Keynote Address for Suncorp and PWC’s Traumatic Injury & Disability Insurance Summit

Friday 14 September 2012

Graeme Innes AM
Disability Discrimination Commissioner
Australian Human Rights Commission

I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today.

Australia's disability service system is broken and broke. The individual stories are graphic - you've just seen some, you've heard many others. The story you've just seen is the extreme example of what happens when a system is broken and broke. But there are other stories. The stories of people who can only have two or three showers a week, or people who can only leave their homes three or four times a year.

But let's not just look at stories. Let me focus on the statistics in Australia today for people with disability. Currently almost one in two people with disability in Australia live in or near poverty - 45% - more than double the OECD average of 22%. Australia is ranked 27th out of 27 OECD countries when it comes to relative poverty risk for people with disability. Year 12 attainment is around 25% for people with disability, compared to just over 50% for the general population.

Overall employment rates for people with disability are stagnant. Labour force participation remains low at around 54%, compared to 83% for people without disability. In 1986, 6.6% of the Australian Public Service were employees with disability. This figure has steadily declined every year since then, and has now reached an all-time low of 3.0%.

All these issues, of course, also affect carers. Labour force participation rates are lower- In 2009, for carers it was 68.9% (and for primary carers just 53.6%, compared to 79.4% for non-carers). 60% of adults in the prison system experience an active mental illness. In NSW prisons, people with intellectual disability — who make up between 1% and 3% of the general population — represent between 9% and 13% of the total NSW prison population. Australians with disability, are seriously disadvantaged, by any measure.

We are also prevented from contributing. Australia is wasting the capacity, and ability, of people with disability and their carers. The existing service system blocks us from contributing, and therefore reduces the effectiveness of the economy overall.

And the Queensland government - where the level of spend per head on people with disability is one of the lowest in Australia - tell us they can't afford an NDIS. That is a national shame.

If Australia is serious about achieving equality for everyone, including people with disability, then an NDIS cannot be ignored. And it’s not being ignored. The main reason for the NDIS is not economic benefit. But it's pleasing to see increased recognition of what big economic opportunities are presented if we can do better on the numbers I've given you. Earlier this year, the Australian Network on Disability, Australia's lead employer organisation on disability, issued a report estimating a $43 billion increase in Australia's GDP by reducing the employment participation gap even by one third. The report notes that closing this gap by one-third is an achievable — even a conservative - target, given that many nations, including New Zealand, have already achieved or surpassed these benchmarks.

A.N.D.'s report reinforces the conclusion of the Productivity Commission: that increased employment participation from improved support, and reduced barriers, will easily pay for the costs of the National Disability Insurance Scheme. I hope that for this reason we'll see business and employer organisations continue their very welcome support for governments establishing and funding the NDIS.

So what will an NDIS do. It will revolutionise Australia's approach to disability services. It will replace a rationed, demand driven service system with a system that empowers the individual, based on need, with ability to purchase and direct their own system of supports. It will enable greater choice and control. It will intervene early after acquisition or diagnosis of a disability, and aim to maximise the person's economic and social participation. It will not define the person by their disability. And it will aspire to the sort of economic equality that is required to address the inequality that people with disability currently experience.

On many disability rights issues, we're used to a glacial pace of change. It's over 60 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declared human rights for everyone, without discrimination — but somehow managed to miss mentioning disability. It's more than 30 years since the International Year of Disabled Persons. It's already 20 years since the start of Australia's Disability Discrimination Act.

We've spent decades trying to build a society that's fit for all of us to live in. Chipping away at the barriers that exclude men, women and children with disability from full and equal participation in, and contribution to, our society.

Certainly, we've seen progress. On issues like access to public transport, and buildings, and information and communications. But it's painfully slow, patchy, and incomplete. Years, in fact decades, go by in our work, and in the lives of people with disability around Australia, with barriers still shutting people out and shutting people in.

But sometimes, a moment comes when change happens very fast. And what's striking in the disability rights area, is how much agreement has been achieved in recent months, and how quickly: not only that there is a serious problem that has to be addressed, but on what the way forward should be.

The Productivity Commission report provides strong analysis, supporting the argument by a number of organisations over the years, that an NDIS would have overall economic benefits likely to substantially exceed scheme costs, by facilitating greater economic and social participation by people with disability, and families and carers. The Report also gives welcome emphasis to the point that limitation of individuals' social participation, and life choices, is itself an economic issue, even when it can't be measured directly in dollars. This is consistent with the approach of Treasury, and the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which both emphasise human wellbeing, rather than solely GDP, as the appropriate measure of economic progress.

The report shows that thwarted potential, and limited life chances, for people with disability don't need to be invisible to policy makers, and to the wider Australian community, if we decide to look. And that social and economic arrangements that exclude, or restrict, participation by people with disability is felt in people's lives.

For too long, people with disability in Australia, and their families, have been paying for disability with social and economic exclusion, and lack of choices. As a whole, Australia has been paying as well — both economically and socially — by missing out on making the most of the contribution that the millions of people with disability in this country have to offer. Bill Shorten has said that this is as unjust, and unacceptable, as putting a wall around one of our capital cities, and condemning everyone inside to inferior life chances and outcomes.

The Productivity Commission has shown evidence that better equality in economic participation, for people with disability, could bring billions of dollars of economic benefits, and that a society which effectively includes all its members will be a more prosperous, as well as a fairer place.

The report does not neglect the human dimension of all this. But I guess it recognises the reality of how much policy-makers in Australia bow to the god of economic benefit.

Overwhelmingly, it was recognised that support for an insurance approach, rather than other possible responses, such as expanded welfare schemes, would be a key factor in moving disability issues from a welfare-charity model, to one based on rights and entitlements. And also, in ensuring that a scheme promotes access and participation in all areas of life, rather than only providing an improved funding model for segregated services and segregated lives.

Despite how many of us there actually are as people with disability in Australia, disability has too often been strangely invisible in public discussion. Media professionals tell us that nothing cuts through like real human stories. And we've seen that in the media response to the report, which has been overwhelmingly supportive.

So we get a scheme. But there are things that could be added to make it a better scheme -

• Independent review;

• Committing to employ people with disability, and making it one of the criteria for contractors;

• Accessible procurement;

• Subrogation of discrimination rights so that the scheme can complain on people's behalf.

I'm a proud Australian. We live in a great democracy, with one of the strongest economies in the world. I'm not proud, though, of how we treat Australians with disability- some of our most disadvantaged citizens. And we are all ashamed that, in such a strong nation, that treatment continues. This shame can no longer continue. So let's fix the system. Let's have an NDIS so that not some, but every Australian counts.

Thanks for the chance to speak with you today.