Australians with disability need - and deserve - an ambitious and forward-looking employment strategy
The Australian Government is developing a ten-year National Disability Employment Strategy to “increase employment outcomes and break down barriers that people with disability may face in finding and keeping a job.” The Strategy’s proposed priority areas, set out in a consultation paper released in April, continue down a path that has not improved employment outcomes for people with disability at scale for nearly three decades. In today’s post, adapted from the Melbourne Disability Institute’s response to the consultation paper, Sue Olney (@olney_sue), Kirsten Deane (@NDISDeane), and Bruce Bonyhady (@mdi_unimelb) explain why we must seize the opportunity presented by the COVID-19 pandemic to rethink how we frame and address disadvantage in the labour market, and why we need new approaches to policy design and implementation in this arena that reflect the current and future environment in which Australians with disability are seeking work.
Australians with disability want to work. Yet despite rolling reforms to targeted initiatives and investment intended to build better pathways to work - underpinned by both rights-based and robust economic arguments - their labour force participation rate has not increased in a generation. The gap between the participation rates of Australians with disability and Australians without disability widened between 1993 and 2018 from 21.9% to 29.7%. This was despite a shift to a more service-oriented economy that presented an opportunity to narrow that gap. The discrepancy in the employment rate instead became even more pronounced.
As COVID-19 disrupts and reshapes the labour market, there is a risk that both the labour force participation rate and the employment rate for Australians with disability will fall even further. Huge strides have been made in flexible approaches to work over the last year, presenting new opportunities for people with disability to more readily access employment. However, research and numerous government inquiries have revealed that even in times of skill and labour shortages, and with support and incentives available to potential employers, people with disability struggle to find work. For many, the pandemic will exacerbate existing health and economic vulnerabilities. And as competition for entry-level employment ramps up, early exclusion from employment for young people with disability may have lifelong consequences.
The Australian Government is currently developing a ten-year National Disability Employment Strategy - a key element to address the National Disability Strategy commitment to increase employment and economic inclusion for people with disability. The government released a consultation paper in April seeking feedback on the Strategy’s four proposed priority areas - lifting employer engagement, capability and demand; building employment skills, experience and confidence of young people with disability; improving systems and services for jobseekers and employers; and changing community attitudes.
We welcome the government’s commitment to turning the tide on employment for people with disability, and each of the proposed priority areas in the National Disability Employment Strategy consultation paper has a part to play. However, they do not go nearly far enough. The consultation paper does not address the compounding disadvantage jobseekers with disability experience in the current health and economic climate. It does not acknowledge the competing priorities of strategies to address unemployment for people with disability and other groups of disadvantaged jobseekers in the wake of the pandemic, which will leave them jostling with each other, and with newly unemployed people, for employer’s attention. More importantly, it does not propose any steps to ensure that people with disability have the opportunity to be included in plans to drive unemployment to below 5% post-COVID-19.
The proposed priority areas in the paper continue down a path that has not improved employment outcomes for people with disability, either at scale or sustainably, for nearly three decades. The paper frames the persistent unemployment of people with disability as a problem that can be solved by adjusting the skills, attitudes, and behaviour of individual actors – jobseekers, their families, service providers, employers, people in the community - in the face of labour market conditions shaped by economic policy, global forces, and technological change.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional organisational behaviour and customer bases. It has also highlighted the value to government and business of embracing different perspectives in framing problems and solutions in a crisis. It presents an opportunity to reset how jobs are created, how work is organised, how productivity is measured, and business hiring and management practices to build a more inclusive and diverse labour force and realise the full potential of Australia’s human capital. This calls for new approaches to policy design and implementation that reflect and balance the needs and circumstances of marginalised jobseekers and employers in the context of the current and future labour market, to expand opportunities for work in private and public employment, social and disability enterprises, the green economy, micro-enterprises, and self-employment.
As at 31 March 2021, the total caseload for Disability Employment Services (DES) was 309,994 jobseekers. The total jobactive caseload exceeded 1.2 million jobseekers, including 259,484 people with disability. In February 2021, there were 288,700 advertised job vacancies in Australia. We cannot - and should not - rely on the private sector to bridge this gap between demand for and supply of labour and trust that people with disability seeking work will not be disadvantaged in that process. Entrenched and widespread unemployment for people with disability will have significant private and public costs.
The COVID-19 pandemic presents an opportunity to rethink traditional approaches to addressing disadvantage. The National Disability Employment Strategy will not improve the employment prospects of people with disability if it simply repeats approaches and initiatives that have failed to move the dial on employment for decades. We cannot keep repeating the approaches of the past and expect a different outcome. The National Disability Employment Strategy will only be effective if it explicitly addresses the current and emerging social and economic environment in which people with disability are seeking work. Government must play an active role in shaping the future labour market and ensure that people with disability are not sidelined in that process.
We now have a chance to chart a different course. This new path must begin with recognising that persistent unemployment of people with disability is a structural and social problem as well as an individual one. We need strategies and initiatives that respond to both. And that’s where the NDES should start.