"I don't want to make people nervous" Shorten shakes up disability employers

Parliamentary Secretary for Disability Services Bill Shorten has reversed what many saw as a budget cut and launched a year-long inquiry into organisations that employ disabled Australians.

"I think disability employers serve an important function," Mr Shorten told the Herald/Age ahead of announcing the inquiry today. "But frankly some are held together by sticky tape and band aids."

"They need to get people onto their boards who have accountancy skills and marketing skills - it is no longer enough for these operations just to be run by people who care, they have to be run by people who care and can count."

The 206 companies supported to employ 19,000 disabled Australians were shocked to discover on budget night that their government funding had been frozen after years of getting what amounted to annual increases of around 3 per cent.

"We had already had a rough time through the economic downturn, but it was a shock to find nothing in the budget to reflect cost increases," said Ken Baker, chief executive of the umbrella organisation Australian Disability Enterprises.

"To his credit Bill Shorten has listened and responded and come up with 2.4 per cent. There's some way to go, but this will help members that were on the edge."

Mr Shorten said the apaprent funding freeze flowed from an earlier decision of the Howard government to provide a temporary funding boost that was not included in budget forward estimates.

"But whatever the reason, you've still got to solve the problem," he told the Age.
"The trick in negotiations is to move them from a single issue to multiple issues, so I have found more money but I've also found a way to keep their costs down by freeing them from the need to do quarterly worker assessments for a trial period of a year."

Combined the two measures should boost the financial position of disability employers by around 3.5 per cent.

Mr Shorten praised the work of organisations such as Endeavour in NSW and Queensland which makes furniture, runs farms and packs food and Waverley in Victoria which mows lawns, manufactures equipment and provides corporate catering.

But he said some of the smaller organisations should merge.

"Some should remain but if we want to get beyond hand-to-mouth funding we have got to encourage them to promote their existence and their value."

"It will not be a shakeup as such. I don't want to make people nervous - no disabled worker will be displaced. But if we are funding 19,000 people with special needs we need to do it well."

""We need to look at whether $10,000 per disabled worker enough."

With Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner Mr Shorten had already government tender guidelines so departments could allocate contracts to disability employers without the need to seek competing bids.

The inquiry will be conducted by staff of Mr Shorten's department and will seek public submissions.

Mr Baker welcomed the inquiry saying if the enterprises folded or did not work well 20,000 Australians with quite severe disabilities would find themselves sitting at home.

Published in today's Age


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We have to

The head of the Treasury has declared war on Australia's growing reliance on disability support benefits saying "it's hard to believe that an ever-increasing number of people dependent on income support is the best we can do".

Addressing a conference on economic governance Dr Henry said his Tax Review had been told repeatedly "including by those who are themselves disabled" that the present system did not adequately recognise the desirability of people on benefits back to work, with their income "effectively contingent on them working little or not at all".

He presented Treasury calculations that appeared to show that around 1 in every 20 Australians of working age was on a disability pension.

"For many years now there have been more people receiving disability support pensions than unemployment benefits," he told the conference.

While social security and welfare payments had jumped from less than 4 per cent of GDP in the early 1970s to more than 10 per cent today, the proportion of recipients getting the aged pension had "actually fallen"...

The big drivers were sole parent and disability pensions.

The Treasury Secretary said he was concerned about far more than the budgetary impact.

Quoting the Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen he said the true measure of human development was "the capabilities that an individual has to choose a life they have reason to value."

He asked whether Australia's system of payments to people with a disability was "making it more or less likely that they are choosing a kind of life that they have reason to value".

Australian National University economist Bob Gregory backed Dr Henry telling the Herald/Age the rules governing disability pensions made it almost impossible for the people on them to improve their lives by seeking work.

"As we have tightened up the rules, people on the benefits have come to realise that taking any part-time work weakens their case for keeping them," he said.

"The benefits are a one-way street. Half of the people get there from unemployment, not from work. When they get there - unless they are very young - they rarely return to the workforce."

An Australian who gets onto the disability pension in his or her 40s is unlikely to leave it until he or she becomes eligible for the pension at around 65 years of age.

Women have replaced men as the drivers of growth in disability pensions, moving on to them in increasing numbers as their eligibility for the old-age pension has been pushed out.

Until the 1980s most of the claimed disabilities were skeletal. Since then the growth has been in mental disabilities which are harder to define.

"It could be because work is getting more stressful," said Professor Gregory. "But we shouldn't be making it hard for Australians who are disabled to return to work."

Dr Henry will present his report to Treasurer Wayne Swan next month. Mr Swan expects to release it early next year.


Published in today's SMH and Age

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