Alan Robertson proudly displayed his door key at the Disability Royal Commission

Alan Robertson spent his childhood in institutions: the notorious Kew Cottages and group homes. “Staff were allowed to do what they liked. Bash you up, give you a clip over your ear”. Life was bleak and cruel, he said.

Today his world is different, Mr Robertson told the Disability Royal Commission. He lives in his own unit and has a key to his own front door - a key he proudly held up to show the commission and a potent symbol of independence.

Kevin Stone, the chief executive of VALID, (left) and Alan Robertson, who lived in institutions and group homes and is now an advocate for people with disabilities.Credit: Jason South

And Alan Robertson is now also a disability advocate. For years he returned to Kew Cottages, while they remained open, to talk with residents about their rights. “I’ve become a bit more cheerful because I’m out in the community,” he said.

On Wednesday the royal commission heard more evidence about the realities of life for many people with disability, both historical and contemporary.

The demand for advocacy far outstrips supply, said Kevin Stone, the chief executive of the Victorian Advocacy League for Individuals with Disability, which represents adults with an intellectual disability, like Alan Robertson, and their families. His organisation employs two full-time advocates for the whole of Victoria.

Group homes involve herding people against their will without choice, without compatibility, in compressed situations.

Kevin Stone, CEO of the Victorian Advocacy League for Individuals with Disability

“The truth is that as good as we feel about what we have achieved we continue to despair at the work that still needs to be done,” Mr Stone told the commission.

The main issues are a lack of suitable housing for people with disability, which leads to them being incarcerated and institutionalised, and the prevalence of abuse, exploitation and neglect, he said.

About 35 per cent of VALID’s individual advocacy cases relate to people living in group homes, and 25 per cent of those involve client-to-client abuse that he said was a result of “herding people against their will without choice, without compatibility, in compressed situations”. VALID had advocated in the past 12 months on group home cases where:

• Faeces was smeared over a bathroom, there was no crockery in the house and the kitchen table was covered in dried, spilt food.
• A resident had moved to live with her mother in a retirement village because she was scared of a fellow resident, and a different client was sleeping in the group home hallway because she was afraid of a resident.
• Staff in a group home repeatedly refused to assist a client to cook even though the client wanted to learn. Instead they facilitated them eating takeaway food.
• A client was forced to relinquish his pet birds because staff refused to help him care for them.

When institutions started to close in Victoria, people with disabilities and their families believed group homes would be a place where residents could gain skills with the ultimate aim of moving into their own home, Mr Stone said.

The hearing of the Disability Royal Commission in Melbourne.

But many group houses had become “the end of the road” because staff and support services were not equipping residents with those skills, he said.

“Many services have become containment, just as much institutions previously.”

In Victoria, about 5000 people live in group homes. Victoria’s Disability Services Commissioner, Arthur Rogers, told the commission that between 40 and 50 per cent of complaints to his office relate to group homes. He said he did receive complaints about the use of restraint, but in the past three years no service providers had been prosecuted for unlawful restraint.