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According to a 2009 survey, 45.7 per cent of people with disability aged 15-64 years living in households were not in the labour force. Credit: Alan Porritt (AAP) http://www.abc.net.au/rampup/articles/2013/06/20/3785743.html The welcome introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme is shadowed by Australia's poor record on disability and jobs. People with Disability President Craig Wallace believes it's time we came up with new ideas to get more people with disabilities into meaningful work. The Australian Parliament has recently passed a bill to introduce an extension to the Medicare Levy to guarantee funding for DisabilityCare. So overall, 2013 is a great year for people with disability. And yet, Australia retains a bad record on disability and jobs. As Paralympic gold medallist Kurt Fearnley laid it out in his Australia Day speech earlier this year, 45 per cent of people with a disability live in or near poverty; more than double the OECD average of 22 per cent. We rank 21st out of 29 OECD countries in employment participation rates for those with a disability. We rank 27th out of 27 in terms of the correlation between disability and poverty. You could say that in Australia, the unemployment and poverty rates of people with disabilities are placing people with disabilities under conditions experienced in the Great Depression. The 2009 Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers (SDAC) by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows in raw terms that 45.7 per cent of people with disability aged 15-64 years living in households were not in the labour force. That's almost half. In contrast, at the height of the Great Depression around 1 in 3 Australians were unemployed (with many more underemployed). In the US, the unemployment rate was about 25 per cent. Faced with a problem of such magnitude, the response of a newly-elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was to mandate continuous innovation until things began to change. Here in Australia however, we seem stuck with the same old solutions. Expecting changes to the Disability Support Pension (DPS) to create extra jobs is like trying to fix a leaky tap by getting an electrician in to rewire the ceiling. It's the wrong solution to the wrong problem and it doesn't work, but we keep doing it anyway. Earlier this year, I was caught in a media flurry about the DSP following the publication of this article in the Sydney Daily Telegraph. There was debate around whether the number of people on DSP had gone up or down and the Government claimed that it had declined from 831,908 in December 2011 to 824,868 in October 2012. My response to that was a big Aussie 'whoop-de-do'. It still means eight hundred thousand Australians locked out of our economy who are not spending, not consuming, not paying taxes and not having decent lives. We need a better safety net for people on DSP and then we need to shift topic. Targets, goals and funding changes still don't tackle some big questions: Why are people not getting jobs? Why are people falling out of jobs? Why are people underemployed? Why do we get stuck at base level? We need to look beyond parachuting people into jobs and ask how we set people up to fail. It's time we cut to the chase and come up with new ideas to get more people with disabilities into meaningful work. Here are a few: - We need a goal. In their 2011 report for the Australian Network for Disability, Deloitte Access Economics points to an increase of between 191,000 and 203,000 additional people in the labour market, should participation increase by 10 per cent. If we're serious, a national goal of 200,000 jobs for people with disabilities over the next decade is reasonable. - It's time to ask whether policy is still in the right place. When the Commonwealth and the State and Territories split disability policy in the 90s, disability support services were pushed to the States and income support while employment programs were delegated to the Federal Government. The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is shredding the divide so perhaps it's the right time to ask whether there is more that the States, Territories and Local Government can do. These bodies have leverage, they procure from industries that provide many base level jobs; why not make employment of people with a disability a national priority through COAG? - Attitudes are also important and governments invest in awards, campaigns and quality work to build the business case. Yet we have surprisingly little hard evidence about what attitudes are and what might actually work to shift them. Governments should invest in an internationally benchmarked national survey on community attitudes towards people with disability to formulate an action plan for better employment opportunities. - To give things a kick start, let's have an employment target in the Australian Public Service. In the US there are employment programs that support people with disabilities to serve as interns in the White House and on Capitol Hill. Why can't Australian Senators and Members of the House of Representatives utilise the skills of people with disabilities in the work of our Parliament or in their electorate offices through paid parliamentary internships? For every MP and Senator this would mean a total of only 226 jobs. But what an effective way to 'walk the talk' and show every constituent, business and lobbyist that this time we are serious and here is what employees with disabilities can do? - We should recognise the power we all have as customers. As the recent backlash against Myer has shown, disability is now a retail customer force to be reckoned with so why not put that to good use? - The suggestion in a recent paper by Federal Workplace Relations Minister Bill Shorten to introduce mandatory annual reporting by medium to large private employers, including about senior positions, is another good way of maintaining the momentum. - The 2009 ABS SDAC found that people with disability participate less across all life domains, for example from being part of a sporting team to attending a sporting event, or from doing volunteer work to visiting a library. A US survey conducted in 2009 shows that participating in one area of life, like sport or the arts, can be the tipping point for people to re-engage in employment. Disability Employment Services could provide assistance to build friendship networks or facilitate involvement in recreation, sport or arts to strengthen community connection, personal capacity and independence. Why can't we try and see if this works? - As DisabilityCare changes the funding game, we might also ask whether the principles of personalised budgets which are shaping the NDIS could apply to Employment Services. If services don't get people jobs, we should be able to take funding to another provider, including job agencies outside the network, or even 'unbundle' money directly to an employer to provide job opportunities with in-house support. Why not? - Instead of tinkering with the DSP, the government should look into income support to help people sustain a job as they build assets and financial capacity by allowing people with disability moving into entry level positions for the first time to retain their DSP for a period of at least 6 months. Again, why not try it? These are just my ideas. You might have yours. In the famous words of FDR, "It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something." Craig Wallace is the President of People with Disability Australia. Craig has a disability and uses a wheelchair for mobility. This is an edited version of an address to the recent Australian Network on Disability Conference.