TRANSCRIPT
FAMILYANDCOMMUNITYDEVELOPMENTCOMMITTEE
InquiryintosocialinclusionandVictorianswithadisability
Melbourne— 3March 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
Witness
MrJ. O’Brien, state manager, Victoria, National Disability Services.
TheCHAIR— I will just give you the framework for the hearing today. 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. You will receive a proof version of the transcript in due course. The secretariat will be in touch with you in the event that there are any questions taken on notice from this hearing. I now ask you to introduce yourself for the record, state the name of the organisation you are representing and your position, and then provide us with a 15minute presentation to which we will respond with questions.
MrJ.O’BRIEN— Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee. James O’Brien is my name. I am the state manager with National Disability Services. We are the peak body for notforprofit disability service providers. We represent across the country about 900notforprofit disability service providers; in Victoria there are about 200. You may be aware of some of our members: Yooralla and Scope are probably some of the bigger ones, all the way through to small regional community organisations. Our members are mainly notforprofit, and in Victoria provide about 50per cent of DHSfunded disability services through our membership,employing about 8000fulltime equivalent people across the state.
Thank you for the opportunity to present today. This is a really timely inquiry. We have a sector that is going through a massive transition at the moment, with a number of reforms that you will all be aware of. The National Disability Insurance Scheme is the big driver of change at the moment, and that has been running in Geelong, through the trial, for the last seven months. There are, however, a number of reforms happening which will impact, from a state government perspective, on our service providers into the future. The government is still in the early days of the community sector reforms which may emerge from the Shergold work. There are changes happening within DHS around Services Connect. There is also a large body of work which is influencing the way disability services have been running. We are going through a massive time of change, and I think the parliamentary inquiry is really timely to take stock of where things are at in terms of the reform process in Victoria. It will probably also recast focus back on the implementation of the state disability plan, which was released by this government last year.
I said at the outset that we represent the service providers. We do not represent people with a disability; people with a disability are well able to represent themselves. But we certainly provide some advice and perspectives from service providers and also some reflections on the systemic side of things.
We are very much a sector in transition at the moment. You will be aware, through the work of the Productivity Commission and many other investigations, that the disability sector has had a number of stresses and challenges which have confronted it over the years. That has led to the creation of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, which really will be the next stage in the evolution of our sector and the way our services are run. The NDIS is an extension in some respects of the transition that Victoria has been under for the last 10years or so, with the move towards individualised services. The NDIS I think will take that to the next level right across the country. The trial has started in Geelong. It is early days; we are seven months in. There are some green shoots starting to show up down there in terms of the development of a new market for disability services, and that new market for disability services is really driven by the individual choices of people with disabilities.
In terms of social participation, the NDIS is a fundamental building block for social participation insofar as it will give people with a disability the basic supports to get out the door. So often we have seen people with disabilities excluded from the social and economic mainstream because of the lack of supports, the lack of individualised support and the service rationing which has really characterised the system over the last decades. The Productivity Commission in their work, which led to the NDIS, characterised the whole system as being underfunded, unfair, fragmented and inefficient, and a system marked by invisible deprivation and lost opportunities.
I think that is a really compelling and strong diagnosis of the problems that have beset the system and have practically impacted on the ability of people with a disability to be included in the social and economic mainstream. Some of the facts and figures which have come up as a byproduct of those systemic flaws and a number of other factors include very high rates of unemployment for people with a disability. We believe, because of the close link between unemployment and poverty, that people with a disability are also overrepresented when it comes to the incidence of poverty. Again, money is a critical thing for people to participate in the community.
Australia does not farewell compared with other countries. We are very much at the bottom of the pack compared with other OECD countries when it comes to employment participation and also poverty rates. Here in Victoria the involvement of people with a disability in the criminal justice system is very high; there is a serious overrepresentation, particularly for people with an acquired brain injury or intellectual disability. As committee members will know, the cost of a prison cell in Victoria per year is about $94000, which is money, in our view, that could be better spent on actions to keep people engaged in the community.
I would like now to talk a little bit about isolation. You will hear people talk about this in front of your committee over the next couple of months. It is a difficult thing to define, but we have some research fromone of our service provider members—an organisation called Scope— that looked at this notion of isolation. They captured the views of Australians with a disability and their carers and found that only 9per cent of respondents felt that their social contact needs were fully met, only 6per cent felt their community participation needs were fully met, only 10per cent said their need to feel valued was fully met and only 10per cent said their access to services was fully met. That is a qualitative snapshot, if you like, of the notion of social isolation, and anecdotally you will see it once people start appearing before your committee. There will be stories of people who feel disadvantaged and marginalised because of their inability to get access to basic supports.
In that Scope survey there is some references to the specific social inclusion factors: 89per cent of people said that their needs were not fully met to have a social life; 89per cent said their needs were not fully met to actually get out and be social in places like cafes, bars and pubs; 87per cent said their needs were not fully met when they have a crisis; and 88per cent said their needs were not fully met for accessing mental health services. There are a range of reasons for these insights. Certainly community attitudes is a big one. Unfortunately there still exists a healthy level of discrimination within the Victorian community towards people with a disability. They are of course cumulative factors, and there is no one way of putting your finger on it.By way of summary, the Shut Out report, which was undertaken by the National People with Disabilities and Carer Council a couple of years ago, refers to this. I think it is a good snapshot.
‘People with disabilities and their families, friends and carers reported daily instances of being segregated, excluded, marginalised and ignored.At best, they reported being treated as different. At worst, they reported experiencing exclusion and abuse, and being the subject of fear, ignorance and prejudice.’
I have tried, in the first part of my presentation, to talk about some of the challenges that confront people with a disability in terms of social inclusion. You will be aware of those things, but we are talking about a major social challenge for the community. Government does have a role in changing some of those attitudes and coming up with effective policies and implementing those policies, but I would say that there is no one magic bullet which will solve the problem of dealing with entrenched social exclusion or disadvantage.
In Victoria we have strong policies around supporting people with a disability. We have good legislation. The state Disability Act, which was passed by the Parliament in 2006, still presents a solid framework. The state disability plan, which was released by this government in late 2012, is again good policy intent. It has the right frameworks in place. The National Disability Strategy is again good solid policy, which really talks about community participation and ensuring that there is equal access to services for people with a disability.
It does refer to the international, federal and statebased legislative obligations the government has, but we have a view that there is a need— and perhaps that is the role of this inquiry— to see if those statebased frameworks in particular are doing the job and if legislators have the right tools at their disposal through the Act to make sure that we can really address some of these entrenched issues around social disadvantage and to promote social inclusion. We have a view that the state plan is good policy, but the government really does need to focus very heavily on its implementation.
The NDIS is one thing. The NDIS will assist a cohort of Victorians with disabilities. Once it is fully operational, around 100000people from 2019 will get direct services under the NDIS. However, according to the government’s figures, through the State Disability Plan, close to a million Victorians who identify with having some sort of disability, who will still need support through mainstream services. The idea with the state plan is to get those mainstream services equitable and accessible for people with disability. I am talking about transport, housing, education, health and justice— and mental health, of course. We really do need a wholeofgovernment, wholeofcommunity approach. Government cannot do everything— we understand that— but we think government can send some really positive and strong messages to the rest of the community sector, the notforprofit sector, local government and the private sector about building a more inclusive state.
We have come up with nine strategies. It could be more, it could be less, but we thought for the purposes of this committee perhaps nine things could be looked at by way of immediate priorities. Certainly the State Disability Plan is our no.1 priority in our state budgetsubmission which we released just before Christmas. Again, it is trying to have some realisation of the objectives of the plan, which is that people with disabilities have the chance to fully participate in Victoria’s economy and communities.
We know Victoria is not a resource state, but it is a resource state insofar as it has people. We know that there are many people with disabilities, families and carers who can make a great contribution to our state, but who need some support to make that contribution. We know certainly through the unemployment rates that there are people willing to work but who need that support, and there is a longterm dividend to government. The Productivity Commission has talked about this through the design of the NDIS— getting people back into work, less people on the disability support pension, more people paying tax and people resuming their careers and involved in the community.
The second policy priority is to advance institutional closure. Victoria has historically had a largely bipartisan approach around closing institutions that goes back 30 or 40years. They are challenging exercises to close institutions. I think this government has done a good job in terms of advancing the plans to close the Sandhurst Centre in Bendigo, and we are very supportive of the notion of outsourcing those services to the notforprofit sector to support people once they leave Sandhurst. We would now like to see priority given to the closure of Colanda in Colac, which is part of the NDIS launch site, and also advancing the plans to redevelop the Oakleigh Centre, which is a small institution run by one of our members.
The third priority is to keep moving with the evolution of disability services in terms of proactive communitybased approaches. Again, all of our services need to evolve. Many of them have in the past delivered fairly traditional services which probably have not been as attuned to community inclusion as they could have been, but certainly over the last 10 or 15years we are seeing really innovative and groundbreaking practice amongst our not for profits, which is highly focused on engaging people with disability in mainstream communitysettings. We want to see more of that work, and there is obviously a role for governments to support that.
What are the practical things we think we can do? There may be some cause for optimism as part of the Shergold reforms. There is a shift in the way government looks at funding and partnering with the notforprofit sector and a move towards an outcomes approach for measuring service delivery. At the moment not for profits are very much focused on the reporting on outputs and activities, with possibly not as clear a focus as there could be on the actual outcomes for the person with disability. Perhaps there is a way of looking at funding arrangements to enable that to occur.
We would say that certainly government has a role to play in terms of employment for people with disability. I am not advocating for targets to be set for public sector employment, but I would say that government has a leadership role in terms of cultivating environments which are inclusive towards people with disability to provide plenty of opportunities for young people with disability to come into the graduate schemes for the VPS, and to look at ways to keep public sector employees who acquire a disability in older age in the workforce and come up with some flexible and innovative workplace practices to enable that.
I would say— and Andrea will be familiar with this— that there is a need for the government to look at whether it can increase its level of procurement of goods and services and what government departments buy from accredited disability service organisations. They are otherwise known as Australian Disability Enterprises. They provide a range of services that can be utilised by government, and some consideration should be given to some prioritisation of procurement resources there.
Whilst we are incredibly supportive of the move to the NDIS and have been closely involved in the transition in Geelong, we want to make sure that we have a seamless fitting between those people who are going down an NDIS path and the packages and supports they get versus those people who will still be relying on services from mainstream government services. There will be some role for traditional block funding— some services are funded by way of direct grant from government— to do some of the community building work which may not be easily done in an individualised environment. That could be coordination of volunteers. For example, it could be preservation of the successful programs like Interchange .There is a lot of community development work that cannot necessarily be easily individualised, and there is a question of whether there is a role for government in maintaining some block funding for that into the future.
Moving to the built environment— and I know the former Minister for Planning will be acutely aware of this— we think government can do a lot more in leadership around universal access for people with physical disability to the built environment. Social participation and inclusion is one of those things which should be afforded to all people. Dignity of access is an important thing. Having people confronted with massive staircases in public places and having money saved or scrimped around design and the notion of access for people with disability being a bit of an afterthought, we clearly cannot have those things. We have a strong view which we have detailed in the submission about those planning changes being put into the system which can enable universal access as much as possible.