
when you get to that point at the UN
where you're sort of like, you know what?
"Yes, I'm feeling imposter syndrome
well and truly right now of thinking,
wow, I am in this room
next to a, you know,
speaking next to a dignitary, you know,
or, you know, the delegation from Peru
before me or something."
Or actually I think it
was maybe the delegation
from Jordan before me, because
I do remember there was
some captions at the
end of their statement
that I had to cut out just for
sort of apolitical reasons.
Yeah, but basically, yeah,
it was just such a pinch me moment.
It was over with very fast.
- Yeah.
- It was very fast.
I couldn't work out the microphone
because you have to press a button
and then the microphone lights up,
but you're supposed to press the button
when they announce you not after.
So there was a bit of a delay,
and in the video, if you
ever watched the video,
it's kind of a little bit awkward.
And then I didn't know
where the camera was,
so I'm reading my speech
and there's no footage of me
looking straight at the camera
because I didn't know where the damn
camera was that was filming.
- So they didn't really
kind of like, guide you
to what you need to.
- Yeah, no,
and the camera takes a while to find you.
It's kind of funny.
It's like, okay, you know, all people
who are speaking from
non-governmental organisations
speak from one desk, the NGO desk.
That's it.
There's one desk in the whole place,
like just zoom in there,
but it kind of takes about five
seconds for them to find me.
It was quite funny.
- Wow.
- But it was a pretty cool experience
and it was great, you know,
straight after the head of inclusion
at the International
Telecommunications Union comes over
and gives me a card and sort of said,
"Oh, we should collaborate."
So I think it was really good
to raise that profile of
me and the organisation.
- Yeah.
- Because, you know,
a lot of mainstream disability
organisations in Australia
and same people's organisations
don't have very much youth representation.
- Yeah.
- And for example,
at Physical Disability Australia,
when I was elected president there,
I was the youngest president at the time
or chair of an Australian
Disable on people's organisation.
So it was fairly groundbreaking.
- Wow.
- It was a little bit of a,
you know, I learned a
lot in that position,
but, you know, I think anyone would,
and no matter what age they were.
Yeah.
Do you think that your lived experience
of living with a disability
has shaped your thinking
and research at all?
- I think definitely.
So I don't think, and, you know,
you could talk to anyone
in any sector about this,
that cross-sector knowledge,
experience and skills is never wasted.
And I think certainly, you know,
I have written my own appeals
to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal
for NDIS applications.
I am well versed in navigating paperwork
and navigating systems.
And I think when you encounter
those barriers regularly,
you really do have a fair bit
of resilience that, you know,
you think out of the box with solutions.
And I think you have a, you know,
and I do find this with
my research when I sort
of connected with broader
sort of themes of, you know,
renewable transition.
And I think that broader
view of issues and solutions
within the world and society
is I think, invaluable to any work
and particularly research.
And, you know, the
intersection between the two,
between the research and the advocacy work
is that both are working
towards a better world.
And you know, take that
in many ways, you know,
better wealth for people,
better wealth for research,
better well for economic outcomes.
You know, it crosses many
sectors, many demographics.
I often talk about, you
know, inclusion of people
with disability that, you know,
particularly with mainstreaming
education, for example,
that if you've got a
person with disability
who's gone through a mainstream school,
they're more likely to go
through a mainstream higher education.
And they're more likely
to go into a high paid job
and contribute high tax revenue.
So they're actually, in terms of society,
in terms of government, they're
actually contributing more.
Whereas exclusion, on the other hand,
if you had them working a
menial job in a coffee shop
or in a sheltered workshop,
or Australian disability enterprises
as they're currently called.
Earning, I think it's
less than $3 an hour.
- Wow.
- You know, obviously
they're not contributing-
- As much.
- As much.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
And I think it's also about recognising
that capabilities there
and capacity is always able
to be grown and enhanced
with anyone.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Why is it important to
have people with disabilities
in research and in STEM?
- Yeah, so there's a
couple of points on this.
So, just from a stats
perspective, obviously globally,
about 17% of the world's population
is people with disability.
In Australia, it's around 20%,
depending on which census you look at.
So obviously if you're
excluding 20% of your work
of people in society from your workforce,
then there's got to be talent
there that you're missing out on.
- Yeah.
- I don't think
anyone would debate that.
There's got to be people
who are talented, skilled,
bring an edge to your work
that you're going to be missing out on.
If you are putting up
barriers to that community.
From an economic standpoint,
if you have people with
disability in your team,
in your business, in your
workplace, in your research,
you're more likely to be
making products, services,
and offerings that are relevant to
not just the rest of society,
but the whole of society,
including people with disabilities.
So, you know, there's,
that's 20% of people
who are going to be
buying things, you know,
who are going to be, they're consumers,
they're going to be buying
things in our economy.
If you're leaving them out,
then that's a big tangent
of your market that you're
just missing out on.
So that's it, I guess, from
a economic perspective,
there's quite a lot of
stats on diversity of teams,
particularly in delivering
leadership teams,
in delivering and decision making teams,
in delivering better outcomes.
There's great research on
women on boards, for example,
and actually, you know,
companies that actually
have more women on boards
from diverse backgrounds performing better
than companies that don't.
So we actually know that, you know,
there's evidence that
diversity leads to better
and more profitable economic
outcomes in across sectors.
- Yeah.
- So I guess,
yeah, if you're leaving
people with disabilities
out of research and
stem, then you don't know
what possibilities you
could be missing out on
will be my takeaway.
- Yeah, well put.
And like, better
decisions, better products,
better for everyone.
- Yeah.
- Not just people with disabilities.
- Yeah.
- You co-founded the ChemAbility Network.
Tell me a little bit about it.
What is it and why did you found it?
- Yeah, so the Chem Building
Network was launched in 2024
within the Royal Australian
Chemical Institute,
which is the professional body
for chemists in Australia.
I do mean chemists as in
people who do chemistry,
not people who run a pharmacy.
I will just sort of make that clear.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, so basically before that,
we had done a survey two years
previously that has shown,
I think around 77% of
voluntary respondents to
that survey were people with disability.
But we didn't really know who they were,
what they were doing,
what levels they were at in
their careers in the institute.
And we really wanted to create a community
where we could share our journeys,
share, you know, our experiences,
who we are, and really build community
and support our peers.
So within three days of launching,
I'd found out that the chair of, or sorry,
I think the president is the correct term
of the New South Wales branch
of the Chemical Institute
was the person with disabilities.
And she has deafness in one ear.
- Right.
- So, you know, before that,
if someone said, are there
people with disabilities
in leadership positions
in the Chemical Institute?
I would've said, probably not.
But now I sort of say,
well, you know what,
I know someone, Marie Stewart
who is breaking ground
and has a great career
and you know, is just a great scientist.
So it really allowed us to find each other
in the institute is because
it's about 3000 or so members.
- Wow.
- Across Australia.
So before that we didn't
know where we were,
we didn't know who was there.
And I think quite often
there's this discussion
around diversity of sort of, well,
we don't have to do anything
for people with disabilities
because we haven't got any.
And, you know, one of the
first steps for disability
is getting desegregated data
and understanding sort of, okay,
well there are people
with disability here,
let's see what barriers
they're encountering.
And then I think the third step
is really establishing a community
where we can find each other,
because that is really important.
Yeah.
So it was co-founded by
the education manager
at the Chemical Institute,
Hannah McCarthy.
And yeah, basically we
had a great conversation
about sort of, so if you are disabled,
how do you know who else is disabled?
And we just sort of thought,
"Well, why don't we set up this
online forum to find people,
you know, to find our community
and we can find each other."
Yeah.
- Why is community so important to you?
- Well, I think,
I'm going to sound a little
bit unionist in this,
without community, you can't organise.
So without community, you
can't share experiences,
you can't understand
that your individual
issues are not your own.
They're systemic.
You can't advocate for
those systemic issues,
and you can't achieve change.
So, I guess, yeah, that's my
takeaway from that, you know,
if I have an issue
and I write to my local
member of Parliament about it,
it is not as influential
as if 10 people wrote.
Or an organisation that
represented 10 people wrote.
Yeah, or an organisation that
represented, for example,
Physical Disability Australia
represents 1200 members
with disabilities across Australia.
And every time they would write a letter,
it would represent the
views of our members
and elevate those perspectives
of lived experience
with a lens to understand
the systemic issues.
- Yeah.
You seem to have quite a
systems sort of mindset,
even in the research that
you spoke about before,
of just like trying things
and even if they failed
recording that somewhere, so that,
you know, it's not necessarily something
that someone needs to go out
and waste resource is doing again.
Have you always had that? And
where does that come from?
- I don't know, I think
I've kind of have understood
that a bit more maybe
over the past five years,
because it is something
that you, you know,
when you first join an organisation
and learn a lot more,
your brain is just on
absorption mode for so long,
and it takes a little bit
for it to kind of switch to
interpretation of sort of, and reflection
and sort of thinking, "Okay,
so what does that mean?
What do those trends mean?
What does this mean in
the bigger picture?"
Yeah.
- How can visibility and representation
help shift perceptions and open pathways?
- So you can't be what you don't see.
So, you know, there's plenty of research
on this in women in stem,
if you haven't got a
role model, for example,
a female professor, for
example, in your workplace,
then you are much likely
to reach a point, you know,
all young women are much
likely to reach a point
where they're promoted to that level.
It's the same in disability
and other marginalised communities.
That representation is so important
because without that kind
of showing someone who has
basically broken through
the glass ceiling,
you don't see that as a
possible career pathway for you.
- Yeah.
- And even for me, like
when I talk to people
and I sort of say, "Oh yeah,
so my day job is doing a
PhD in materials chemistry."
And I say, "You know,
traditionally that's
quite an inaccessible area
and there are quite
inaccessible aspects of my job."
There are other aspects
that are quite accessible.
You know, I run my own research schedule.
I can choose when I'm in the lab,
if I'm feeling sick, I
don't have to be in the lab.
You know, basically I run
my day-to-day schedule,
which is very accessible.
So I think in some ways,
if we don't have those
people talking about
what it's like to be in those positions
and when, you know, the kids of today
won't see that as a future, they can be.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- You talked a bit about it then,
but you know, what are
some of the barriers
that you've faced in some of
the work that you've had to do?
And have you been able
to work around them?
- Yeah, so one thing I will acknowledge
is that it's quite an emerging
space of understanding
disability and accessibility in stem.
So there still is no
best practise guide to
how to set up a laboratory
in an accessible way, for example.
- Really?
- And I actually was in a
consultation with some people
at University of Western Sydney
who were setting up their
biomedical accelerator facility
and they wanted to be accessible.
And I was in that
meeting earlier this year
and I said to them, you know,
this is really groundbreaking
work you're doing
because no one else has
documented this before.
Yes, we know how to run a
conference in an accessible way,
but what about a workplace in science?
What about a lab? You know?
And I did encourage them
to create a resource
when they finish their project
to hopefully share with others.
So that they can, I guess, take that away
and make their facilities more accessible.
One thing that is quite a
barrier is the deficit model.
So viewing disability in
the workplace as a risk.
And, you know, for example,
the last time I passed
out was five years ago
from my heart condition.
If I talked to my lab techs about that,
they would be quite concerned
and probably wouldn't want me in the lab.
At the same time, I
probably handle chloroform
on at least a once monthly basis.
And I'm not sniffing
chloroform, I can assure you,
but, you know, there's a risk
of me passing out from chloroform.
- Yeah.
- So I think sometimes-
- As it would be for anyone.
- Yeah, sometimes I think we have
to be a little bit realistic about
the risks in these environments
and that, you know,
the last time I had a bad
neurological exacerbation
in early September this year,
I knew four hours beforehand
that things were going downhill.
- Yeah.
- And it lasted for five days,
dizziness, vomiting, you
know, nasty symptoms.
But, you know, by the time it got bad,
I was already at home,
I was in my bed, there was
no risk to anyone or myself.
- Yeah.
- So, I think too often we
sort of view these things
as kind of a massive risk
rather than sort of thinking,
well, if someone's nervous,
you know, for example,
last year I developed a
minor tremor condition.
The only time I found it impacting my work
was one time when I
was preparing something
and I kind of was shaken a bit.
Everyone shakes a bit, you
know, you focus on something,
you try and prepare it in,
you know, that fine motor
control is something
that's variable for everyone.
- Yeah.
- So, you know, do you
make a big deal about it
and sort of say, "You can't be in the lab
because you're a risk?"
Or do you sort of think,
well, you know what,
this person is part of
our team, part of society,
you know, we accept the diversity.
I'm sure if we looked at Deakin's
value pages on our website
on equity, diversity, inclusion,
I'm sure there'd be wording around
we accept the diversity of people.
You know, this is our work.
This is a workplace, a workplace
is a subset of society.
Of course, the diversity of society
should be represented and is
represented in a workplace.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
And I think one thing the deficit model
kind of is a negative of that,
is that there can be a lot of stigma
around people disclosing their
disabilities in the workplace
and getting reasonable adjustments.
Which is certainly something
that I think all organisations
need to work on better
around breaking down those misconceptions.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- So that, and also so that
people don't have a fear of-
- Yeah.
- Of raising what they
need adjusted for them.
- And the last point
on that, I have heard,
I was actually talking to an architect
at a meeting on Friday
of the Victorian Disability
Advisory Council, Nicole,
and she said that she had experience from
designing a laboratory where
it was said that if someone
couldn't complete tasks
that were required in the laboratory
because they were disabled,
then they didn't need to make
the laboratory accessible.
So I'll just sort of summarise there.
If a space is inaccessible,
of course we won't be there.
If you hold a meeting upstairs
in a non wheelchair accessible
venue, you can't say,
well, no one with a wheelchair's
come to the meeting.
So it doesn't matter.
You don't know who you've
excluded through accessibility
through inaccessibility, sorry. Yeah.
So I think that's a really
important point to focus on.
- Yeah, definitely.
What can allies without disabilities do
to support inclusion and
progress in this space?
Have you got any views on that?
- So a really important thing
that allies can support is mainstreaming.
And mainstreaming is
basically removing people
with disabilities from being
segregated in separate spaces.
And we've seen a lot of
discussion nationally around this,
around recommendations
from the Disability Royal Commission
that recommended that we move
away from segregated schools
to basically integration of students
with disabilities in mainstream schools.
And that's where that
mainstreaming term occurs.
- Right.
- There's lots of, you know,
I won't go into the school debate,
but I will talk about the
pathway between the two.
If someone's in a segregated school,
they're much more likely to
be in a segregated group home.
They're much more likely to
be in a segregated workplace.
Their pathway in life is vastly different.
- Yeah.
- If someone is in a mainstream school,
they're much more likely to go
to a mainstream educational
institution in high school.
They're much more likely to go
to a mainstream higher
education institution.
And they're much more likely
to go into a workplace
that is non-segregated.
So those pathways are very different.
One is where people with
disabilities are part of society,
and one is where people with disabilities
remain shut behind a closed door
separated from everyone else.
I think you know, which
one I would prefer,
and I think most people would agree
that one where people with disabilities
are part of society is
better for everyone,
for the whole community.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
So yeah, supporting that is
really important in allyship.
That is something that
is an ongoing change.
I agree it can't be done overnight,
but it's something that needs to be done.
And it's something that we
need to towards, you know?
- Yeah.
- In my lifetime,
I shouldn't be talking
about this at the age of 80.
- Yeah.
- You know,
it should be done in
the next 10, 15 years.
Well, and truly.
Yeah.
The second part is, I think,
better training around empathy
and, you know, not making assumptions.
Assumptions is kind of the,
first rule of disability inclusion
is don't make assumptions.
And the second rule is a polite
question is perfectly fine.
And the second rule is a polite
question is perfectly fine.
So I'll use the example
of my friend, Helen,
she was representing blind
citizens of Australia
at the recent conference
I went to in Fiji.
And we flew back into Melbourne together.
So we were navigating the terminal
and at one point it was kind of unclear
whether the airline staff were
sort of taking a long time,
or whether we were going
to have to wait there
for 15 minutes.
And I said to Helen and I said,
"Oh, do you want just
to sort of take my elbow
and we'll go to the
baggage check and do that?"
And Helen said, "Actually, Tim,
I'd prefer it if the airline
staff just did their job.
It's okay to wait here for a little bit
and just let them do their job."
And that, you know, I
asked a polite question,
I don't know about the
accessibility of Helen who's blind,
and she responded back politely
saying what she wanted.
That's perfectly fine.
And you know, I'll use
my example at one event
in O week once I was called,
was referred to as Sunnies
multiple times at an event.
So, and just putting that in perspective,
I wear Sunnies because of my impairments.
So it would be kind of
akin to calling someone
who uses crutches, crutches, or, you know.
Yeah, not the best practise,
I will say, don't do that.
But, you know, basically that
was based off an assumption
that I was just wearing
sunglasses to be cool.
- That's your thing, yeah.
- Yeah, you know, it'd be weird,
I don't know.
- Style.
- But there could have
been a polite question
just at the start of sort of saying,
"Oh, why are you wearing sunglasses, Tim?"
And I would've said, "Oh, I
have light sensitivity due
to a neurological condition."
You know, I'm not a rock
star, I am a chemistry,
but you know, I'm not
doing chemistry today so-
- Yeah.
- I assure you it's just
because of light sensitivity.
- Yeah.
- You know, and, you know,
I normally make a joke out of that,
but yeah, basically that's a good example
of kind of that assumptions
and just asking applied questions
to break down assumptions.
- Yeah.
I think I've probably
touched on that enough,
around misconceptions and stigma.
One of the things I might say also is that
there's significant barriers around
part-time and full-time
issues with students.
So during my studies,
there were academic awards
that I wasn't eligible for
as a part-time student.
- Oh, okay.
- So for example, even in my diploma,
I would've been eligible for award
if I was full-time after
the first semester,
that would've paid for
the rest of my fees.
But I wasn't eligible
because I was part-time,
even with the scholarships I applied for,
I always had to sort of
say, explain an exemption.
And, you know, I think
that's perfectly fine,
but you need to, I think it's
perfectly fine to ask people
to explain politely
why they, you know, oh,
so why are you part-time?
That's perfectly fine.
The issue is where there's
just blanket sort of,
no, it's only for full-time.
There's similar issues with
PhD scholarships, for example.
There's lack of flexibility
and there's also taxation issues.
So I actually wanted to
go 0.8 FTE in my PhD.
The only option was to
go 0.5 or full-time,
or 1.0, full-time equivalent,
you know, 0.5 for one,
that's not exactly flexible
And then there's also
issues with taxability.
If I was not full-time with a PhD,
my stipend would be taxable.
- Right.
- And it's not very much
already, I might say.
I will acknowledge
that the stipend at present
is below minimum wage
when you actually crunch the hourly rate.
It would be good if we move
to a state in Australia
where the researchers
who are building the R&D
for our nation's future are
paid at least minimum wage.
I will say that.
- Okay.
- Yeah.
I know that sounds a little
bit political, but, you know.
Hey. Just jumping in with a quick note.
The rules and systems around scholarships,
stipends and tax in Australia
are a little complicated, and some of
these challenges extend beyond Deakin.
We've added a brief editorial note in the
show notes to give you some more context.
Now back to the show.
- Well, let's talk a bit about the future.
- Yeah.
- So, Tim, I mean, you are nominated
for the 2026 Young
Australian of the Year Award.
Firstly, congratulations.
Secondly, how does that feel?
- I'm still kind of coming
to terms with it all.
Yeah, so I'm one of four
very impressive nominees.
I will acknowledge my fellow nominees
in the Victorian category
for the Victorian young
Australian of the Year award 2026.
One of the things I might say is that
there's been so much community excitement
and shared joy from this announcement.
So many organisations
that I volunteer with
have sort of been really excited
about sort of the recognition of this,
not just to my contributions,
but to the broader contributions
of their organisations
and not-for-profits,
which is very exciting.
Yeah. It's been quite a joy to see
so many people so elated by it.
- Yeah.
- I think one other thing is that
it is quite groundbreaking
for the disability community.
So from what I understand,
I will say this from a quick Google,
so I will qualify my statement.
It's from what I understand.
Yes, so take this with a grain of salt.
From what I understand,
I am the third nominee in the category
of young Victorian of the year,
sorry, young Australian
of the year Victoria 2026.
I'm the third nominee in that category
who has publicly disclosed
that they have disabilities.
And no one so far has
ever won that category
who's been a disabled person.
So, you know, it's great
recognition for our community.
- Yeah.
- It is 20, you know,
these are the 2026 awards.
People with disability have
always been in our community.
And I think it's great to
see representation there,
and I'm looking forward
to more representation
in the awards from our
community in the future.
Yep.
I think also my nomination is
quite good around perceptions
and sort of, you know, that I
am a person with disability,
a person, I'm halfway off for
disability support pension,
you know, I still receive a means tested
a social security benefit from
the Australian government.
I'm earning a living with a PhD stipend.
I also earn some money from
serving on a Victorian
public sector board,
the Victorian Disability Advisory Council.
You know, I am not a burden to society.
You know, I've well and
truly worked my thumb off
to contribute to society,
to contribute to my field.
And I think it's really important
that we have people who,
from the disability community
who can sort of show to
the broader community
that we are capable,
that we are more than
some of the assumptions
around our capability, you know,
that we really can do anything.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Very well said.
Final big question.
You know, what kind of
impact do you want your work
to have over the sectors that you work in?
And what do you want to
see change in Australia
when it comes to disability
rights and inclusion?
- So, the main word I normally use
around the impact I want
to see is multiplicative.
So imagine a person with disability
who is employed in an entry
level position in a company,
or even, you know, public sector,
you know, a government role,
their impact is only within
their team, you know?
Yes, they're breaking down barriers.
Yes, by their very existence
they're encountering barriers
and, you know, being resilient.
Good, you know, great job to them.
But if they're in a leadership position,
leading organisations, leading programmes,
they're making a multiplicative
effect across society.
You know, their effect
is amplified, you know,
and that's really what
my aim has always been.
And in many ways, I work
across sectors, you know,
I work across governance,
research, and disability policy.
And in all those areas,
I bring together different area aspects
of the different sectors that I work in.
And I really try to use
that to amplify the effect.
I think one of the big impacts
I would like to really
achieve with my work is that
really communicating in advocacy that the
label of disability or
person with disability
does not equate to capability.
And that's really related to
breaking down assumptions,
which I touched on previously,
but I will regal you with a
funny story around assumptions.
So when I was landing in
New York from, you know,
going there in June for the
conference of state parties
for the convention on
the rights of persons
with disabilities.
- At the UN.
- Yep, at the UN, yep.
Yes, yeah.
When I was transiting
from one of the airports,
which was an interesting experience,
I kind of, I wanted the authentic kind of-
- This is the transfer, like-
- Yeah, yeah.
The trains and everything.
- Oh my goodness, yeah.
- Well, sorry, the
trains from the airport.
- Oh, okay. Yeah.
- And I had to get four trains
into my hotel, which was interesting.
Not the most accessible, I will say.
But anyway, so the second train I got on,
I had bought a disabled ticket
because I thought, well,
I'm going to a conference
for people with disabilities.
I'm disabled, been disabled for a while.
I think I can probably, you
know, buy a disabled ticket.
I mean, I'm here for UN conference
on disability after all.
So I had a ticket inspector
who is rather entertaining,
who kept insisting that I
had bought a child's ticket.
And this conversation went around circles
for about six times as sort of,
"You've bought a child's ticket."
"No, it's a disabled ticket."
"You've bought a child ticket," you know,
around in circles, kind of,
and I didn't really notice this,
but there was a guy in the background
sort of leaning against one of the doors
who turns to the conductor
and says in this great Harlem accent,
"Can't you see, he's blind."
So, you know, we've got the
assumption from this guy
that I am blind because
I'm wearing dark glasses.
We've got the assumption
from the ticket inspector
that I'm not disabled because
I don't look disabled.
So we've got assumptions both ways.
Somewhere in the middle is
probably the right answer.
But it was just a really,
really great example.
And it was just hilarious
of just kind of this,
and then eventually the
ticket inspector said,
"Oh, okay, I'll stab, you
know, take your ticket."
- Yeah. He's blind, so-
- But yeah, yeah, oh
yeah, he's blind, yeah.
- Just, yeah.
- Yeah.
But you know, it's a good
example of assumptions
because, you know, the ticket
inspector could have asked,
"Oh, so why did you
purchase a disabled ticket?"
"Oh, because I'm disabled."
You know, it's not a complicated
question or answer, is it?
- Yeah, yeah.
- And, you know, vice versa,
the guy who assumed I was
blind, yes, that was hilarious.
But it was an assumption
nonetheless, it wasn't correct.
So if he'd, you know,
tried to grab my bag,
assuming I was blind, you know,
a polite question probably would've been
maybe the solution, probably.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
In terms of what I would
like to see in Australia
when it comes to disability rights
and what would I like to see change,
I think a Federal Human Rights
Act is really important.
This has been flagged in recommendations
from the Disability Royal Commission.
A really important part of this will be
balancing mainstreaming of, you know,
people with disability
need to be in this act,
but we also need to address key issues
specific to the disability
community in this act.
So there is a push to have a separate act.
There's debates about that.
But, you know, I think it's
in line with mainstreaming
and I think broader
society that, you know,
brought Australian values
that a human rights act
should be for everyone,
and it should address issues,
potential discrimination that
a whole society may experience
and, you know, ensure
that that doesn't occur.
So that's a really high priority.
At a state and territory level,
I think it's really important
that human rights commissions
have, and I do did write on my
notes here, have some teeth.
And what I mean by that, at present,
there's no ability for
human rights commission.
So for example, in Victoria,
the Australian, sorry,
the Victorian Equal
Opportunity in Human Rights
Commission is what it's called.
And it's governed by an act from 2010.
It has no ability to compel
parties to the table.
So if I have a
discrimination case against,
for example, a local supermarket,
they can just ignore the communication
from the Human Rights Commission.
- Yeah.
- And it goes nowhere.
- Right.
- Which really does that,
I mean, it doesn't really
resolve the issue, does it?
If you're just not
responding to your emails.
- Yeah.
- It's sort of sweeping things
under the rug.
And at the same time as well,
there's issues around not
being able to actually
introduce binding agreements.
So, for example, if an agreement is made
under conciliation
between the two parties,
it has to be appealed
through a separate channel
through the Administrative
Appeals Tribunal,
from what I gather
to actually be enforced if a
party just disagrees to it.
- Right.
- After agreement.
So basically there needs to be some teeth,
there needs to be more funding
because at present, the wait list,
by the time you actually
have lodged something,
you know, it takes about 15 minutes
to lodge a discrimination
complaint with the commission,
which isn't bad, but it
takes about nine months
to get a response.
- Wow.
- Which, yeah,
and look, that that is
from a few years ago.
So I'm not saying that's a current figure,
but you know, that I think, you know-
- It's a little long.
- Yes and the reality is
that this is discrimination
around someone accessing society
that discrimination continues
after, you know, like-
- Yeah.
- If I've encountered that
barrier in the supermarket,
that barrier isn't just going away.
- No.
- You know, so for that nine months,
it's being left unaddressed
and you're not even starting the process
of discussing how to resolve it.
- Even after nine months, you're not even
at the start of the process.
It's just the response.
- Yeah, so better funding, more teeth
or, you know, some teeth
and actually some bite.
Yeah, definitely.
- Let's finish up with some
quick fire wrap up questions.
Just some quick answers
on these ones if you can.
What's something that
most people don't know
about your research?
- So one of the funniest
things about my research
was that in, I mentioned the paper around
where I recycled that electrolyte.
I bought a highly sophisticated piece
of scientific equipment for that.
I went down to JB Hi-Fi, sorry,
I probably shouldn't
drop brand names on this.
- That's, all right.
- I went down to a local
electronics retailer
and I bought a Nutribullet blender,
an entry level fruit blender.
And you know, I did nurse it,
I definitely pushed it past its limits.
I definitely avoided its
warranty, I will say.
I won't be returning it, obviously,
you know, I gave it many ice baths, but-
- Maybe we should try and
return it on the show.
- It worked for a whole
paper where I recycle things
for six cycles in total.
One pilot cycle and then
five separate cycles
of repeating a process.
And yeah, it just shows
research doesn't need complicated tech.
Sometimes you can just go to
your local electronic store
and get what you need for the job.
- Wow.
- Yeah.
- NutriBullet, use the code
word stories at checkout.
- Yeah.
- What's one myth about disability
that you wish more people understood?
- Yeah, so I have
mentioned this previously,
but polite questions are
completely acceptable
and don't make assumptions.
- Yeah.
- So they're the key takeaways.
- Yeah. Good ones.
And finally, what's a
moment in your journey
that you are most proud of?
- So, I did toss up around this,
but I really narrowed
it down to my co-option
to the board of the Australian Federation
of Disability Organisations
in December 2024.
So that was really the first time where
on a board I was not
elected to that position.
I was appointed by the board for my skills
as a young person with disability.
And basically, you know,
the message that sent was
that the organisation was stronger
with the young person with
disability involved than without.
And that really, you know,
was fundamental support
to a whole heap of representations.
Going to the Global
Disability Summit in April,
going to the UN and
speaking at the UN in June.
And recently representing
the same organisation,
the Australian Federation
of Disability Organisations
in Fiji at the Pacific Disability Dialogue
in the last couple of weeks.
- Yeah.
- Yeah.
- Wow.
Well, Tim Harte, honestly,
it's been amazing to chat with you today.
We're all pulling for you
at the Australian of the Year Awards,
which will happen probably
around the time we release this episode.
And thanks so much for
sharing your incredible story
and so much about your incredible work
here on "Stories of Wonder."
- Thanks, it's been a
great chat, thank you.
Thanks for having me.