Page 683 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 8 March 2005
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People with disabilities who apply for an ISP are forced into competitive misery.
Those who are most capable of proving that their life is more miserable, or their crisis is more immediate, than anyone else’s have the best chance of receiving the most funding.
David Lazarus’s life is obviously not miserable enough.
I understand that change needs to happen at a number of levels at the same time, but we need to be wary of the situation where administration or management appears to be expanding to develop these positive new programs while people working on the ground feel they are simply being squeezed, as they have in the past.
Perhaps more concerning, given the genesis of the Gallop inquiry, is that there are issues of safety for residents while there remains no flexibility in housing. The board of inquiry recommended a move away from group houses. Yet the group house model is one that can work very well for the right group of residents with appropriate support. If there is no room in the housing system, however, then conditions will be much less than satisfactory. So the vision of individually appropriate housing is relegated for another 10 years, to join Challenge 2014 as somewhere we hope to be aiming, while inappropriately housed residents—rather than living in the competitive misery of the ISP process—live in competitive need or danger. For residents now and their families and for staff, Challenge 2014 is a long way off.
The whole issue of competitive resources and of fairly limited communication can be read into Advocacy Action’s letter to the Chief Minister in December last year about looming staff shortages. It argued that the impact of unexpected staff changes was enormous and that the loss of opportunities to engage with the community and the world that the staff shortages delivered was, in terms of quality of life, substantial. Similarly, in my office, we are aware of occasions on which, presumably due to limited resources, time constraints and so on, vulnerable clients of Disability ACT find themselves with inappropriate staff.
There is another complex issue that warrants care. The shift towards community-based programs sees more resources going to the community sector. There is a problem if Disability ACT delivers two-thirds of the services and funds the other third. In such situations, community organisations can face or fear retribution or intimidation from the department if they criticise it.
While the report we are debating catalogues a list of developments and innovations that are comprehensive in their scope, I do not believe that this should be the final report. More useful at this stage would be to design some performance measures to apply to this development work so that we can see over time how effective this response has been on the ground, in the houses and in the community in increasing the safety of people living with disability and in the fulfilment in their lives. In other words, having seen the new directions for Disability ACT articulated, we now need to track their effect.
A further response to the Gallop inquiry has also been the ACT government’s commitment to creating a new human rights and service review commission, incorporating a disability services commissioner. One of the key concerns of people
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