The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability has made 222 recommendations on how to improve laws, policies, structures, and practices to ensure a more inclusive and just society that supports the independence of people with disability and their right to live free from violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation. In response to these comprehensive recommendations, Disability Employment Australia (DEA) has presented a robust approach aimed at addressing the complex needs of individuals with disabilities. IEP provided a ‘companion piece’ to the Commonwealth Disability Royal Commission Taskforce in support of DEA’s contribution offering additional insights and perspectives, aligning with DEA’s overarching principles while also highlighting areas for further consideration and enhancement.
DEA has presented an approach which the IEP can wholeheartedly endorse. That said, the IEP recognises that this includes and responds to a tension in government programmes that is familiar among the anglophone nations: the pulls between social justice, cost, economic ideologies (employers always know best / must not be over-pushed / presumed workforce efficiency), the urge to control and prevent abuse leading to inflexibility, compliance, and less responsive services. Overall, this tension is unhelpful; the most successful services are those which mitigate its effects.
Thus, it is valuable to have DEA counterposing this limited and ideological viewpoint with a human-centred and participatory model. It is valuable too that the DEA recommendations recognise political, economic and practical realities, so can be implemented by an act of political will with minimal social or programme disruption.
The IEP wholeheartedly endorses the emphasis on the human rights of people with disability, and the application of a social model in preference to the medical model, especially as applied to eligibility and access criteria. DEA goes further, to say ‘putting human rights, as expressed in Article 27, at the heart of our disability employment approach necessitates putting people with disability in the driving seat and aligning DES with the Social Model of disability’, and we support this view, which can only lead to greater opportunities, better service design, and diminution of inequality over the long run.
We note too that DEA is critical of ‘using ESAts, classification instruments and datapoints to determine a probabilistic likelihood of a participant to enter and sustain work and determining funding levels on that basis. Again, this is a deficit based medical model, rather than aligned with the social model of disability.’
However, there may be a case for careful and well-researched and supported use of predictive instruments to identify personal needs and capacity, and to better inform personal advisors. Examples are to be found in Ireland, where important work has been done on measuring clients’ ‘Journey to Work’, and Estonia, where AI has been applied in the context of highly digitalised government services, to provide insights to front line advisors. These are not without risks, and could be open to misapplication, but we feel also deserve careful consideration. That said, we recognise DEA’s valid concerns about the use of AI in recruitment, concerns which must also apply to any classification instrument. Properly applied, these 2 technical approaches might contribute to the elimination of the requirement to have an assessed work capacity of above 8 hours a week or under 30 hours a week to be eligible for DES.
We agree with DEA that seeking only to fill vacancies ‘designated as being suitable for people with disability’ will not pay sufficient attention to the participant-centred approach and risks creating ghetto-isation of disability employment. This risk was also found in the UK many years ago, when quotas were in place though not rigorously monitored or enforced. So, we do have reservations about the quota approach, though we recognise its good motivation. Certainly, any approach to quotas will need ‘Research …funded to design a potential Australian approach to employers quotas/targets, ….. led by people with disability and employers working together.’
DEA’s concerns about funding models, erosion of funding levels and the impact on quality standards are familiar from a UK context. Unlimited amounts and freedoms in funding are not on the political horizon, but DEA’s concerns should be at the heart of discussions and decisions. Agreeing with DEA about the dangers and unfairness inherent in reliance on a medical model of disability, we would also both encourage and point to risks in the ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ approach. To give DES participants an informed choice and a range of different service options and models is plainly right, provided that the options do what they purport, and the choice is free and well-informed. Equally, IEP members have experience of services where there is too much prescription in contracts, or sometimes, too little. The idea that innovation is necessarily good has not, however, been borne out in outcomes. Rather we would emphasise, with DEA, that quality needs diversity of approach and careful evaluation and research as a base for improvement. Where this is not the case, ‘innovation’ can too easily become a mantra for bid-authors with little real-world benefits.
The UK experience of welfare, sanctions and the impact on clients strongly supports DEA’s view that it is, to say the least, problematic for providers to be both ‘coach’ and ‘cop’. Combining coach and cop duties introduces fatal ambiguity into the relationship between service, advisor, and clients. The ambiguity can neutralise, or even poison the essential benefits of a supportive professional relationship between client and service provider. There is good quality evidence from the UK that sanctions applied to clients are ineffective and damage their labour market participation.
We also recognise the need for restraint in compliance and bureaucracy. The IEP’s Quality Improvement Framework addresses the issue by formulating ‘compliance’ as one of the important external factors imposed on providers, one which they must accommodate in their own practical decision-making. If government imposes too much, or the wrong compliance, there can be damage to the very qualities and results it is seeking to purchase.
DEA has suggested a set of competence standards beneath which frontline practitioners must not fall, and notes that no appropriate qualification or occupation standard yet exists. This is right. And within the DEA’s suggestion for an approach which is relevant, flexible, proportionate, and incentivises ongoing professional development we can see that a long-term approach to professional development, underpinned by some measure of contract stability is desirable. We would however caution against defining mechanisms (attending events and conferences, to completing approved training packages, to involvement in mentoring schemes, to tuning into short webinars and podcasts) until skill- and competence-goals have been established, and it has been shown that they can be achieved by these mechanisms.
The final report from the Royal Commission can be downloaded here https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/publications/final-report
The Royal Commission has also published ‘A brief Guide to the Final Report’ which you can download here https://disability.royalcommission.gov.au/node/12935
DEA’s response to the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (February 2024) can be downloaded here https://disabilityemployment.org.au/file/a51c862ab2c97de61828f422c4f90bb32edabd19/dea-drc-response-final-feb24.pdf
