Forty-five per cent of the two million Australians living with a disability, live in or near poverty, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
This is partly because most of us spend much of the small income we receive on services and supports. The new national disability insurance scheme will address this over the next few years.
Another reason is because we participate in the job market at a rate that is 30 per cent lower than that of the general population. And when we are employed, we are significantly underemployed.
We are living on welfare, and not paying taxes: 800,000 of us live on the Disability Support Pension. Any economist will tell you this creates a problem both for people with a disability and for the country.
So why is this the case?
We want to work. I don’t know anyone who is happy to live on the Disability Support Pension, and I know plenty who are actively looking for work. We can work, as those of us who are working demonstrate. When we do work, we take less sick leave, stay longer in jobs, and are more committed employees. Workers compensation benefits do not increase when we are employed. Most of us don’t cost any extra to employ, and the government pays the cost of workplace changes for most who do.
So why aren’t we getting jobs? All of the efforts of governments, employment professionals, and others, have not resulted in employers saying those four words we all want to hear: ”You start on Monday.”
As a country, we’ve tried slick marketing campaigns. We’ve tried more training and education. We’ve tried spending money on government and private job support services. The figures don’t improve. In fact, in the Commonwealth public service, the employment of people with a disability has dropped from 6.5 per cent to 2.9 per cent, yet we make up 15 per cent of the working-age population.
What could we do to change this?
We could remove some of the structural disadvantage by not using recruiting mechanisms which exclude people with a disability. We could recruit chief executives and other leaders to be role models on employing people with a disability. We could set targets for the percentage of people with a disability to be employed or recruited. We could set up schemes in which people with a disability are employed in highly visible places, such as the offices of our politicians. We could provide easily available support and advice to employers.
But most of all, what we should do, is talk much more with organisations who are recruiting, and find out why they are not employing us. The central conversations should not be between governments and job support organisations; they should be between employers and people with a disability, through our representative organisations.
Employing people with a disability benefits the whole community. Jobs shift us from poverty, and mean we pay taxes. If just one-third of people with a disability who are unemployed got jobs, our gross domestic product would increase by billions.
I’m one of the lucky Australians with a disability. I have a job.
Graeme Innes is Australia’s disability discrimination commissioner.
Read the full story... (off-site)- Topics:
- Centrelink, Discrimination, Employment
- Author:
- Graham Innes
- Source:
- The Age
- Date published:
- Thu 3rd Oct, 2013