TRANSCRIPT
FAMILYANDCOMMUNITYDEVELOPMENTCOMMITTEE
InquiryintosocialinclusionandVictorianswithadisability
Melbourne— 3 March 2014
Members
MrsA. Coote / MrD. O’BrienMsB. Halfpenny / MsD. Ryall
MrJ. Madden
Chair: MsD. Ryall
Deputy Chair: MsB. Halfpenny
Staff
Executive Officer: DrJ. BushResearch Officer: MsV. Finn
Administrative Officer: Ms N. Tyler
Witnesses
MrL. Harkin, AM, Commissioner,
MsL. Coulson Barr, Deputy Commissioner, and
MsT. Reinisch, Principal Officer, Disability Services Commissioner.
TheCHAIR— Thank you for appearing before us today. I will give you some background information. I remind you that all evidence taken by this committee is taken under the provisions of the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003, which attracts parliamentary privilege and is protected from judicial review. Any comments made outside the precinct of this hearing are not protected by parliamentary privilege. All evidence given today is being recorded; however, the committee hearing is not being publicly broadcast. You will be provided with a proof version of the transcript. I now ask you to introduce yourselves, state the name of the organisation you are representing and then provide us with a 15minute presentation to which we will respond with questions.
MrHARKIN— Sure.Thanks for the opportunity to come along to another parliamentary committee. It is always pleasant to say hi to various MPs and give studious consideration to important issues. We appreciate the time. I am Laurie Harkin. I am the disability services commissioner, in fact referenced in the terms of reference, having been established some seven years ago. My colleague, Lynne Coulson Barr, on my right is deputy commissioner; on my left is Tamara Reinisch, who is the principal officer in my office. That is who we are.
TheCHAIR— Thank you.
MrHARKIN— We have submitted a piece of advice to you, which has probably not been able to be digested given that it was only provided to you on Friday, but there are a number of other things that we have provided to you just now and I will give context for them, if I may. Two are Occasional Papers; one goes back to a paper that we wrote about three years. The purpose that sat behind us writing that was we were unconvinced that people withdisabilities’ rights were being appropriately protected by the various arrangements that are in place that ought to have afforded better protection than they were receiving. It is a paper based on a range of considerations, including inquiries of our own, international research and significant consultation. I can probably talk a bit more to that paper as my 15minutes unfold.
The bright orange paper that you have with slightly pointed cogs on the front— we would hope the cogs mesh when the wheels turn; they do not always— is a paper that we have only recently produced, and we were moved to produce that again because we were not convinced that folks with a disability necessarily were afforded appropriate opportunity. We looked at the sorts of things that characterised why things went badly in relationship terms with service users, their families and service providers, it was typically that the well of goodwill and trust had been poisoned over time, and finding ways to recover from those levels of distrust in terms of rebalancing relationships was herculean as a task. But more to the point, we have taken a view that says, before all of that, what is missing in the things that go not so well is typically a lack of agreement and understanding about what it is that is to be provided by a provider and what it is that the family’s expectations are, and there needs to be clarity about those things.
Ideally these things are written down, in particular to include, where things do go badly— and things often will go not as well as you would hope, notwithstanding good intentions— that the ways in which these events, should they arise, might be remedied are clearly articulated and understood by the parties. We hope that if those sorts of foundational approaches are adopted— it is a bit like building the house not from the roof but from the ground— then the prospect of better things happening for folks would be enhanced.
I do not want to be too tedious, but I draw your attention to the Disability Act— not all of it, just a few bits. I invite the committee to give some thought to one or two things in the act, in particular its purpose at part1. I want to recite some words— not all of it, because you will lose the will to live if I do that. In the purpose, among other things it uses the words:
… the recognition that this requires support across the government sector and within the community.
The next thing I would like to mention is in section4 of the act. The objectives of the act include:
(a)advance the inclusion and participation in the community of persons with a disability;
(b)promote a strategic whole of government approach in supporting the needs and aspirations of persons with a disability…
It seems to me that these things are germane to your considerations, and that is the driver for my drawing this to your attention. Part3, division1, section8(2) of the act defines the role of the Secretary of the Department of Human Services as, among other things, having a function:
(a)to promote awareness and understanding of disability within the community;
I note that the secretary is the only person in the act who is required to do such a thing— nobody else is, just the secretary. My submission to you is this: this is not about human services; this is about society. I will go on. Trust me, I am nearly finished. Section12 is about the functions of the Victorian Disability Advisory Council. The act establishes an advisory council to give advice to the minister. In particular at 12(1)(a) it says:
(i)whole of government policy directions and strategic planning and the implementation of initiatives for persons with a disability;
(ii)the barriers to full inclusion and participation in the community of persons with a disability and the strategies for the removal of those barriers;
Those are the things about which the council is required to give advice to the minister— one minister, just one. Lastly, section12(1)(e) of the act says the council will:
(e)monitor the implementation of strategies for promoting inclusion and participation in the community of persons with a disability and for removing barriers to inclusion and participation.
My reading of the act ends there. The point I want to leave you with, and my reason for reciting that, is that this is where I think legislatively there are deficits. The act refers only to particular responsibilities being vested with the Minister for Community Services and the other titles that minister may hold, and the secretary is the only person or government official who is nominated as having to do anything about it, leaving aside various other things that are laudably said in the act. There is no particular regime of arrangements that requires a wholeofgovernment approach to be adopted; it rests on the goodwill of the government, whomever the government of the day might be. I find it curious that the expectation of government would have it all sit with one minister. I again repeat that I do not think this is a question of human services or community services; it is a societal question.
Recently when I spoke with some folk on a Channel31 program I observed that in the work we do lots of people are afraid to speak up about their circumstances. The fear people hold is influenced by two things particularly. One is that they have been conditioned, if you like, to fear that if they say anything, they will lose something they have— that something they have by way of support will be diminished in some way. The other key factor in influencing fear is that if a person is in receipt of what is described as and understood to be intimate supports, they are less likely again to say anything, because they do not want to poison the relationship or the dependency that people may feel in terms of a recipient of supports of that kind.
I draw your attention to a vast array of other things. Here is the 2010–2020 National Disability Strategy, which talks about inclusion. Here is a Services Connect thing from human services, which talks about inclusion. It goes on. Here is more from Services Connect. Blow me down, there is even a Victorian state plan, and the state plan unsurprisingly talks about inclusion.
I do not reckon anybody needs another document that talks about social inclusion; I reckon a simple thing that needs to happen is that there be a genuine commitment to do something across government that everybody buys into and that does not see social inclusion for folks with a disability as some addon we need to think about because we are kindly folks and we want to give appropriate and thoughtful consideration to other folks who do not have the same abilities as us. Fundamentally that is a bigger issue.
The extent to which you can influence your parliamentary colleagues and indeed whether you agree with me at all are obviously matters for you, but the views that I bring to you are informed by seven years of practice in the complaints business with people with a disability. We have had something like 4000people with disabilities bring issues to us over this time. Through the complaints reporting mechanism under section105 of the act, all people who are registered providers are required to report to me every year on the number of complaints they have had, what they have done and the outcomes they have achieved.
Significantly within that reporting tool there are two free text sections. Since the early days those free text sections have been increasingly populatedThe two questions that are posed are these: ‘Can you name one practice change you have implemented as a consequence of dealing with complaints in the last year?’ and ‘Can you name one procedural or policy change you have implemented as a consequence of dealing with complaints in the last year?’. The message, given the increased extent to which providers populate them, is that we are dealing with a growing and more thoughtful environment of service provision.
Are we there yet? I feel like a child in the back of the car and my father or mother turns from the front and sternly says, ‘No, but please be quiet’, and I say, ‘No, I can’t be quiet; I just have to keep talking. Please don’t frown at me, but when will we be there?’.The fact is we will not be there for a while yet, but what is encouraging, when I look out the window of the car from the back seat, is that I can see we are actually going somewhere, which is a really good thing.
If you go to the sorts of things we have said in particular in our submission to you, we have drilled down to a number of the dimensions I have spoken to at a high level around what would be useful to see. I do not think you need another plan, and I am not suggesting you are trying to work on one. I think there is enough work done. There is opportunity to really make a difference. People are working at really making a difference. There is not a shortage of commitment or goodwill, but things still go badly wrong. People with disabilities are still abused. It gives me no joy to sit here with you today and say with some level of confidence, if not disturbance, that there are people out there right now who are being treated badly because of a service system and a society that do not recognise that folks are entitled to be treated the same as everyone else. It should not be an additional question.
If I think about the work more recently, some work has been written by the Association for Children with a Disability. They go to the question of special schools and what they mean, and they talk about something philosophically that is very powerful. Why are the schools so special? What is it that causes us to think about small children with a disability in a way that needs to label them that way? What message does it give to the small children as they grow up that they have already been labelled as special— that they are different? These are bigger questions for us to all think about so that we touch the society we are part of in a different and more caring way.
Without wanting to proselytise about anything in particular, those subtle messages reinforce in people’s lives that they are special. In a not special school that has some special children, when a specialist teacher comes in typically the special children are taken away to another part of the classroom and are visited upon by the specialist teacher whilst the other less special children— the ordinary children— are dealt with in the routine way by the education system. It is surely flawed, I would have said, if you are thinking about that as being inclusive. It is clearly not inclusive, but there is an embedded practice that we do not challenge enough as a society what it is that we do and why we do it. I am mindful of time; I can talk under wet cement.
TheCHAIR— Thank you very much, MrHarkin. I will kick off with the first question. In relation to the complaints mechanism you talked about all of those reports feeding in to you. I am obviously referring to social inclusion, but we can look at all aspects of complaint. Is there a mechanism for collating that data and then, through that, putting forth recommendations on the improvement of standards of disability services and also the improvement of operations of disability services, or to the wider scale of statewide?
MrHARKIN— The simple answer is yes, but I would invite my colleagues to also speak, if that is alright, rather than sit here with me.
TheCHAIR— Certainly.
MsCOULSONBARR— What we do with the complaints that are made to our office is— we have a data system— we identify what the issues are presenting in each of the complaints and we categorise them. We identify themes related to quality of standards of disability services. We also identify where there are issues around the adequacy of support for people to participate in community activities— activities of their choice. We report that in our annual report, and we also compare that to the data that the service providers report to us on complaints made to them. We are in the process of producing another of those occasional papers that will look at the data over six years in terms of: what are the themes and what can we learn from those complaints in terms of improving services? We can also, in relation to specific instances, provide a notice of advice to a service provider or the department in their role of policymaker when we identify themes, where there are real issues in terms of quality of service, and we identify an area that needs to be addressed.
TheCHAIR— Trends from that perspective?
MsCOULSONBARR— Yes.
MsREINISCH— Just to add to that in a little bit more granular detail, there is the annual complaints reporting tool, which is an online tool that all funded services can access. It is quite a dynamic tool that can be accessed from the staff level to the manager, and they can see their organisational complaints. The benefits of having a consistent tool that goes across all services is that, one, this tool was designed— and you will see a bit more information in our submission— to come from what we call a personcentred practice point of view. So it is very much asking about how that person viewed the complaint and what the outcome was for that person, but it also askswhat the detail is around the service issue and trends— exactly what Laurie was saying before about ‘What have you learnt? How difficult was this complaint?’ and other issues.
What comes out very strongly year to year, and what is also supported in the early data forour occasional paper, is that communication is the number one issue. Quality in accommodation is also a key issue; likewise, the staff or people supports that sit around a person is another critical issue. What that says to me, when you look at the data and you look at the free text, is that this is not just a service system response; this is really about how we embed true inclusion and respect for people with a disability. Theyare some early findings for that paper.
MsHALFPENNY— I have not read this, but in terms of the complaints, are they mainly complaints about a service or that the result of a service was not——
MrHARKIN— Yes.
MsHALFPENNY— If you are talking about a whole government approach, I guess, if it is also people complaining or you investigating the outcome— for example, ‘I had a disability. I went to a job service, and I never got a job out of it’— do those sorts of complaints come through and so then you can go and look at other agencies? Are you able to do that as well?
MrHARKIN— The limitation, if you like, is that the act limits what we can engage with to be concerned with the services provided by registered providers— that is, registered with DHS to provide disability support services— and in 2012 the act was amended to include other than contracted service providers. To use your example of a job search organisation, the short answer is no, I have no jurisdiction. If you were to say to me, ‘What if I was a parent of a child in a special school or indeed in a regular school but my child had disabilities of a kind that needed the provision of supports?’.Can you come to me and express concern about that service provision? No; not within my jurisdiction. Typically about 40per cent of the things that come to the door are out of scope or outside jurisdiction; that is a fair bit. It is probably an indicator, I suspect, of folks’ aspirations to be able to go somewhere, where currently they would see nothing.