Two blind men run for office in Australia's federal election

From The Age in Australia:

When Vision Australia manager Tony Clark (pictured) was chosen to run for Labor at this year's federal election, he could have been forgiven for thinking he would be the only blind person in the race.

But next to the seat of Higgins, where Mr Clark has been preselected, former barrister Steven Hurd (pictured) - who lost his sight as an infant - has also been chosen to run for Labor in the seat of Kooyong.

''Can you believe he stole my thunder? How rude!'' Mr Clark joked yesterday.

The preselection of two blind candidates is unprecedented - even for the ALP, which prides itself on espousing fairness and equality. And while both seats have traditionally been blue-ribbon Liberal territory, Mr Clark and Mr Hurd believe their preselections have ''set the scene'' for people with disabilities to one day be properly represented in Parliament.

''It's a bit like climbing Mount Everest - when they climbed Everest, a group of people went up and each person had a go, hoping they'd get somewhere,'' Mr Hurd told The Age. ''It's going to be hard, but we sort of see this as a long-term thing.''

Indeed, there will be challenges. Some are purely political: Labor needs a swing of 7 per cent to win Higgins - the seat once held by former Liberal Treasurer Peter Costello, and is now in the hands of Liberal young gun Kelly O'Dwyer. It needs an even greater swing of 9.5 per cent to win Kooyong, the prized seat vacated by Liberal veteran Petro Georgiou, where banker Josh Frydenberg is the new Liberal candidate.

Other challenges are logistical: Mr Hurd and Mr Clark will need assistance to meet and greet voters. Both must use computers with text-to-speech technology in order to ''read'' documents. And they might take a bit more time to get around the electorate as the campaign intensifies. But they argue that you don't need eyesight to bring a bit of ''real vision'' to Canberra, and believe they are more than qualified for a tilt at politics.

Mr Hurd, 50, was only six months old when his mother discovered he was totally blind due to rubella. Nonetheless, he attended a mainstream school, Burwood High, and later cut his teeth as an ALP president in the Monash University Student Union, before working in law, the public sector and community services.

Mr Clark, 40, was diagnosed with the degenerative eye condition, retinitis pigmentosa, when he was 19.

The father of two is now a business manager for Vision Australia, and helped pioneer electronic voting, giving blind people the chance to cast a secret ballot for the first time.

Labor strategists say their preselection is part of a broader plan for more diverse representation in the party: two years ago, rank-and-file members passed a conference motion which said that, by 2014, the party should have a person with a disability contesting a ''winnable'' state and federal seat.

Higgins and Kooyong might not exactly be clearly winnable yet, but it is a start.

''If you think about it, there are about one in five Australians that have a disability, but how many parliamentarians can you think of who have a disability? The answer will come up pretty close to zip,'' Mr Clark said.