Middle-ear disease

This sets up a lifetime of unusual sleeping patterns for those affected by middle-ear disease, making school attendance for them and their siblings quite difficult throughout periods of prolonged sickness.

When kids are up all night with unbearable ear pain, it disrupts the household, as a whole.

The sort of gnawing pain that accompanies chronic ear-disease is not effectively treated with the standard treatment for young children's pain, which is just paracetamol.

Sudden bursts of blistering eustachian tube pain, which my son and many other children with middle-ear disease have, causes infants and children to engage in prolonged, distraught crying.

Historically, the lack of interest among authorities regarding all aspects of service provision for long-term glue ear sufferers in society, impacts on Aboriginals worse.

Hot on the heels of the Redress Scheme, incredibly, one committee member even commented that a parent not sending their chronically-ill child into the classroom, was akin to abuse and the Department for Child Protection should "step in."

Discrimination experienced by people with a hearing loss, both systemically and directly, is such a common daily occurrence that they don't even bother talking about it.

Ear disease is intergenerational in my family and my friends' families, and some have tried to play down and cover-up their hearing loss, particularly as youngsters.

Last year, Becky, 10, during a bad bout of glue-ear, her principal decided the illness was something that DCP must have had a magic wand to cure – or perhaps it was her skin colour that was really at the heart of his hysteria.

Richard, 50, also had long-term glue-ear before he was stolen from home by DCP, tortured and abused in institutions, derided and vilified at school, and his disability completely ignored.

An apology from the PM was appreciated, but still Richard's outcomes remain tragic and unchanged.

Both Richard and his brother, Simon, were imprisoned at an early age, and juvenile sufferers are over-represented as victims of crime and offenders, in the criminal justice system.