Disability Service Provision in Australia

Disability services across the country are in disarray. The few get much while the many get nothing. Huge bureaucracies exist, all devoted to planning, administration, advocacy and research in the disability sector but not to the delivery of services.

There is one supported accommodation place for every twenty people in need and there are no plans to provide for the rest. Parents who have cared for their intellectually disabled sons and daughters for a lifetime are dying without seeing their person settled in an appropriate residential setting.

These same invisible carers are voiceless, unrepresented in almost every forum and unheard in their crises. They are mentioned fleetingly in academic papers and disability conferences as the high level of unmet need before the important issues of community integration, social inclusion, independence and choice are discussed at length. The reality is that there can be no true independence while living at home with one’s parents and there is no choice in life for the vast majority of people with an intellectual disability in our country.

There are three things that are glaringly obvious: the first is that our governments need to put far more resources into caring for Australia’s intellectually disabled citizens and the second is that we must find a way to make our disability dollar go further.

Our activists take the stance that everybody can live in the community regardless of the cost so that one person is funded where ten could be. Some NGOs are funded ten of thousands to deliver an hour or two of daily care with little accountability around outcomes.

The aged care sector shakes its head in disbelief when it sees what it costs to support a person with a disability in the community. An average group home funding package is in the vicinity of one hundred thousand dollars per annum and yet most of the families in receipt of these are unhappy. They are unhappy about out-of-area placements, incompatible mix of clients, poorly trained staff and high staff turnover, unresponsive service provision and so on.

The extra one hundred million promised by our prime minister in May 2008 will provide only three hundred and nine new accommodation places. This is an outrage but who is saying so? The third thing that is obvious is that the first and second are linked: if governments could see better value for their dollar, they would be more inclined to increase the numbers of those dollars.