And how he spent 10 days at a church-run camp with an untreated broken arm and no pain relief, and told to stop whinging when he found it hard to move in his wheelchair.

Mr Wallace, a Canberra-based activist and former president of People with Disability, spoke out this week ahead of a motion in Parliament calling for the establishment of a royal commission into abuse within the disability sector.

He said his experiences were far from isolated, and that many in the disability sector had suffered at the hands of carers and educators.

“I saw and witnessed much worse things, and experienced worse things that I haven't talked about publicly and won't be, but enough to make me think that this is endemic,” he said.

“If you sit down with any group of disabled people, around my age but also younger, and talked to them for a couple of hours and people start relaxing, weird things come out. People start talking about the things that happened to them.”

Mr Wallace has a rare congenital disorder that has left him wheelchair-bound since his teens.

He said that despite working in the disability sector, he had not spoken publicly about his own experiences until this week.

“I have held on to this for a long time, but I decided that yesterday was the right moment and the right time to speak about my lived experience, and hopefully encourage and support others to do so,” he said.

Following the motion on Monday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison supported an inquiry in principle, but said it was up to the states to agree before anything could start.

People with Disabilities ACT chief executive Rachel Sirr said it was the government’s role to make sure that people in the sector had the chance to talk about their experiences in a safe space.

“That’s the government at every level, so the prime minister has to actually make a decision and set a timeframe,” she said.

“I'm wondering if they hope it will just blow over and go away.

[But] we shouldn't have to put that pressure on government, they should just step up and do the right thing, and that's what they're there for.”

Mr Wallace said it was up to the prime minister to set the ball rolling.

“We're quietly optimistic that something will happen, but what we need to see is a timeline from the prime minister in terms of the consultation, terms of reference, the work that he says needs to be done with the state and the territories and the scope of the commission,” he said.

“But there is no reason why they can't start that now. When the government has wanted to set up an inquiry on issues ranging from franking credits to the building industry, they have got their skates on and done that quickly - they can do that here too.”

He said his experience of abuse began in the early 1970s, in a child rehab facility in New South Wales.

“There was a nurse that was preying on people, and for some reason that I didn't fully understand, was setting fire to people's hair at night, and targeted me for that repeatedly,” he said.

He also spent time in a school facility with so little space that students were made to undress in front of each other, and all the toothbrushes were shared.

“It's a small thing, but those are the kinds of things that tell you that you are less valued than other people,” he said.

He said that little seemed have changed in the intervening years, and that many of these abuses were occurring today.

And many, like him, did not speak out at the time because they didn’t think they’d be believed, or were unable to communicate.

“Unfortunately, we act as a magnet for people who think it is OK to bully, to intimidate, to commit acts of violence, and unthinkable things, on other human beings, and part of that... is a kind of perception that people with disabilities are less worthy of life than other people,” he said.

Ms Sirr said while those perpetrating abuse represented “a small minority of carers”, calls for an inquiry was about exposing them and calling them to account.

“They're in every element of society,” she said.

Mr Wallace said the stories told by a gathering of campaigners at Parliament House on Monday demonstrated a clear need for the inquiry.

“We heard many compelling stories of those yesterday from people with disability, including the statistics on sexual assault and rape of women with intellectual disabilities,” he said.

“We know that there are still cases going on, that it's still happening in our community, and that's why we need a Royal Commission to shed some sunlight on this and to take corrective action that is broad and sweeping.”

“I think our project here is to actually make disability abuse as vile and abhorrent as child sexual abuse, or lighting bushfires for kicks,” he said.

“We need to make this an un-Australian thing, that doesn't even form inside people's hearts and minds, let alone actually get acted on.

“We need to make this unthinkable.”