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| SPEECH: Sydney Institute July 13 |
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SYDNEY INSTITUTE – JULY 13th
INTRODUCTION:
I’m grateful to the Sydney Institute for inviting me to speak today.
Let me begin by asking you a question:
What is a person worth?
What is your value? What is mine?
Are we all of equal value?
Or are some of us less equal than others?
Am I less equal if I cannot live where I want? Or go where I want?
Am I less equal if I am segregated?
Am I less equal if I can’t get a job interview?
Am I less equal if I can’t complete my education?
Am I less equal if I can’t enter a building or get on a plane or train?
What if I can’t even cast a private ballot in a State or Federal election?
If you are one of the One-and-a-half million Australians with a disability – or the 600,000 friends and family
members who are their unpaid carers – you know the answer all too well.
The answer is: Yes, I am less equal.
Yes, I am not valued according to my potential, but according to my limitations.
Yes, my voice is not heard sufficiently in political discourse
Yes, I am a second-class citizen.
Yes, I am less equal.
It is still the case in our very lucky, and very special nation, that the achievable aspirations of the average
Australian remain out of reach for a person with disability, or their carers.
A good education, a steady job, owning a home, a role as a valued and respected member of a family and a
community, followed by a comfortable retirement in a safe and peaceful place.
All of those everyday aspirations remain a distant goal for many people with an impairment.
Over the last thirty months, as Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, I’ve seen that what they get instead, by
and large, is a life in the margins.
A struggle to find a school that will accept you, difficulty travelling to a university.
A struggle to find an employer who’ll give you a second-look for an interview, a smaller pool of rental houses, a
life of extra expenses and of isolation and frustration.
That is why I have come to see that life with disability is the last frontier in practical civil rights.
An issue that does not just challenge the democratic principles upon which our Federation was founded.
But raises generational challenges for the future prosperity of our nation.
I want to make the case that there is a practical civil rights agenda around disability, and the inclusion of people
with disability as full members of our society. That it is not special pleading or charity, but essential for Australia.
Disability is not just a test of our national morality, but a test of our national sustainability.
Because, sooner or later, Australia’s governments, industries and communities must address the facts of disability or risk the kinds of social and economic hardships that are now being experienced by the nations worst-effected by the Global Financial Crisis.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is no exaggeration.
The stakes are that high – the human rights are that low.
People with disability lack power in our society, they lack organisation and they lack a voice.
There is no union for them, there are no powerful disability lobby groups.
There is not even an equivalent of The Choir of Hard Knocks, that has personalised the problem of homelessness.
There is no acceptable face, packaging or spokesperson.
There is no single image of an MCG full of the lame, the halt and the blind, singing a song of demand for our help.
A hero of mine, George Orwell, once said that the problem with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.
This goes double for having a disability.
Disability makes you poor, and on top of that you have to expend your energy dealing with systems that were not designed with you in mind.
People with disability spend so much energy surviving, that they have little left to start thriving.
The disability sector does a fine job in patching immediate holes in our creaky system, but it has not been able to convince the rest of the nation that this important issue is also an urgent issue.
In my view there can be no real change without disability becoming an urgent political issue, and wielding the political clout that its numbers demand.
With that in mind, I want to do three things today.
1. I want to explain why Disability matters to us all.
2. I want to explain why – as a nation – in business, in the community and in government – we need to change the way we think about Disability.
3. And I want to explain why it’s in the national interest to bring Disability in from the cold and make it a mainstream concern.
1. WHY DISABILITY MATTERS
Before I go into why disability matters, let me give you one example of how it struggles to gain mainstream attention.
Recently, before June 23rd, I was invited to appear on the ABC TV program Q&A.
On the night, though, not one question was asked about disabilities – because of course, four days before the program, Julia Gillard became Prime Minister.
When – in the dying moments of the show – I broached the issue of a national disability insurance scheme and stated that disability was at least as important as other questions of national politics I was accused of changing the subject – of “spinning” and ‘giving a line’.
What is the point of that story?
Disability is not a mainstream media issue.
There are notable exceptions in the media, indeed today in the SMh and the Daily Telegraph - but – generally – disability is seen as an issue outside the realm of everyday life.
It is something that doesn’t concern “us”.
And it is therefore quarantined as a subject for one-off specials or sensationalism, tragedy or heroism, but seldom for sustained investigation.
To use the media vernacular: disability just isn’t sexy.
Let me tonight tell you why disability should be sexy.
According to the latest statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, there are about 1.5 million people with a severe or profound impairment.
That means that they need assistance with one of the core functions of living, be it speaking or moving around.
Half of these Australians are under the age of 65.
This year, State and Federal governments will spend about $6 billion on care and support for those under-65s.
This system is propped up by the unpaid work of hundreds of thousands of primary carers – many of who are ageing parents.
It is a system in perpetual crisis.
But the crisis is set to become a catastrophe as our population ages.
Many carers simply won’t be able to shoulder the burden.
As a consequence, in 10 years, the cost of supporting people with a disability aged under 65 is projected to jump by 66% – to $10 billion a year in current dollar values.
And in 20 years, it will jump to $17 billion dollars.
Currently the states are spending four billion on services, in 20 years they will need to spend $11 billion just to keep pace.
And that is just the beginning.
Every year about 30,000 children under 15 acquire a health condition potentially leading to a disability.
There are now an estimated 180,000 children under 15 with a severe or profound disability.
Every year nearly 10,000 Australians under 30 enter the Disability Support Pension or DSP. Most stay on DSP for life.
There are now nearly 800,000 Australians receiving the DSP at all ages, costing nearly $12 billion per year.
Every person with a disability aged 20 who enters and stays in the mainstream workforce rather than spends their life on DSP.
Saves the government nearly $600,000 in service outlays, pays taxes, And has less need for government-funded care and support and by the way, they’ll have a better life experience.
The inadequacy of the disability system is impacting on other areas of critical need – such as acute health and corrections.
Our prisons have become an institution of last resort for many people with an intellectual disability.
People with intellectual disabilities are scandalously over-represented in jails.
It’s been estimated that in NSW alone over 20 per cent of current inmates have an intellectual disability.
Too many young people with disability remain in an age inappropriate nursing home, rather than with people their own age.
We have reduced the numbers but there are still 7000 people under-65 in aged care, because there is nowhere else for them to go.
People with disabilities are often ‘parked’ in hospitals until more suitable service arrangements can be found – a very expensive way to support people.
One Community Care and Participation project in the NSW Lifetime Care and Support Authority reduced hospital lengths of stay by up to 83 days by opening up community options in some categories of severe spinal cord injury, saving nearly $100,000 per patient.
What does this tell us?
That unless we do something now,
More and more Australians will be forced to drop out of the workforce to care for loved ones,
Our economy will be hamstrung by an acceleration in the fall of labour force participation rates,
State Governments will be driven to the verge of bankruptcy by rising disability services costs,
And Australians with a disability will become increasingly marginalised and segregated with there being a very real risk of a return to the Dark Ages of institutionalisation.
What if all the Carers went on strike?
What if they costed themselves as employees and asked to be paid?
They won’t, because love drives them. But we should support and value this love of these parents and siblings and children not take it for granted.
As dire as things are, real progress has been made since our Government was elected at the end of 2007.
I want to acknowledge the contribution of Jenny Macklin in achieving this.
· We’ve doubled the amount of money available to the States through the NDA – taking it to $5 billion over 5 years – and we’ve introduced better benchmarking.
· We’ve increased Carers Allowances and the Disability Support Pension by almost $100 per fortnight.
· We’ve changed the Disability Employment Network – and ended waiting lists for people with disability who want help to find open employment.
· We’ve created the Helping Children with Autism package, for the first time giving funding - $6000 per year – to parents of children with autism up to the age of 6.
· The first Access to Premises standards - delivered after a decade of delay.
· We were among the first developed nations to have signed the UN convention on the Rights of People with Disability and ratified the optional protocol.
· And, most importantly, we have established a Productivity Commission inquiry into the possibility of a lifetime care scheme, or social insurance scheme in Australia.
These changes aren’t enough.
Not by a long shot.
In short, the current model cannot cope.
I have spoken to the Prime Minister about this, she has great empathy and understanding of the real lives people with disability are living now.
She has the vision to understand why more reform is in the national interest, and why doing nothing is not an option.
Tonight I suggest that we need a new approach.
A new model that’s all about driving better and more coordinated service delivery and outcomes, facilitating community and employment participation by people with disabilities.
By 2030, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, there will be 2.3 million people with disability.
But there will be no increase in carers, in fact there is likely to be a drop, as elderly parents of children with disability become too old to look after their kids.
There is a tsunami of need on the horizon.
Unless we change our thinking we run the risk of being swept away.
2. A NEW WAY OF THINKING
To shift our thinking away from old ideas of and attitudes towards disability is a big task.
It will require the efforts of the whole of society.
We need to admit that the way we live and work – from maternal child and healthcare centres and schools, to shopping centres and public transport, to housing and workplaces – has been designed without consideration of the needs of people with a disability.
For instance, in the upcoming Federal election the ALP has two blind candidates – Tony Clark and Steven Hurd – standing for House of Representatives seats in Victoria.
Tony and Steven are strong candidates and would make excellent MPs, but there’s a problem …
.. they can’t cast a secret ballot.
The secret ballot is a cornerstone of the democratic system. It was first introduced in Victoria 1855 but, 155 years on, voters with a visual impairment still have to trust someone to fill out their ballot paper for them.
The secret ballot should be universal by next year, but why have one segment of the community had to wait a sesquicentenary for a basic democratic protection?
I will talk about what the broader community – including business – can do to make a difference in Disability.
Before I do, though, I want to explain my personal thinking behind the proposed National Disability Insurance |
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Authorised by Bill Shorten MP, Suite 1A, 12 Hall Street, Moonee Ponds Vic 3039 |
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