Mention the name Suresh Rajan, winner of last year’s Senior of the Year award, and some politicians and bureaucrats start to shake in their boots.
Suresh has battled on many fronts for the rights of people he believes have been treated unfairly by the system.
He’s fought for those facing deportation and for people he feels have suffered under the health system.
Now, Suresh believes it’s time he turned his attention to advocacy for older people.
Some of the older members of his family grew up in non-English speaking parts of the world and as they have aged have reverted to their native languages. This has meant his boys, who speak only English, have difficulty communicating with some older family members who are becoming isolated.
“We are repeating that whole exercise with the Sudanese, with the Somali, with the Indians. We are all now ageing populations. And our children are not learning our languages.
“The other space that I’m really concerned about is aged care abuse. I’m mortified by what I see and I think that I need to do a lot of work in that area.
“I want to just make sure that all of our aged communities are protected, included, and also, we’ve got to be careful that technology doesn’t leave them behind. My mother is brilliant. She has a Facebook page, she has a Twitter account, she does all her banking online, and she does all her airline bookings online. She’s 91!
“I want to see that for everyone because I think there’s just so much there to include.
Born in Singapore in 1959 of South Indian parents, he moved to Brunei in 1960 at three months of age when his schoolteacher father got a job there.
At the age of 10 Suresh’s father decided it was time to learn about his own culture and the children were all sent off to boarding school in India.
Five years later his father decided to move to Australia where he had a brother. He taught at Mirrabooka Senior High School, Rockingham and various other schools.
Suresh went to university and then started working at the taxation office before opening his own financial planning practice and getting involved with the media.
His media profile developed when he started doing market reports on radio, which led to an approach by the Ethnic Communities Council.
“The Ethnic Communities Council is the advocacy body for people from a non-English speaking background.
“I started moving into general policy around advocacy, cultural diversity, racism, and around refugees.
“We were getting a lot of refugees then from the Middle East and Africa which is when we started to do a lot more work in that area.
“And because of the media profile, media kept coming to me for comments.
“About 2011, I got very sick. Over a period of three weeks, I had a heart attack, a quadruple bypass, discovery of a grade four cancer in 21 lymph nodes.
“They gave me six months to live. We’re now 14 years on.
“I started re-evaluating all of those issues around what’s important in life, money versus human rights. I started thinking much more about refugees, about racism, and people with disabilities.”
In his early days of advocacy with the Ethnic Communities Council, advocacy was about banging heads.
“We were constantly butting heads with ministers, accusing them of things. I remember accusing Geoff Gallop of racism at one stage, and he’s probably the most un-racist person that I’ve ever come across. I accused him publicly of treating us with disrespect; I think back then, it was very militant.
“Then I started to find that actually didn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve. Whereas if you just say that the system is disadvantaging certain groups of people, then we can work to fix the system.
“I found that I was getting a lot more engagement with government because they were keen to get me to help them to change the systems so that it treated everyone equally.
“Geoff Gallop appointed me to an anti-racism steering committee and we then became very good collaborators. I found that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar but I still retain that element of militancy when I don’t get my way or I find that ministers are taking too long to respond.
“What I’ve started to do now is to engage in advocacy at the bureaucracy level rather than the ministers.
“I can engage with the bureaucracy much more to implement much more inclusive policies.
Suresh says his greatest advocacy success was his work with Geoff Gallop to enact the strongest racial vilification legislation in the country.
“I spent three weeks in Parliament eyeballing both sides of Parliament, making sure that they would actually pass that legislation.
“I think I’ve also raised awareness around disability issues. I’ve been a board member of People with Disabilities Australia for about 13 years and I’ve just finished my final term.”
Suresh says he was also commissioned by the government to write the state disability strategy 2020 to 2030, which is now in place and can be found online.
