Why talk about boatpeople when there are more pressing problems

Recovery, if possible, and to varying degrees, will often take many years. The strain on families is enormous, for some it is just too much.

My friend and his family had an extra problem of being stuck in the wrong state. They needed to be where they had better support. But if I thought getting refugees out of detention was hard I hadn't yet tried to get a patient transferred from one state health system to another. Dealing with the Department of Immigration now seems like child's play in comparison.

Approximately one in 45 Australians are currently living with an Acquired Brain Injury. This is not a small problem and it is the tip of the iceberg in terms of a wider field of disabilities suffered in Australia. One in five Australians suffer from a disability of some kind.

The Brain Injury Association of NSW reports that there are 55,000 young people aged 15-24 with a brain injury and more than 10,000 more who will acquire a brain injury every year. The common causes are from "car or bike accidents, falls, infections and illness, or child abuse".

In an intensive care unit late on Friday or Saturday night there is anticipation of the accident victims who will soon be wheeled through the doors. Acquired brain injury is significantly higher in males than females. Alcohol and speed driven accidents are often the cause. We hear about death tolls on our roads but we don't hear about the permanent disability tolls.

In the months I spent at brain injury units with my friend and his family I met many grief stricken people caring for loved ones over long hours each day. It was often as unbearable to face their suffering as it was to face the person we were caring for. These people don't get medals or awards, they barely even get noticed. I saw patients who had no-one to fight for their life, or to protect them, some rarely had any visitors. I had to stop myself from taking up the causes of everyone around me.

Fifteen months after the accident my friend has now been discharged from a rehab unit. He cannot walk, he is significantly impaired, with short and long term memory problems, he has behavioural problems and pain, and most of the time he doesn't recognise his own family. His wife and children will be taking care of him for the rest of his life under extremely stressful conditions.

The outside world does not want to know what happens inside a brain injury ward, or inside the homes of disability sufferers or their carers. It is easier to turn away than face the suffering that none of us want to imagine even exists.

Australia does have the resources to do much more for our disabled, our carers, our hospitals, or in preventing accidents and injury. But what we need is an Australian community willing to pay attention and take up the fight. If just some of the hot air and media space that is currently invested in talking about a few so called "boat people" could be reclaimed, we might just start a genuine debate about how to make the lives of some human beings a little easier to bear. Imagine if a whole question time in Parliament could be taken up with demands to know what is being done for our carers or disabled.