More than 600,000 Australians with disabilities are living below the poverty line, according to new figures from the Australian Council of Social Service.
ACOSS Chief Executive Dr Cassandra Goldie said that people with disabilities lacked job opportunities, with only 45 per cent employed.
''It is high time that we considered introduction of targets and quotas, to provide the incentives necessary to ensure equality of employment opportunities,'' she said.
Its wrong that so many people with disability have to live in poverty and Dr Goldie is right in identifying employment as the key to solving much of the poverty seen amongst people with disability.
However, it’s wrong to suggest that quotas are a means of solving the problem – in fact, the introduction of quotas is far more likely to exacerbate the issue.
Why are quotas a bad idea?
Quotas lead to tokenism – finding some person with the either the slightest or the most extensive disability and for essentially the same reason employing these so business can say, we’ve done our bit’
Quotas suggest people with disability can’t make it on their own as valued employees and that’s manifestly untrue.
In Japan, employers with more than 100 employees must employ a percentage of workers with barriers in their staff. Consequently, smaller Japanese businesses (smaller firms are the largest employers in Australia) see disability as an issue for big business only and as a sort of extra tax rather than a sensible workplace policy.
Finally its demeaning for the person employed to know they are only their because the powers that be said they must.
Why is Australia so far behind and showing so poorly ion International comparison.
Why are disability employment services failing to make meaningful differences? - We used to; time was when real change was being acheived across Australia.
So much more money is being spent, why are we sliding backwards.
For the same reason any business must fail – its being badly managed.
There’s no real business plan and no actual goal other than ‘do better’ the ‘do’ that’s being measured has little to know correlation to the relief of poverty, rather what’s generally touted as the (numerical) success of the program relates to the number of sites from which service is delivered (and this has thrown up some truly bizarre examples) and the total number of participants.
Participation is not presently linked to meaningful employment – it includes all the small hour (generally 8) jobs that were actively encouraged under the funding bodies last contract – you can hardly punish these now that so much new business has been awarded on their acquisition.
Poverty will continue until the managers of this program link outcomes and reward to reduction in pension benefit
- been saying that for more than 8 years Until real change in the circumstances of people with disability are included in the KPI’s of service delivery headlines like the one above are inevitable.
*** One other thing that could help - stop the ridiculous red tape that saw my program waste so much time over the past few weeks supplying the same information we'd beed asked for just a few weeks before.
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