Disability Employment Services: Labor to introduce voice to improve ‘lottery’ of services

Labor government wants the experience of almost 300,000 people who rely on Disability Employment Services to inform how service providers perform.

Social services minister Amanda Rishworth. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

People with disability face a “lottery” when signing up with a service provider to secure a job, with varying quality an issue that must be addressed through a suite of policy reforms, social services minister Amanda Rishworth says.

One key reform understood to be high on Ms Rishworth’s reform priority list will be embedding the experience of the almost 300,000 participants receiving Disability Employment Services in determining whether disability service providers are meeting their KPIs.

The issue will be a priority discussion item at an industry briefing in early December, to be attended by the Minister and departmental officials.

Ahead of the meeting the minister said it was time to end the “mixed bag” in the disability employment services sector and begin the process of reform.

“I don‘t like the fact that there is almost a lottery of which disability service provider you end up with, whether you get a good quality service provider or not a good quality service provider,” Ms Rishworth said. “(The system) hasn‘t delivered a good experience for participants in some circumstances. It hasn’t always delivered that focus on making the right match between a job and a person living with disability.”

Ms Rishworth said while current contracts in the sector would be honoured for the next two years, providers will be scrutinised for their performance, and if shorter term reforms were required they would be considered.

“I am very keen to see what we can do to boost quality of these services, because that is not being measured now. It is a KPI, but I don‘t believe the experience, the quality has been measured,” she said.

“(Participants have commented to me) about not feeling that their experience has taken into consideration about how a disability service is rated. I found that quite hard to understand, because of course they are the consumer. They are the ones whose views need to be taken into consideration when we rate the experience.”

There are more than 281,000 Australians currently participating in the Disability Employment Services scheme. Providers under the scheme, a mix of large, medium and small for-profit and not-for-profit organisations, support people with disabilities in the workplace and the employers who take them on.

Just 53.4 per cent of people with disability are in the labour force, compared with 84.1 per cent of those without disability. This gap of over 30 per cent has remained largely unchanged since 2003.

Almost a quarter of working-aged people with disability who are not in the labour force (224,000) intend to work or look for work.

“I don‘t want to pretend that shifting the dial on unemployment for people living with disability is just down to employment services,” Ms Rishworth said. “There is a wider piece of work to be done on community attitudes.”