Morning session – 9.30am – 11am
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- Conference Opening – 0.10 secs – 7 min 42 secs
- Welcome from VCOSS and Minister’s Speech – 7 min 42 – 13 min 24 secs
- Welcome from Disability Advocacy Victoria – 13 min 24 – 19 min 26 secs
- Keynote Speech – Christina Ryan, CEO Disability Leadership Institute – 19 min 26 secs – End
Morning - Audio transcript
MELISSA: Welcome, everyone, if we could please find our seats and then we’ll get started. Good morning. Welcome to the Strengthening Disability Advocacy Conference for 2024. My name is Melissa Hale and I’m the manager of the Disability Advocacy Resource Unit. It’s really lovely to see you all here today. Before we start I’d like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation, the traditional custodians of the lands on which we gather today and pay my respects to their Elders past and present and extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today. So what a year it’s been. We’ve seen the response from the Disability Royal Commission and we’re awaiting the outcomes of the NDIS Review. The NDIS amendments act have passed and the change is unfolding whether it’s realised yet or not. So what’s next? Our collective challenge is to make sure people with disability can live without violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation and these are not just words and to have strong regulations in place to have such breaches of human rights in the future. We need to consider Victoria’s next steps and how disability advocacy can guide this process effectively. I’m excited to delve into these topics with all of you today and…whose voices should lead this campaign and what does it mean to walk alongside in true allyship. There’s a lot to cover so I’ll start with a few housekeeping notes. In case of an emergency the NIB fire wardens will assist. Please follow their directions calmly. On arriving we discovered the ramp doesn’t work. This is clearly not accessible or inclusive and we’re really, really unhappy about this. And all I can do is unreservedly apologise to everybody in the room today about the ramp not working. It just brings to light how important the Disability Royal Commission recommendations are making them real and universal design and all those things are important so it’s really important to have you here today and keeping that ramp in mind the whole day. Toilets. To the left out of this room, follow the corridor almost to the end then turn right near the turnstiles. For accessible bathrooms take a left out of this room and a hard left down the side of the hallway. Wifi details should be on your tables. The green room is available behind the stage to my right which is a quiet space if you need one through the day. And there is a Mentimeter QR code on your table. So you can scan the QR code through your smart phone and have a say about anything that’s happening today. So all the topics, there’s questions about all the topics, all the questions we’re asking speakers today you get a chance to have your say about them too so please I encourage you to have fun with it and use it. Our colleagues Adam and Noah, can you put your hands up? Where are they? Adam is there. Noah is outside hiding. So Adam and Noah will be doing in video interviews with people through the day. So if you want to have a say and you want to be interviewed and talk about some of the topics today, please go and find Adam and Noah or they’ll come and find you. We encourage you to share your thoughts through the break. It’s not just about the people on the stage, it’s about you too. We’ll have a photographer here today. If you don’t wish to be a part of this, that’s fine. Please go to the registration desk and get a blue sticker we can put on your name tag and we’ll make sure nothing is published. Thank you for being here. We look forward to a productive and engaging day. Before we get started I would like to extend a warm welcome to Wurundjeri Elder Perry Wandin.
PERRY: (Foreign language spoken). Good morning. Here to do welcome. Thank you very much for having me. Us to be able to do this. Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge all my ancestors, Elders, both past, present and emerging. All the…into Melbourne, so I’m very lucky I go home to beautiful…in the afternoon. So my family have all come off from the mission proudly to say my father was the last Nuringera in today’s day. He’s been passing there for 21 years. So I became an Elder becoming the eldest and it’s always passed down to the eldest. Then it goes to the next one in line. That’s gone through our whole family the whole lot from 1963 through to 1924. All my ancestors were gathered on Wurundjeri country taken to…firstly that was…but there was only 35 men, women and children left because all the boats come to Melbourne and just about wiped everyone – wiped them out along the coastline to…but as I said, it went from Simon Wonga, William Barrack, then to my great grandfather Robert won dong who was the last one…and then to my father. Today we’re a thriving community of thousands. So we’ve made up for a little bit. My father married an English woman so I’ve got a great story line on my other side as well, for those I haven’t told you before. My mother’s name was Olive Potter. Have a guess who my grandfather was? Harry Potter. So I can sort of say I’ve got a great breeding line but, no, it’s what we are and who we are today. So I thank you and I hope you have a great day today. A clear example of how things should work and shouldn’t, we were talking about what happens when the power goes out, we can’t wave that card anymore. Carry cash, remember. But, no, but everyone, look, I thank you for listening to part of my story and that’s only just a smidgen. So (foreign language spoken) meaning welcome to the land of Wurundjeri people and I do welcome you and I hope you have a beautiful 2024 and stay safe. Thank you.
MELISSA: Thank you very much, Perry. It’s a privilege to be standing on Wurundjeri country and I thank you for your warm welcome to country. To kick off proceedings today I would like to welcome Damien Perry the President of VCOSS to the stage.
DAMIEN: Welcome, everybody; to the Strengthening Disability Advocacy Conference 2024. My name is Damien Ferrie and I’m the President of the Victorian Council of Social Services and it’s a great pleasure to be here among you today. I’d like to acknowledge, to thank Perry for his Welcome to Country and to acknowledge that we are meeting on the lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation and pay my respects to Elders past and present. I’d like also to acknowledge the many disability advocates and activists here in the room and not here today. Who have worked tirelessly and continue to work tirelessly to improve the rights of people with disability across the state. VCOSS has enjoyed a strong partnership with Disability Advocacy Victoria over many years to deliver the Disability Advocacy Resource Unit which we are very proud to auspice. We work alongside you in allyship to progress the work that needs to be done to realise disability rights and to make a fairer and more inclusive Victoria for all of us. We know that the disability royal responses have been met with disappointment from a range of advocacy groups and that further action is needed to achieve the comprehensive reforms required to prevent violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disabilities in Australia. We know that the reform environment is extraordinarily complex requiring on coordination between jurisdictions. However, it is positive to note that both Commonwealth and Victorian Governments acknowledge the importance of collaborating and agree that there is a pressing need for continued improvement in areas such as housing, justice and sector development to develop a more inclusive society. VCOSS is here to act in allyship with you. We are keen to hear from you and what needs to be done next to progress the disability rights agenda. We had invited the Member of Parliament, Lizzie Blandthorn, Minister for Disability and children. She was disappointed she was unable to attend to be part of today, however she has sent a message to us all. I hope you have a very enjoyable day.
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MELISSA: Thank you very much, Damien, for setting the scene today. So it’s now my pleasure to introduce Julie Phillips, the chair person of Disability Advocacy Victoria who will do a welcome from DAV.
JULIE: A period of intense reform, that’s not the way I would have described what we’re going through at the moment but there you go. It’s all a matter of perspective, isn’t it? Disability Advocacy Victoria also welcomes everyone to our annual strengthening advocacy conference which it presents in partnership with VCOSS and of course with Disability Advocacy Resource Unit who have done an incredible amount of work to get here always. Thank you to the DARU team, particularly Melissa, and we’re so thrilled to see so many people here today and I do want to acknowledge the stress and strain that many of us are under, many organisations have lost staff, have had to give up their offices, are worried about redundancies. It’s actually a really difficult period and for that reason it’s even more important that we’re all here together to share this period of intense reform. I think that for some of us we are fighting for our very survival and it’s a very sobering time. One might actually be forgiven for thinking that the disability advocacy sector and on the road to oblivion and some members of the disability community are about to experience new levels of hardship that go hand in hand with not being able to access disability advocacy when it’s needed. And so as a result there’s no more pressing time than now for the disability advocacy sector and the disability community to work productively, collaboratively and as one in response to all of these reforms, the changes to the NDIS, the significantly disrespectful response to the Disability Royal Commission recommendations. And so how do we do that? How does the disability advocacy sector, which by the very nature of its work have had a relationship with many members of the disability community, which it could be described as working for, rather than working with. Because a lot has changed in the last 10 years and have we changed with it as a disability advocacy sector? I’m not sure. Now is the time to not only stand side-by-side with people with disabilities but I think the answer to the huge challenges facing us at the moment is to perhaps work out how we put people with disabilities in front of us. Because we have to remember that we only exist as a sector to create access to all manner of things to people with disabilities. And therefore our futures are inextricably linked and it’s time that our advocacy, our systemic advocacy, especially now is inextricably linked. And so how do we do that? How do we walk our talk about nothing about us, without us? Well, let’s find out. We are very fortunate to have Christina Ryan who is the CEO of the disability leadership institute. In 2016, Christina took one of the most radical steps in her long career of activism and change making. She put the two words disability and leadership into the same sentence. Her next step was founding the Disability Leadership Institute. Now governments and major cooperations use the term disability leadership and Christina shares her experience and leadership knowledge with disability leaders all over the world. The Disability Leadership Institute has become a global community of disability leaders supporting each other through a community of practice and member groups. As a specialist leadership coach Christina now uses her decades of experience built through frontline Disability Rights Activism, community sector management, systemic advocacy, working at the United Nations and mentoring to build more disability leaders. So I hope that Christina gives us a good challenge and I welcome her on behalf of us all.
CHRISTINA: Thank you to the assistance crew. Disability does not come without challenges and something else I will also acknowledge is that we’re extremely flexible people who are very good at problem-solving. So here we are. Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation and pay my respects to Elders past and present and thank Uncle for his very warm welcome this morning. I’d also like to acknowledge any other First Nations folk who are in the room with us today. It’s truly an enormous pleasure to be here with you at the DARU conference. When DARU contacted me earlier in the year to ask if I would be here I said yes like a shot and then worried about whether I would have had the operation by then and whether I’d be recovered enough and whether we could actually organise the logistics, who cares, I’m here. This feels like home. These are my people. For many of you who haven’t met me I’ve worked in disability advocacy for a long time. I ran an independent advocacy organisation and for a period of time I was on the Board of DANA but also was the Chair of DANA. I know that there are many organisations in the room today that I’ve worked with over the years and it’s a pleasure to be here with you all. This is an interesting time and thank you, Julie, for your interpretation of the Minister’s kind words. We are at a cross roads in the disability rights movement. Many big processes or reforms have concluded and have left many of us asking whether these processes have taken us forward or back. We’ve also seen a shift in the disability advocacy sector and how it works. Julie didn’t read my speech beforehand. We’ve had several years of major processes and reforms, including the Royal Commission, the NDIS Review, the registered provider inquiry, more reviews of the advocacy sector and most recently the NDIS legislation process. This has all been happening alongside our usual work of implementing the CRPD, engaging with the United Nations and keeping in touch with our international colleagues about latest developments. A lot has been going on. Many of us felt deflated with the government’s underwhelming response to the Royal Commission. We waited a long time for the government to work out how it would respond and ultimately they couldn’t even accept the recommendation that disabled people should be consulted. It’s left a lot of people asking, where to from here? Disabled people fought hard for the Royal Commission. For some of us it was a couple of decades of fighting. We then committed a lot of trust and energy to make sure it was the best we could make it. Then our various governments, state and federal, couldn’t find the courage to use it as a catalyst. Rather they seemed to have found it awkward and inconvenient. Then other processes were forced upon us. Sometimes with very short timeframes, like the NDIS legislation changes. And we once again engaged in those reviews and legislative reforms to do the best for our community to move things forward in a positive direction. It has been very difficult to see if we are achieving any real change with these processes. It is always hard to see change when we are right in the middle of things. When we are working flat out at the coal face every day doing our best to make things happen. But ultimately these processes have all contributed to change. Some of it big and some of it incremental. Let’s pull back to the bigger picture. I’m a big picture kind of girl. Our disability rights movement is about equality and how we are getting equal. So what’s been happening there? How have all these processes been making a difference to disabled people getting equal? Are we really implementing the CRPD? When I look back over the last decade one big change becomes obvious. Disabled people are now expected to be in the room. A decade ago we were still knocking politely and asking that disabled people be part of the conversation. That we be a part of discussions about how our lives looked and how much we controlled them. I’ll just refer back to the Minister’s terms of inviting us to have a say. It was very interesting language she used. I look back to the NDIS field process which is actually more than 10 years ago, of course, and recalled that many of the working groups had one single disabled person on them. And how we had to fight to have that one disabled person in the room. Disabled people now have power that we have never had before. We have gone from asking to be in the room to expecting to be in the room. Sure, we’re yet to be there in numbers, the numbers that we should be and we rarely, if ever, are there as the key policy designers and decision-makers. We are not yet there as government ministers or heads of departments. We still have only four openly disabled parliamentarians across the 9 50 or so parliamentarians in Australia’s state and federal parliaments. However, no process about disability is considered legitimate today, unless disabled people are there. Our voices are stronger than ever. We have developed our own power. What I am not seeing is the disability community using our power consciously or deliberately. Somehow we are still tapping politely on doors and asking to have a say, just like we did a decade ago. It’s time to stop this. To recognise that we do have power and to start expecting to be part of the big conversations. Every disabled person in this room today has power and I would like to see you using it. We have colleagues right now insisting that the new CEO of Vision Australia is from the blind and vision impaired community. Have people seen that one? United blind leaders have circulated an open letter insisting that a transparent and accountable process is undertaken to achieve this. And only yesterday they came through with a victory. Fantastic. Up until yesterday that process wasn’t going to happen but there will now be an open external process and being blind or vision impaired is considered a desirable selection criteria to have. We’re getting there, folks. Another example, the deaf president now campaign at gal date university of the deaf back in the 1990s was as a result of many individuals saying, we do not accept degraded status. They succeeded in getting the first deaf person appointed as Chair of the university Board because they refused to accept anything less. Our New Zealand colleagues were appalled in 2022 when the head of the new ministry of disabled peoples announced and it wasn’t a disabled person. They fought hard for this ministry and did not want to see it going the way of other disability specific agencies. So they refused to accept the appointment. They let the government know that the appointment wasn’t legitimate or credible and insists that a disabled person be appointed. Within a few days the appointment was renamed as interim, while a disabled person was found. And you bet they found one. There’s plenty of very impressive people in New Zealand. And who can forget stop the tram? A campaign that has recently been revived, started in Melbourne in the 90s to get accessible trams and stops. I have memories of very early internet with pictures of people like Katie Boyle chained to the front of trams, Bourke Street, it was fantastic. My favourite protest ever. This campaign was an outstanding example of disabled people using our power to make change. A whole heap of people chained themselves to the front of Bourke Street trams in flash protest that held up traffic for hours. It changed a lot of things, including the national transport standards. Many of us now enjoy an accessible inner Melbourne tram system as a result of this campaign. And I acknowledge our colleagues who are currently working to make that further out so you can actually move beyond the city. Throughout history those in power have never given it away. Power is not ceded by those who have it. When it changes hands it is because others have stepped forward, moved alongside and taken it. If disabled people want equality, if we want to be in the rooms with people of power in making decisions for our lives, we must recognise power, own it and start using it. When we see appointments being made to disability specific or relevant roles it is within our power to accept or reject those appointments. It is up to us to insist that disabled people are appointed to run our organisations. Our service providers, our offices of disability and to the various statutory appointments like Commissioners of disability or heading our regulatory agencies like the safeguards commission. If we really want equality it is also time we got into the parliaments and into the cabinet rooms. When nondisabled people are appointed we can say no. Go back and do better. Just as our fore bears have done in various campaigns we can reject others speaking for us or being in positions of power that make decisions about our lives. We can also start saying no when policy or processes are not acceptable to us. When governments tell us they will only accept 13 of the Royal Commission’s recommendations, we have the power to say no. Go back and do better. Not good enough. Disability advocacy has evolved. We have reached a point where it has become offensive for anyone other than disabled people to speak for disabled people. This includes frontline advocacy services who now work using a rights-based approach and understand that they do not speak for a person but rather are there to support a disabled person to be heard. In line with the CRPD expectation of support being provided so that a disabled person can engage in a particular system or process. Just about every article of the CRPD uses that word support. Support to do this. The relevant support to do that. Right across the board. If you haven’t read it recently, go back and have another look. It’s a very grounding document. Our allies have become those who step back and make space for us to be in the room. To be heard. To be respected as equals. Our allies help us to do our work. Help us to be strong. Support us to show up. They have our backs and make our work possible. In the disability community allies do vital work that makes it possible for disabled people to do our work getting equal. But they do not and cannot do our work. They do not have the expertise of lived experience. Those who are not our allies, who are not creating space, are not supporting us and putting us forward are the ones who are lagging behind and it’s time for them to go back, have a think and come back when they are ready to do better. Disabled people are no longer prepared to ask. We now expect those who are making decisions that affect us to be us. Just having a moment of thinking of all the allies that got me up here this morning. Thank you, ally. I’d like to talk to you now about productivity. This seems a bit odd but I’m going to do it. Australia is having a productivity crisis. For at least 20 years we have been struggling to improve our international competitiveness. For even longer we have been towards the back of the OECD pack when it comes to disability employment. I sometimes wonder if solving disability employment might not also assist us with improving our international competitiveness and productivity. Australia needs our disabled people to be a part of fulfilling our potential as a country. This isn’t just a buzz phrase. It is a serious economic problem. Around one fifth of the Australian population struggles to find work and struggles to build careers in our chosen fields. With around 5 million Australians with disability we are talking big numbers who are not contributing as we would like to. Disabled people are needed and yet we are shut out from being part of the solution. We don’t just find it hard to get work, we are rarely seen in any senior leadership positions. Whether it is the public, private or community sector. We must start with our advocacy organisations and our service providers, while also looking at any government position related to disability. If disabled people are not being appointed we should be asking why, reject the appointments and send recruiters back to do better. This needs to happen for the country, not just for us and for getting equal. Reputable studies have shown that disabled people are 10% more innovative in the workplace than the people we work alongside. A more recent study showed that when disabled people are team leaders and supervisors our teams are far more productive. When those teams are also largely teams of disabled people they become even more productive. And we’re talking significant percentages. So why isn’t Australia going full pelt on building our disability leadership and our disability workforce right across all sectors? . For at least the last three decades the Australian policy push has been for entry level employment. What I call the get a job policy. You can read about it in the national disability strategy. Yet various studies show that to generate culture change and build more inclusive workplaces you need diverse leadership. I’ll pause there. A couple of days ago chief executive women came out with their annual census of women getting on to ASX Boards. Did anybody pick that up? They used all of exactly the same language about diversity and the importance of diverse leadership that we use. It’s the same stuff, folks. Their concern is with mainly white privileged women getting on Boards and running the top companies. The reality is it’s the same conversation. We need culture change to build more inclusive workplaces and to do that you need diverse leadership. Studies also show that disability leadership provides for greater innovation and productivity. Disabled people aren’t super human. You can’t just get a token crip in and the world will change. But we do see things differently and we are outstanding problem solvers. We are great at finding work a rounds and making systems work. Disability leaders are masters of flexibility and adaptability to circumstance. If you want something done a disability leader will find a way to do it. We also know that diverse leadership is the key to building and sustaining a diverse workforce. Yet for some reason Australia is lousy at appointing disabled people to senior positions, whether it be in government, corporate, community or academic sectors. Everyone seems to be talking diversity, except they keep forgetting disability diversity. When they do talk disability diversity they don’t mean leadership. They mean entry level. Yet it is when we have disabled people in leadership positions that productivity and innovation increase. Why isn’t Australia getting the message? Well, let’s make sure it does. We need disabled people across all fields, across all sectors and in our parliaments. That means you, me, all of us. This must become our frontier work. The tough and difficult job of being the first and often only disabled person in your workplace or at your level but it must be done. The job of the disability rights movement is to support each other as we infiltrate all of these systems, workplaces and institutions. It’s a long game and it’s going to be a tough fight. But it’s one we must take on to tackle the continuing ableism and prejudice that continues to govern our lives. More and more disabled people are being open about their disability at work and we must recognise how hard it still is for people to be doing this. By backing each other through our networks, our community and our professional organisations, like the Disability Leadership Institute, we can make it easier for the next person and the one after that. When people on the inside are unable to speak out our advocates and change makers can. We are going to need both contributions to get to where we are going. The disability rights movement is big and diverse and it is going to take all of us across all our intersectional spaces to get to the equality we are looking for. We can start by saying no and expecting better. It’s time we expected to be in the Board rooms, executive offices and in parliaments as decision-makers. Not just about disability but right across all feels because that is what Australia really needs if we are going to be a power house 21st century economy. Disabled people are in a very different position to where we were a decade ago. We now have power and a voice and we must learn how to use it. It is time we’re told the organisations and governments that affect our lives, to go back and to start doing better. Thank you.
MELISSA: Wow. You could hear a pin drop. I love listening to you speak. Always lovely listening to you speak, Christina. Always come away feeling empowered and inspired. So I think we’ll go to questions now. I think we’ll go to questions now. So does anyone have any burning questions? I think I’ve got one question I would like to ask you, Christina, as a woman with a disability on a Board or if you find yourself being the only person with a disability, say on a Board of say 10 people and you’re expected to sort of have the answer to everything disability-related, how would you suggest someone deals with that?
CHRISTINA: You can only be yourself, Melissa. I’ve actually come from a gender equality background. That’s what I’ve spent, you know, half of my life doing before I turned into cryptum. I can talk about cryptum because I am one. And this is exactly the same issue that women moving into nontraditional spaces had 30, 40 years ago. Expecting to speak for all women as the only woman in a room. And many of us as disabled people have still expected to speak for all disabled people. We all know we can’t do that. I can’t speak for the deaf community. You can’t speak for the wheelie folk. What we do know is that we all implementing the CRPD and getting to equality. It’s actually about if you’re in a Board room you’re there to govern. You’re actually there to do your governing acting in the best interests of the organisation and making sure that good governance is what that organisation is doing. Good governance is actually about having diversity going on. Any modern Board that doesn’t have some kind of diversity reporting framework isn’t on top of its game. And if it doesn’t have diverse leadership the Board should be asking why. Because it will affect the bottom line and the outcomes of that organisation, and I’m talking nonprofits as well. Bottom lines exist across the board. So we are there to be doing our governance expertise in those situations and we’re coming from a diverse perspective. We will ask questions that others might not ask. We might be asking the question about where’s our diversity framework and our diversity reporting. We might be asking those questions about, if there’s 10 people on this Board why am I the only one? How are we going to recruit more disabled people at the next AGM? Particularly if we’re a disability focused organisation, in which case I would hope that you are aiming at more than 2 and looking at, well, I’m a bit of a 50 plus per cent person when it comes to that sort of a thing.
MELISSA: Great. Thank you. So time for questions. We will have floating mics coming around. So I think we have a question over there, Martin over there. If you raise your hand, Martin, and the mic will come.
CHRISTINA: Please let me know who you are.
MARTIN: Martin Stuart, Blind Citizens Australia. Thank you so much for mentioning Katie Ball. I was on many of those occasions when she was sitting down in front of trams, trains. I think we missed out on buses
CHRISTINA: I did, sorry, yes.
MARTIN: She was a fire ball, not just Katie Ball. At that stage even our community thought that we were, not just radical, but very radical. These days I’m glad to hear that she, in particular, with me with her led the way to where we are now and that is having the power which we must use, as you’ve just said. And the other thing I wanted to say is thank you for saying how I felt for quite some time, particularly the last three years. When organisations and governments, schools, et cetera, talk about inclusive practice they don’t mean us. And you struggle to have that understood. The message to be heard. All I can say is we, and I know will keep sending that message until it is heard because we’re not taking no for an answer. Thank you
CHRISTINA: Thank you, Martin. It’s important to remember that movements take all sorts of us and they take a long time and they shift and change and morph into other spaces. They look different. They shape differently. But all of our work today is based on the work on the people who went before us. And the change they made allows us to do the work we are doing today. It’s a really important thing to remember. None of us work alone. Sometimes one or the other of us might be the person up front but the reality is unless we’ve got our community alongside nothing will change, nothing happens. Thank you, Martin. Thank you so much.
TANYA: Hi Christina. I’m Tanya from advocacy and…appeals from RIAC. Thank you for your talk, your speech. It’s very empowering. I just wanted to raise something that really resonated with me when you spoke about power, about empowering people and how we do that on a regular everyday basis. Everyone in this room is trying to build that resilience with people and trying to empower them to speak up and to be brave and have the courage to do so. I think the – to me there’s a real mismatch in that we have the guts to do that, we have the drive to do that. The problem that we often face are the people that are running these departments or the people that are running the country, as everybody would understand, and that’s the mismatch there because we can have the power and we can say all the things that we need to say and we can fight for what our rights are but if nobody is listening from the top and nobody is listening in that room that has the power to change that decision, that’s the struggle I think that we face everyday and we can have these great conferences and we are all fighting for the same things but unless someone actually listens, that’s the struggle we see with people that on a daily basis people come to us to say, this isn’t fair. They’re not listening to me. And we can build people’s abilities and their confidence and all of these things and we have done over the years, like many years as we know, and then they keep getting blocked or shut down or – and then they say to us, well, what’s the point of complaining? What’s the point of doing that? And it’s really exhausting. And I think that’s our real big struggle.
CHRISTINA: Absolutely it is. Absolutely it is. Disabled people are some of the most resilient human beings on the planet. I think any of us who have worked in the disability community and our activism spaces for any length of time knows that. One of the things that I’m interested in is how we speak up. I’m in the luxurious position these days of not being in the frontline of change making. I’ve stepped back and – metaphorically speaking, of course. And so I can observe and I can watch the work that others are doing. Something I’ve noticed is that we don’t speak up when we can. And I, like many, when the Royal Commission announcements were made, what’s that a few weeks back, maybe a month, when the Feds finally came out. They took far longer than they should have to come out with their response to the Royal Commission and then it was – well, pathetic. The response of our community, including myself, most of us just sort of went, what? And it was blind siding. It was so bad. We were just side-swiped. We’ve all had that experience when someone is appalling in your face, bullshit technical terms, our usualness is blind side. Occasionally you have the witty remark and it does happen occasionally. What we could have done at that time if we had a bit of a think about it or if a few of us had actually thought about it beforehand was to actually consider whether we would accept the government’s response, but we didn’t.
TANYA: Isn’t that their ammunition though?
CHRISTINA: Absolutely, Tanya. You bet. They’ve got the infrastructure, resources, a department most of who are not disabled people, senior people in DSS, I’ve got spies, I know who they are, they aren’t disabled people who came up with that response. It was watered down, watered down, watered down. They had an intergovernmental committee and they only accepted 13 recommendations because that’s all our collective governments could come to an agreement on between all of those nondisabled bureaucrats. It’s like what the? And yet the disability community didn’t say no. This has been five years of our lives. The decades before that of getting the damn thing up and running. Engaging with the Royal Commission, most of whom were not disabled people and actually recognising that we had to do that and you’re just going, okay. That happened. I’m also going to use another example. These are a bit uncomfortable for us but we have to look at ourselves sometimes. Last week the new safeguards Commissioner was announced. I am the only person I am actually aware of who has publicly spoken out against that appointment. I didn’t speak against it, I questioned it. From all of the lovely congratulatory posts. The person who was appointed is a nice enough human. I don’t have a problem with her as a human being except that she is not a disabled person. Why has she been appointed to this position? We all know there are disabled people with that expertise. You’ve actually got one here in Victoria. Why wasn’t the person who was appointed the deputy Commissioner appointed the Commissioner? They are completely capable of doing it. Everybody in the disability community rallied around congratulating this person on their appointment. Why on earth did they do that? These are all my colleagues. These are people I’ve worked with for decades. These are people I know and love. I am not – excuse me but why aren’t we even saying, hang on a minute, was there no disabled person to appoint? Why are we accepting this appointment? Why are we not saying, no? We expect this to be a disabled person. We know the problems the safeguards commission had around understanding disability because it hasn’t had enough disabled people at the top. There’s been some revolting things that have gone on. We need disabled people in those sorts of positions. But we also know when we’ve got a disabled person running something like that that they actually employ other disabled people and we start to get a culture change. Have a look at your own regulatory commission here. It’s one of the best employers of disabled people in the public service. And for good reason. It’s got nothing to do with the subject matter. It’s got to do with the fact that you’ve got a person at the top who is a disabled person. Look forward to hearing from him later in the day. So there’s two examples of things where we as disabled people could have spoken up. When the Minister sends a message like that, which would have been used at just about any conference including the service provider one down the road right now, I actually thought at first that maybe they got it mixed up and sent it to the wrong conference, just politely. Why aren’t we saying, well, sorry, that – why did we even play the message? You’re not here. You don’t have the respect of showing up. Well, okay, we’ll get on without you. We refuse to meet with you. We want to meet with a Minister who is a disabled person or somebody who is at least interested in what our community is doing. We could actually be doing that. You and I both know that’s going to take a truck load of courage. It’s going to shoot all of the techniques out of the water that we’ve been using around being nice and polite and if you’re not going to be nice, we’re not going to listen to you. Why do they say that? It doesn’t matter what flavour of the government you get. You’ve got the lovely people in position who once they get into position they stop. When I was chair of DANA we got…a different flavour of government. He was a different ally. We could get meetings of him within five minutes. The CEO of DANA and I did not get one meeting with him despite being based in Canberra at the time. He suddenly had no time for us. Like, excuse me? If we accept those things happening they’ll keep doing it. If we accept our offices of disability being run by nondisabled people, they’re the ones putting policy to government we’ll keep getting these things happening. Look at the other diversity areas. Have a bit of a look at how they operate. The offices of women are run by women, folks, in case you hadn’t noticed. Ministers of women are in fact women. If not there’s a national scandal about it. We had one of them a few years back. Office of Indigenous policy are now expected to be run by First Nations folk. Our ministers for Indigenous affairs are in fact First Nations folk. We’ve actually managed to achieve First Nations folk in parliament mainly to be able to do that. Not always. In the ACT we don’t. We’ve got a white person. Because people expect that. We need to expect it. It’s going to take courage but we are the most courageous and resilient people I’ve ever come across. We are the people who are the people doing revolting things in our faces all day every day who question our right to even be somewhere. Who pat us on the knee in public and say, it’s lovely to see you out, dear. Thanks. I was looking forward to a day at home because gee, it would be nice to have a rest sometimes. We can speak up, Tanya. We can do it. It’s going to be hard. We don’t throw our youth, our emerging talent, our self-advocates who need support into the lion’s den on their own. We make sure that we go in as groups of people and we do it together. We make sure we’ve got old hands, that doesn’t mean that they’re old people. It means people who have been doing it for a little while. Sitting alongside people who are learning their trade, who might also be of an older age. We all come in different shapes and sizes in the disability community. We make sure that we actually back each other up and do it. We go in and we do it. We make ourselves ready, we do it. We get training to actually deal with unexpected and weird situations where somebody – we grab someone in a foyer and they say no to us, well what do we do then? Make sure you’re ready. Train for it. Be prepared. That’s how all these other communities and diverse communities have done it. They didn’t just hope that one day people would be nice and that they’d let us in. Disabled people are supposed to be nice and grateful all the time. Well, I’m over being grateful. I have a bit of gratitude here and there but I’m not going to be grateful to a government that accepts 13 recommendations after how many years of my existence. Why should I? It’s actually pathetic. It’s not good enough. How much did they put into that? That’s just not good enough. Apparently I could rant about this all day.
MELISSA: Right. I believe there was a vacancy for the NDIS Minister coming up soon so opportunity right there.
CHRISTINA: We need someone in parliament. So get elected, people. We need you to get elected. What are you doing after this job?
MELISSA: Writing my application. We’ve got a hand up over here.
RAVEN: Hi. You’ll have to forgive me if this is a bit rambling. This is the first time of asking a question like this. I’m pretty new to the industry and myself. As somebody who has had years of experience like this and clearly a lot of wisdom to go around, what advice would you give for, say, younger advocates or younger people in the industry who are just starting to get involved in it, especially because like a lot of people have been radicalised about this stuff after like COVID happened, the Royal Commission and a lot of us – like a lot of the work that young people do for advocacy is online but for those of us who are wanting to make that step to help with – like and make more change in person, would you have any advice for that? Thanks.
CHRISTINA: I missed your name.
RAVEN: Sorry, I didn’t say it. I’m Raven. I’m here from valid link.
CHRISTINA: Fantastic. Thank you. I love the valid mob. Fantastic to see you here. Hello Raven. Getting involved in the community is a big start. Don’t operate alone. Something we talk a lot at the Disability Leadership Institute is not operating in isolation. You don’t have to go it alone. We are the largest minority group on the planet and in this country. So there’s plenty of us out there. Practice. But something I learnt from my grandmother who was also a big change maker is find the niche for you. The thing that you’re most interested in. Your big issue. Your one thing. So I now do leadership. I focus on leadership. So focus on your thing. Develop your expertise about that and follow that thread and see where it takes you. You might find a few kind of allies on the side on the way through. If you spread yourself too thin and try and do everything you’ll wipe yourself out in five minutes. We have very high levels of burn-out in our community. Most of us have only got so much energy to spare because it takes about 120% to get out of the house in the morning or to prop up at the computer. So focus on the thing and do that and it might change. It might be a different thing in five years’ time but start with the thing that’s in front of you right now and work with others. Get a group together. Some sort of coalition. Some sort of thing. The CYDA is just fantastic. CYDA is a really good thing for young folk to do and WDAS. They’re here somewhere and I love you all. It’s those sorts of things to do. Recognising we’re not alone and we are not operating in isolation. Those two big things. Yeah. Absolutely. And get some training. Do a program here or there. There’s some free ones out and about. We have some at the DLI that cost money but get some training and get into it but most of all feel welcome, Raven. You’re one of us. It’s fantastic to see you being part of what we’re doing. Thanks. I’m going to go over here.
JARROD: Thank you, Christina. Jarrod Samuel Hay. Today is my second day. As a new voice at the table, my – you went into it a little bit in your speech and in your questions. When it comes to having difficult conversations with the people that we love, admire and the ones that we work with, our colleagues, and government and each other, when it’s Vision Australia or the commission or our own performance, if you like, around our response to the Royal Commission and the NDIS Bill and all of that, as you said technically bullshit, how do we have those difficult conversations respectfully without criticism that’s been thrown my way is that I’m engaging in actual violence. How do we – how can we have those conversations without looking like we’re engaging in actual violence?
CHRISTINA: Yeah. It’s a very important question, Jarrod, and thank you. I firmly believe that we’re all working on the same outcome here as I’ve said. We’re all going to do it differently. Apart from all being different because we’re all disabled people, our disabilities are all different. We all have different ways of approaching things but we’re also different people. We’ve had different backgrounds, different education, different careers, different work, different organisations that we’ve worked with and work with still. And so all of those things mean that the approach we take to an issue is going to be different. And that’s okay. It’s actually what we need. If we didn’t have things coming at different angles we wouldn’t actually get the outcomes, particularly the political outcomes. It does take all of that diversity for it to work. But something that I’m also really, really – I think is really critical is that we focus on the issues. I like to think, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I do not engage in telling somebody that they’re wrong. I would never do that. I’m a leadership coach anymore so I’m not going to do that. But I wouldn’t tell someone they’re wrong. I’m not going to tell an organisation that they shouldn’t be there. I’m not going to attack any person or individual or group. I’m not going to say, don’t be here or don’t say that or don’t do it this way, because we need all of us. It’s about the issue. But one of the most important things that I’ve learned from a lifetime of change making, I’ve had the privilege of having grown up in that space, is that we operate in coalitions. So it’s important that we don’t go out on our own and say something that literally is out of left field because it actually gives ammunition to the very people Tanya was talking about. What we do need to do is check in with our organisations, even if we aren’t members of them. Even if we don’t necessarily agree with the people who are running them or even like those people. We don’t have to like each other to be working on the same issue. We can actually be looking at it and going, they’re taking this angle. Righto. Here’s how we can do it. And at least all be going in the same direction. And it’s that common direction that will get us the outcomes. If we split off, if we start arguing amongst ourselves, hello that’s what they want, doesn’t matter who is in power. People in power prefer others to be arguing because it stops us from taking the power from them. So the first thing we have to do is actually avoid arguing with each other. And we have some silly arguments. You see silly arguments about language people use. Whether it’s disabled people or whether it’s people with disability. Excuse me, it’s like excuse me, really, get it grip. Whether we’re allowed to say this or call it that. Honestly, we’re all different. We will use the language that works for us individually, that suits us. As a rights activist I use disabled person, that’s how I identify. Recognising that our community is incredibly intersectional. Incredibly intersectional. We’ve got people from all sorts of spaces. And respecting it. It’s about respect, Jarrod. If we respect each other. Even if we say something tough or difficult we actually have a look and say, that’s a different perspective. That’s interesting. What can I learn from that? Rather than engaging in argument. Or deciding that we need to correct a person because that’s just going to take energy that none of us have actually got. Yeah. That’s my thoughts on it for today. They might change again tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. It’s an important one though. I think fundamentally all of us need to think before we speak. How does this sound to the person on the other end of it? Is it about them or is it about the issue? Am I operating? Am I speaking with the same generosity and kindness that I would hope that someone speaks to me? And if I’m not, okay. I’ll go back and just rephrase what that looks like. We all know that we can bolt off emails and social media posts and sometimes they’re a bit blunt. Yeah. And we just need to haul ourselves back a little bit. Go gently on each other. We’re all tired. We’re all working our guts out. Most of us are actually doing far too much and most of us are dealing with the relentless barrage of demand from the world. Yeah. Things are going to slip through sometimes that we would prefer hadn’t. And don’t be afraid to say sorry to somebody. If you’ve said something untoward, when you realise it you can always turn up and go, yeah. I didn’t speak kindly there and I’m sorry about that. Everything is a learning experience. Yeah. We’ve all done it. All of us have done it at some point. Some of us unthinkingly and unintentionally. But it’s important to raise and acknowledge that it happens. Thank you, Jarrod. Thank you very much.
MELISSA: Excellent and nuggets of gold right there. I think now I’ll go to Patrick, then Kate and Brent and then we’ll wrap for morning tea.
CHRISTINA: And we’ll try and keep them shorter, I think.
MELISSA: Patrick’s gone. We’ll go straight to Kate.
KATE: Hello. So lovely to see you again. I’ve been thoroughly enjoying your presentation today. My name is Catherine and I work at Deaf Connect and we are a disabled persons led organisation. I’m happy to be here but they didn’t pay me to say that. So really in relation to your talk I feel like many of us here in this room have to feel like we appreciate and must say thanks to the people who are giving us what we need, especially as a young deaf female. I think that we need to – we’re expected to say thank you for the opportunities that are presented to us. But we do need to do better than that. So what is your advice on how we can gain more courage to say no, to say no to government? Often when we’re receiving the advice it’s last minute. We have to respond within a day. We don’t have the time to prepare our responses. So do you have any advice about how to navigate those sorts of situations? Where if we don’t do the right thing then the risk of not responding is even worse? So we’re left in a dilemma of not having enough time but needing that courage to do better?
CHRISTINA: Thanks, Kate. Thank you. Apparently I know everything. Yeah. Okay. This is a really interesting one and I’ll share a few examples that I’ve come across and also used in the past. We had an interesting experience when I was running the advocacy organisation that I ran where the media kept asking us to provide talent. So they kept wanting our consumers, as we called them, to be available to them for case studies. It was like really inappropriate in advocacy for all the advocacy organisations who are here. We know this is not what you do. But it also was potentially retraumatising and of course for many of the people, even if they had agreed to speak to the media which occasionally happened, when it came time for the media to show up they became nervous because it was the first time and it’s okay to back out. But then the media get the shits, you know. We actually developed a statement that we put on our website. And we put it into our policy manual that said, we are not available to source talent for media. And we – I can’t remember the wording. It took the team a while to develop wording that was polite but direct. So that they got the message. Then we could say we have a policy that we don’t to this. I’ve seen other organisations do similar things with consultation. And I’ve seen other disabled peoples organisations that have a similar stance right now if they can’t have people on the livestream. They won’t go. Puts a lot of pressure on us to find money for livestreams but – so people are developing policies and they actually make it an organisation policy. If you don’t give us a minimum number of X days or weeks, it should be six weeks, that’s the standard, if you don’t give us six weeks consultation period we will not engage in the consultation. Now, the immediate thought is the government is just going to say, well, we’ll go off without you. What happens if every single member of disability advocacy Victoria says, you haven’t given us six weeks, we will not engage in this consultation. Suddenly you’ve got a consultation process where nobody showed up. Hello? How’s that going to look? And you don’t just not show up, you put out a media release saying, we’re not engaging in this process. Government doesn’t respect our opinion. They haven’t given us enough to consult with our members. This is particularly important for organisations with communication barriers or who are supporting self-advocates to be heard. We know that. Six weeks is barely long enough. If you’re dealing with First Nations folk, six weeks is mandatory minimum. No option. You’ve got to have a whole process of sitting down and talking. If they’re not respecting us to give us the amount of time we need to have we won’t engage but tell someone you’re not engaging. So we don’t just not engage and go home. And we can do it politely. Here’s our policy. If we’re not getting it. Now you bet the next time they’ll find time to go back to you. We often get the classic one where the department puts something out just before Christmas and expects us all to work through January so that they can come back from their holiday and it’s all waiting for them. Well, yeah. I’ll try and be polite about that but you all know what I really want to say. No. If you can take six weeks break then we’ll talk to you at the end of February when we’ve had time. If you do it once they start to expect it. If we all do it they’ll start reshaping their processes. You bet they have processes that get pushed back all the time. All of these bureaucrats have deadlines they push back. They give us timetables and expect us to meet them. You just don’t do it. Talk to the media. Put out a media alert. Can you imagine if six media releases land in the Age news box saying none of us are engaging in this process. Someone will go up the hill and say, why is this process so flawed? She’ll have to come up with an answer. That will be exciting. I said that aloud.
MELISSA: Thanks, Christina. We’ll go to our last question now. Brent. Getting the interpreters ready.
BRENT: Good afternoon. So lovely to see you. My name is Brent from Deaf Victoria. I’m an advocate working in the deaf and hard of hearing community space. I’m wearing a black long sleeve top and have black glasses on. For myself I’m curious about what you have said today about courage and being brave and having the passion and the experience and working in solidarity with the community. So I’m thinking about these elements and I’m ticking all of these boxes. I’m like I’ve got this, I’ve got that, I’ve got this element. So what I’m wondering is in terms of disability leadership, you really need to respect the individual and be passionate and have the support of the people around you and it’s when you’re doing that, that you can make those achievements. So this is part of my goal to be a disability leader. I want to be able to navigate this space because there have been – and I think that there are a lot of avenues in which to get to that space. A lot of different journeys that you can take and we can all be supporting one another. So I wonder what can you recommend for me to become a more well-known disability leader? To be on the stage, you know having the community listen to me and me leading them and getting the respect?
MELISSA: I love that. Well done. So go on, Christina.
CHRISTINA: Let’s talk about what we mean by leadership. So most of us here have gone out on a limb at some point. Is that an ableist term? Put ourselves forward. Have a think. We’ve jumped off the cliff. I like to talk about cliff jumping and we’ve done things that took courage. Leadership is about how we operate. It’s not about the position that we hold. And that’s a really important distinction for me. So all of the disabled folk in the room today are disability leaders, Brent, including you. How do we develop a career where we become more prominent? I don’t know if I have the answer for that. I think most of us who have ended up in positions where we get seen and heard a lot more, just sort of landed there. It’s not always by choice. But it does take putting yourself forward at the time when an opportunity arises. So leadership is often about being prepared and I’ve talked about that before. This is kind of a continuation of Raven’s question. Being ready for the moment. The tram stoppers were ready. When the tram stopped they all just jumped in front of it and did their thing or wheeled in front of it. It’s about being ready. Knowing what you will say when an opportunity arises. Knowing what you might do and having an action plan. So there’s a lot of strategising that goes with being ready to put yourself forward. Having a think about, how do I respond to this? But I want to really go back to that big message about how we operate. And leadership to me is often about supporting the people around us to move forward into the space. Now, you’re in a position where you can do that. And there will be a lot more that’s noticed about your leadership by doing that than by you getting out there and being a talking head somewhere, I would suggest, but I want to reflect as well again on what I was saying to Raven is focus on your area of expertise and become the person that is the person that needs to be spoken to about that. This is how any of us who have been appointed to committees, advisory groups, who are the people who attend consultations, all of those things come because we have particular expertise in a particular space, a particular channel. That’s the thing. So it might be advocacy, it might be communication. It might be whatever. My focus now is leadership and I can talk to you for days on end about leadership. Know all the things. Know your material and speak about it. To get a bit of practice you can also start talking to some media here and there and you don’t go straight for the ABC and the Age. You go for the community media. Get articles in. VCOSS, DARU would have newsletters about what’s happening in your space. I know the valid mob put out a bulletin on a regular basis. People like Julia Far put out a bulletin on those sort of things. You’ve got to create content. The one thing I expect to see after today is all of the disabled people in the room will ask to connect with me on LinkedIn. If you are not on LinkedIn then that’s your call. I would expect by the end of the week your LinkedIn profile will be established and by next Monday I’ll have a connection request from you. So if you’re not out there, nobody will see you. If you’re sitting waiting for people to come to you, it will never happen. You have to network. Networking is one of the top leadership skills. Know people. Meet other people. Introduce people to each other. Talk to people. And we’re in the privileged 21st century where networking doesn’t have to happen in morning teas or foyers anymore. We can do that and we can do it online. Am I connected to you on LinkedIn, Kate? Of course. Of course. Absolutely. That’s right. I’m certainly connected to Jarrod. So all of you, thank you. That’s what you do. You get out there and you connect to people. Someone comes to me and says, we need somebody who does that? Hang on a minute. That would be Melissa. Talk to her. That’s what networking is about. When the NDIA comes to me and says, we’re looking for three people to do this. I go, have a look at this lot. Because they do. So that’s what networking is for. Are we on LinkedIn, Raven? Go, girl. Yeah. Ascribing a girl to you. Sorry. Gender of preference. Get out there, folks. Be seen. Metaphorically speaking. Yeah. If you’re not out there, nobody will ever notice you. That’s how it works. That’s how it works.
MELISSA: Wow. Thank you very, very much. That was just incredible and I think LinkedIn is going to get this whole big list of applications this afternoon. Thank you so much. It’s always such a wonderful time to hear you speak about all things leadership, about your perspective and the reform that’s happening at the moment. I know a number of people in this room are just looking at you going, I want to be you when I grow up including me.
CHRISTINA: The first time someone said that to me I thought, that’s a bit creepy. Now I just feel old.
MELISSA: Okay. So now it’s your networking opportunity. So it’s time for morning tea. Don’t forget you can use the Mentimeter QR code to put your thoughts and feelings on what’s happening throughout the day and you can also go and see Adam and Noah. I think we’re kicking off at lunchtime to do some video interviews. Yes, please come back at 11.30 so we can kick off again. Enjoy.
CHRISTINA: Thank you.
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Mid -Morning session – 11.30am – 12.30pm
Disability Royal Commission: Unpacking the Victorian Response to the Disability Royal Commission
Facilitated by: Deb Fewster, Director of Policy and Advocacy, VCOSS
Speakers:
- Lucinda Garrido, Director | Disability and NDIS Reform, Department of Families, Fairness and Housing
- Sandy Ross, CEO Rights Information Advocacy Centre/ Disability Advocacy Victoria Board Member
- Philip Waters, General Manager, Deaf Victoria/ DPO Victoria
- Jeff Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Disability Advocacy Network Australia (DANA)
Mid-morning - Audio transcript
MELISSA: Welcome back, everyone. If we can just take our seats. If we can just take our seats so we can get started. Okay. Thank you, everyone. I hope you’ve all had a great break. The first thing I wanted to highlight is we are aware that there is a very, very long line to the accessible bathrooms. So if you don’t need to use an accessible bathroom there are other bathrooms also downstairs and there’s lots of them but if we could just reserve the accessible bathrooms for those who need it that would be much appreciated. We have…issues so we’ll make sure there will be more at lunchtime. We apologise for that. Our next session addresses the elephant in the room, the responses to the disability Royal Commission. I’d like to invite Deb Fewster to the stage…
DEB: Thanks, everyone. We run a lot of events across DARU and…thanks for all the great energy you bring in. I know this is a workforce, a sector that really I think Julie mentioned some comments this morning around the stress and the strain so I really want to acknowledge that, express my solidarity as an ally and thank you for the strengths and courage and relentless fight that you bring to all these spaces. So thank you. Before we kick off I do want to thank Uncle Perry Wandin for a really beautiful generous Welcome to Country. I would like to pay my respects as others have this morning and acknowledge that we’re meeting on the lands of the Wurundjeri people and pay my respects to Elders past and present and any First Nations people here today. So in this session we are going to spend some time unpacking the Victorian response to the Disability Royal Commission and we’ve got a lot of experts who are going to be on this stage today in this session but I really do want to make a few comments about how we’ve structured the session. You’ll notice I use the word we. When I say we it’s Melissa. I think we all know the extraordinary leadership that Melissa brings through her coordinational management at DARU and she’s got a great team behind her. The way Melissa has intentionally structured this session is we’re going to hear from the Victorian Government and then that will be followed by a Q&A session. We’ve got a short amount of time for that because really what we want to do is hold space for you, the people in this room, we’re going to have some leaders from the disability advocacy sector on the stage to talk about their perspectives and insights. I think that that structure speaks to many of the themes that have come up already this morning about the sector leaning into its power and into its leadership. We have government coming into a space that’s been created, curated, held, led by DARU supported by disability advocacy Victoria and supported by VCOSS in allyship and I was talking to Julie Phillips and Christina Ryan just a little while ago in the break, I hope that we’re holding ourselves to VCOSS to a really high standard, ethical allyship. Not just allyship but there’s a lot of dimensions and ethics to that. So we’ve asked government to come into the space that is owned by the community and speak to their response to the Disability Royal Commission to this community and then holding space for the sector to talk about what you think is next. I guess before I introduce our colleagues from government to talk to the government’s response so far I do want to just make a few quick remarks about some of the comments that Christina Ryan made this morning as well. I was telling Christina over literally written pages of notes from her key note address this morning. Amongst the many lessons and insights that Christina shared from her extraordinary leadership to the things I picked up, amongst many, are expect better and to focus on the issues as well. I think it’s in that spirit I do want to open up this space and invite Lucinda who is the director of disability and NDIS reform for the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing who is going to take us through the government response to date. Then we’ll have a Q&A, a quick one, and then importantly we’ll hold a lot of space for a panel discussion where we’ll hear from three leaders in the sector but it’s an opportunity for you to have a voice from the floor as well. Please be mindful with these things as always we have a room that is not full of wall flowers. We have really strong leaders in this room. So I know that there will be lots and lots of hands up. We’ll try our best to get through as many of your questions, your comments as possible but sometimes we just can’t always get to everyone but we’ll try really hard. You can use a QR code on your table to have your say and as Melissa mentioned earlier, we have our colleagues Adam and Noah here today who are recording a video piece at lunchtime. So that’s another way for you to have your voice. We want to hear from as many of you as possible in as many ways as possible. So it’s my pleasure to invite Lucinda Garrido to speak to us in the first instance.
LUCINDA: Thanks so much to Deb and Melissa for inviting me to be here today. I want to start today by also acknowledging the…on come we’re meeting today and pay my respects to Elders past and present and Aboriginal people who are in the room with us today. So thank you to you all for inviting me into your space and I look forward to discussing today about the ever changing landscape of disability reform. I’m going to provide an overview of the Victorian Government’s work on disability reform including the implementation of responses to the Disability Royal Commission and the forthcoming NDIS Review and as was mentioned, I’ll take some questions at the end also. Before I delve into this I want to acknowledge that advocacy plays a vital role in upholding disability rights, addressing discrimination and harm and driving inclusion. Advocacy will play a central role across all of the disability reforms that I’m speaking about today. Ongoing engagement with the disability advocacy sector and all of your organisations is going to be critical to the successful design and implementation of the reforms. So as you very well know it’s an understatement to say that it’s a busy time for disability reform, both in Victoria and across Australia. The release of the final reports of the Disability Royal Commission and the NDIS Review present an important opportunity for us to work together to deliver long lasting and transformational change for people with disability. Victoria takes its role as leading the nation on supporting the rights of people with disability. We’ve done that over a long period of time and it’s something that we’re very committed to taking forward in this current disability reform context as well. The Victorian Government has made significant investments to improve the accessibility and inclusion of our education, transport and health services, as well as our public spaces and social housing. We’ve implemented various legislative reforms to strengthen the rights, protections and safeguards for people with disability in Victoria, as well as nation leading programs, such as our former individual support packages. However, in the current environment I do want to acknowledge that we are hearing there’s significant apprehension and anxiety in the community and sector due to the forthcoming changes. We are hearing you when you say there’s a lack of information currently available about the reform agenda, particularly around foundational supports and recent NDIS legislative reforms. We’re in a tricky position at the moment. Negotiations between the Commonwealth and states and territories on key issues related to foundational supports are still ongoing with many key overarching decisions yet to be made. And I do want to acknowledge that. It’s a very challenging environment for the community and the sector to be continually operating in. I do recognise that with that void of information there’s a lot of discussion as to what will be the future of the disability reform agenda. But we’re seeking to close that gap as soon as possible. It’s very much on our radar and we’re really keen to work with you as we move into the next phases. So there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes. So the Victorian Government can prepare for the design and implementation phases. And while we’re not yet able to commence the discussions until we know who we’re going to be designing for we are preparing to be able to engage when we can. So we’re not just sitting and waiting. Rather we are listening and hearing what many of you are coming to us and saying and we are making sure that Victoria is well placed to move forward with the Commonwealth and other states and territories once the key overarching decisions are made. And we want to make sure that the disability reforms are joined up and that there’s a holistic approach to the reform agenda, as we have heard the community say that there is that desire for. So the release of the Disability Royal Commission’s final report provides a pathway for the pivotal reforms that I’ve mentioned earlier. Setting out a vision for inclusive Australia and a call out for significant action for Australia’s people with disability are up held. Some of Victoria’s own reforms and initiatives were highlighted by the Disability Royal Commission as leading examples of disability inclusion. These included the Residential Tenancies Act that has specific protections for residential rights in specialist disability accommodation. The incorporation of a contemporary framework for supported decision-making under the Guardianship and Administration Act, and the application of co-design principles to reshape Victoria’s mental health and well-being system. And co-design is also one of the six systemic reforms outlined in inclusive Victoria, our state disability plan. On the 31st of July the Victorian Government released its response to the Disability Royal Commission alongside the joint response by the Commonwealth and states and territories and Victoria’s response builds on the commitments of inclusion and accessibility in our state disability plan. Of the 130 recommendations that fall within the responsibility of Victoria, either solely or jointly with the Commonwealth or other states and territories 107 were accepted in full, in principle or in part, 22 recommendations require further consideration and one recommendation was not accepted. Of the 45 recommendations that are the sole responsibility of states and territories, Victoria has accepted in full, principle or part 37 recommendations. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank and acknowledge the Victorians with disability and disability advocates, many of whom are here today who advocated for the establishment of the Disability Royal Commission and who generated…throughout the four and a half year inquiry. I’d also like to…provide submissions and testimony to the Disability Royal Commission. And I acknowledge that there has been some disappointment with the initial response. I’m keen to emphasise though that the release of the Victorian Government’s response is just the beginning of our work in responding to the Royal Commission and the Victorian Government will be considering the implementation pathways of these recommendations now and over the coming years. Your voices and voices of all people with disability will remain at the forefront of our reform efforts moving forward, as we work together to plan and implement the recommendations. As we move into the phase of considering how to implement the recommendations we look forward to working with VCOSS on a series of engagements over the coming months to inform our detailed implementation planning for both the Disability Royal Commission and broader reforms. We are working with the Commonwealth on a series of engagements on foundational supports proposed to be held in late October. The engagements will include a focus on generational foundational supports and we’re committed to sharing information with you as soon as the details are available. The Victorian Government will build on this work with further engagements on general and targeted foundational supports later this year and into 2025 when we will be able to engage in much greater detail following the release of the foundational supports strategy and that will go to a lot of those high level decisions that are still outstanding. These engagements will include a focus on underserviced groups and communities to ensure all people with disability have an opportunity to inform the decision and implementation of foundational supports and the broader reforms. Your advice and expertise is critical to our implementation planning efforts. Victoria’s also committed to transparent and robust reporting on reporting recommendations and will be providing biannual public reporting and implementation of the recommendations to the disability reform ministerial council also. While we consider how to implement the response of the Disability Royal Commission we’re also considering how to integrate the response with the NDIS Review which is forthcoming so that there’s a joined up reform agenda. In June, disability ministers across the country agreed to develop a joint response by the end of this year. We’re currently working with the Commonwealth and other states and territories to develop a joint response. A significant element of the NDIS Review has of course already been agreed to. That was the decision in December 2023 at National Cabinet to implement foundational supports, which would be designed, funded and commissioned by the Commonwealth and states and territories. The NDIS Review recommended that foundational supports be established so that some people with disability are able to access the supports they need outside of the NDIS. This is a significant change and one that seeks to build an interconnected disability ecosystem given the NDIS Review findings that there were gaps in the delivery of a broad range of supports for people with disability. We expect that the foundational supports strategy will have a lot more information about how we can plan for, coordinate and implement foundational supports across the country. And as I mentioned, we’re advocating that as soon as key details are settled the information will be shared with the disability community so there’s a clear and shared understanding of the role of foundational supports across the disability ecosystem. And implementation of the responses of the Disability Royal Commission and the NDIS Review will build on the work already well underway in Victoria, included in our commitments in our state disability plan. In 2024-25 the Victorian Government invested a further $24 million to support Victorians with disability and that included support to strengthen Victorian disability advocacy program. Students and their families also have access to NDIS navigators as part of the $23 million fighting for students with disability package and the $23 million also covered a range of other initiatives. So advocacy is set to play a significant role in the delivery of general foundational supports. As I previously mentioned, the Victorian Government is planning to work with VCOSS on a series of engagements so we’re keen to engage you and the sector, the advocacy sector as a whole on how things should work. We’re committed to working with the…to plan and implement the forthcoming reforms. We know that working closely with the disability community is essential to delivering high quality outcomes and the transformational change. We look forward to working with you to undertake this process in the near future. I’ll pause there and invite the Q&A session.
DEB: Thanks. I’m going to side step from the microphone in a moment but I’ll open up the Q&A session. Thanks so much, Lucinda, for your presentation. Looking forward to questions from the floor. I thought I might just as well quickly remark briefly on what role VCOSS might play as well. So, again, really want to acknowledge the importance of community-led and sector-led responses. So very mindful of VCOSS’s role across cross sect recall…I mentioned before ethical allyship. So around just ensuring and creating and facilitating pathways to linking up with the disability advocacy sector. Very, very mindful of the role of our peak body, disability advocacy Victoria and obviously in a national context there’s DANA as well. I do just want to make those clarifying comments. I think where we really see a very key role for VCOSS is alongside DAV providing really strong support to DARU and also I think putting a spotlight on our mainstream community services, the NDIS Review talks about an ecosystem of supports. So we really want to make sure that mainstream, like sub sectors whether it’s child and family services, family violence, homelessness, the community legal sector, that all of those sectors are aware of their responsibilities, their obligations to provide inclusive and equitable access to all Victorians with disabilities, whether they’re NDIS participants or not. This is about everyone’s right to equal service, particularly – like our universal service as well. I do just want to make that comment as well. Sorry for taking up time but I thought it was an important clarification. Keen to open up to the floor. So, Julie, you’ve got the microphone. I’m going to step aside so that Lucinda can answer questions. Thanks.
JULIE: Lucinda, you were talking a lot about co-design and liaising with VCOSS as well. My observation is and I think it’s shared by a few other people is that the government and DFFH does not have a relationship with disability representative organisations. And liaising with VCOSS in relation to the DRC recommendations with respect is not appropriate and I think this is what Deb was alluding to. It would also not be appropriate for disability advocacy Victoria to be liaised with as the primary liaison. When is DFFH – or does it realise that having an advisory committee of disability individuals and liaising with organisations that are not disability-led organisations is not meeting the requirements in the disability plan of co-design with people with disabilities and would you be open to revisiting your consultation process to ensure that the main people who are consulted about the disability recommendations, which most of us don’t accept, directly with disability community representative organisations. Thank you. And I realise these are not your personal decisions so, please, you’re very brave to come out here. Please don’t take anything personally.
LUCINDA: Thank you so much for raising that. It’s a good point because we do need to make sure that we are hearing from all different parts of the community and all different types of organisations. When I referenced working with VCOSS, it’s on the stakeholder engagement plan itself. So that we can actually make sure that we’re then going out and talking to all the right organisations and people and so we’re in that process at the moment of designing that and it’s something that I definitely take onboard and will take back and have a critical look at what we are planning because it is still being planned and make sure that we are addressing that because I think that’s a very valid point and we are keen to ensure that we are talking to lots of different types of organisations and people and we’re very conscious as well that the Commonwealth primarily deals with disability DROs and that we want Victorian organisations to be part of that conversation as well and so we’re working with them to ensure that they have a broader list of organisations that they’ll be consulting as well. So we’re really trying to step beyond what perhaps we have done in the past and ensure that a range of voices will be at the table.
DEB: I’m not sure if my lapel mic is working, is it working? Thank you. We’ve got other questions. I can see Emma my colleague has a microphone. Is there anyone with their hand up? Julianne at the back.
MARTIN: Thank you. Martin Stuart, Blind Citizens Australia. You know, the disability movement, the collective, the advocacy bodies, are completely amazed that we have had to have a suggestion for foundational support and I’ll tell you why, because it should have been designed in from the beginning. Why is it that we’re in the position that for those who fall short of qualifying for NDIS support have had other supports withdrawn? Why? Simple to us. So we’ve had to be possibly too restrained, no longer. Now, we know that you’re working on it. Who would have thought that for a system that began to roll out 2013 NDIS that its own workplace would be inaccessible for people who are blind and vision impaired and perhaps some others. How have we got to this place? I’ll tell you why. In my opinion, it’s because of what we spoke about before, the lack of people with disabilities recruited into leadership decision-making legislative roles. That’s why. And that’s why it’s so important that we heed each other’s call. Come together collectively as organisations, as individuals and really ensure that this time at last we get it right. Thank you
LUCINDA: Thank you. I’ll go to the first part of your question and comment regarding the implementation of supports outside of the NDIS over the last 10 years. As many of you would know there was the information linkages and capacity building element that was originally designed into the NDIS and for a range of reasons was not implemented as originally designed and I think that it’s quite well recognised that that was one of the issues and by the NDIS Review that having not been implemented in the way that was originally intended it did open up a gap. I think with the NDIS Review having a view to the disability ecosystem and looking at it as an ecosystem with various parts of the ecosystem needing to work together and building on additional foundational supports that there will be a more holistic range of services on which people can draw from. And I would say that Victoria is filling – we are well progressed in terms of establishing foundational supports. I think we’re one of only a few jurisdictions that keep a range of programs going when we transitioned into the NDIS where other jurisdictions did close down a lot of their programs and that money was funnelled into the NDIS and that was by design. So I think we’re now looking at how we can establish additional foundational supports to build out that ecosystem so that people can access services outside of the NDIS and that commitment was made at National Cabinet last year. And so, as I said, we’ve got quite a lot of high level decisions to be made, as to the scope and breadth of foundational supports and we’re working through that at the moment and then we’ll move into that phase of, what does it actually look like in Victoria, and design what the service system will mean here and have – and see what is happening across other jurisdictions as well because we do want to make sure that there’s that consistency across jurisdictions and that’s the work that we’ll be doing over the next while.
DEB: Thank you. I can see another hand up at the back. There’s a microphone coming to you. Thank you.
TANYA: Hi. I just wanted to – I’m Tanya. I asked a question before. I’ve always got questions. But I just want to try and – maybe if you can clarify or maybe you can kind of surmise for me how this is going to work because as we all know the NDIS has a very big pool, as far as financial gain for a lot of therapists and a lot of service providers and a lot of support workers. If somebody is not eligible for the NDIS but they need to use state funded services, mainstream services, that sort of thing, I guess where I’m going with that is it’s got to be as attractable as the financial gain that people are also making in the NDIS because we already know that when people are using mainstream services and so forth it could cost $80 to get an OT assessment or to go to an OT but as soon as they know you’ve got an NDIS plan it goes right up to $193. So there’s got to be something there that needs to be looked at to make it just as financially attractive to the states services as to what it is with the national services. Does that make sense? Or the national program.
LUCINDA: It does. Yeah. Thank you. And it’s something that we’re – it’s definitely something we’re thinking about and considering how will we address that in the design of foundational supports. Unfortunately I don’t have an answer to that today but I think that that’s something that we’re going to have to grapple with over this next period and we’re really keen for voices like yours to be involved in the engagements to raise those concerns and challenge us in the design thinking so that we do ensure that the issues that have eventuated in the current design don’t get translated into the new disability ecosystem as well.
DEB: Thank you. I can see it’s Heather, isn’t it, from YDAS. A microphone will be brought over to you. Thank you.
HEATHER: I’m Heather from Youth Disability Advocacy Service. In this conversation of the Disability Royal Commission recommendations and their implementation we hear the word support and services used a lot. What I’m not really hearing is human rights. And they’re the initial recommendations that we heard from the Disability Royal Commission. We’re not hearing that from our government in their responses but if disabled people’s fundamental human rights are up held everywhere, some of these are mainstream things we’re talking about and their costs and everything actually go away because disabled people don’t need them anymore because their rights are being up held and all of our systems are being made accessible. The other thing that I find really curious as well is that we’ve got this – with the state government we’ve got this teeny, tiny little office for disability that is funding teeny tiny little amounts to advocacy organisations who are then in turn advocating on behalf of individuals back to very large state government and federal government but state government organisations, such as child protection, the family violence system, the courts, the education system and so on. I’m really interested to hear of those bigger systems, child protection, family violence, all of those other ones, what’s their role going to know in implementing the Disability Royal Commission recommendations?
LUCINDA: Yeah, sure. Thanks. So I’ll take that in two parts. So first of all I would say the human rights of people with disability is absolutely paramount in our thinking. I think in terms of the Royal Commission’s response it was looking for legislative change and that is something that does take time to consider and look at the federal context as well as the Victorian context. It’s something that we are giving further consideration to and that is because of the complexity of the system that we are trying to change. Changing legislation always takes time and I think going to the second part of your question, there’s so many portfolios that are part of this change and so we are definitely engaging with all of the different parts. It’s a very big ship to steer and change direction and so that does take time but we are absolutely looking at what the Disability Royal Commission has said about that and seeking to work with the Commonwealth on those changes and then look at the Victorian changes that will subsequently take place as well. So that is absolutely something that we are giving much consideration to. And in that same vein we’re working very closely across the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing that has all of the portfolios – some of the portfolios you mentioned across the Victorian Government with the Department of Justice, Department of Education. We see these reforms are everybody’s business. This isn’t just about the disability area in DFFH, driving these changes and so we have across government leadership driving these changes and we’re going to be engaging through each of the departments, so leveraging some of the advocacy committees that they have or advisory committee, sorry, that they have established to receive advice and engage with people with disability through the various portfolio lenses as well so that these reforms are taken across government. And so we’ll be continuing to do that as we do our implementation planning and look at the different initiatives that we can progress in order to equip their recommendations over time.
DEB: Great. There’s one last question. Just at the front here from a fellow there. Over to you. Thank you.
SPEAKER: Hi. My name is Deb and I’m coming from ARDAS which is in the north east of Victoria. I’m listening to what’s being said by yourself, Lucinda, thank you. And many of the previous speakers. What I’m interested in knowing is who’s going to have the oversight over your government to make sure that this happens in a timely way and is there a threat that if for some reason your government doesn’t return next year, that that will still continue, whatever decisions are made. So who is going to have the oversight to make sure what you’re saying actually happens? And, B, if your government isn’t returned, is that still going to be the case?
LUCINDA: Thanks for the question. In terms of oversight, the governance body that oversees disability reform and is initially the disability reform council and that’s made up of disability ministers from across Australia and then we also do report to National Cabinet as well. So there is really high level oversight and if the government were to change there would be a change of representation into those ministerial bodies and so that would continue. That we would be engaging and we have the Royal Commission response but it’s also supported through a number of other policy positions and responses, such as the state disability plan, such as the national disability advocacy framework and other initiatives that scaffold around the response as well. And so I can’t speak to a future government and their intentions, however there has been public commitment to it, not only from a Victorian perspective but also a federal perspective and we are working towards a lot of these initiatives and, as I mentioned, Victoria very proudly is pushing forward in many different directions and so we will continue to work towards that. Sorry, there was another aspect to your question. You look like you’ve got a follow up so.
SPEAKER: I think you’ve covered it. Thanks, Lucinda.
DEB: Thank you. It’s Deb speaking again. I want to make sure we’re also respecting the time of Philip, Sandy and Jeff who are going to join us on the stage as well for a panel conversation. So we’ll draw that to a close. Thanks to all those that asked questions. Sorry we didn’t get to some. As I thank Lucinda, was it Julie or Christina earlier today used the analogy of a lion’s den that sometimes people in the room go into a lion’s den. In this case Lucinda has entered into our lion’s den today. I want to thank Lucinda for coming and fronting up the government’s response. Lucinda only found out 48 hours ago she was going to be the person speaking today so I do really want to thank Lucinda for coming and engaging. I think what I heard Lucinda say, I think this can be frustrating for the people in this room, but we’re being told it’s the beginning of a process and we’re being assured there will be co-design and it’s up to all of us to really keep pressing hard on that but in the spirit in which you’ve come into the room, Lucinda, I really want to thank you a lot and look forward to everyone in this room and people who are not in the room today having access to tables and to conversations so thanks so much for coming today. Thanks, Lucinda.
LUCINDA: I appreciate it. Thank you.
DEB: Now we’re going to move to the panel session. So it’s my pleasure to welcome Sandy Ross to the stage, Philip Waters to the stage and Jeff Smith to the stage as well. So just give us a few moments, folks, as we get ourselves organised. Okay. Thanks, again. It’s Deb again. So now we’ve got the panel session and I’m going to introduce our panellists. I know they’ll be well-known to many of you in the room but really want to pay respect to my colleagues here and introduce them properly. I have been told I talk pretty fast and I’ve been asked to slow down as I do these introductions so I’m going to try and speak a bit more slowly so that my colleagues are able to interpret at a good pace. So, first of all, I’m going to introduce Sandy Ross. Sandy is the CEO of rights, information and advocacy centre, also known to many of you as RIAC and Sandy also wears another hat, you wear many hats, Sandy, another hat and important hat in the room is that you’re the Treasurer of disability advocacy Victoria as well. Prior to working at RIAC, and this is where I first met Sandy actually, Sandy spent five years as the executive officers of Financial Counselling Victoria. Also serving on the executive committee of the Consumers Federation Australia. And Sandy’s career has included stints at the telecommunications industry ombudsman. Sandy has been an academic at the social…secretary of the CSIRO staff association and of the CSPU science division. So very, very eminent colleague on this panel. We’ve got another eminent person on the panel Philip Waters and Philip Waters is a proud deaf man. General Manager for Deaf Victoria, the peak organisation representing deaf and hard of hearing Victorians. Previously Philip was a senior human rights consultant at the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission. And while Philip was there he worked with organisations to develop diversity and inclusion action plans and gender inclusion strategies. Philip is interested in developing and engaging with partnerships with change makers in both consumer organisations and policy-makers and he’s passionate about deaf and hard of hearing people in the Pacific and I think I’d remark about developing partnerships with change makers in both consumer…cross-sectoral peak body to have Philip engaged in the work across VCOSS and really informing everything from election platforms and state budget submissions through to advocacy around inclusive education and more. So thank you for that partnering approach that you bring, Philip. My third very eminent colleague on the panel is Jeff Smith and Jeff had a chuckle there. Jeff, you are a powerhouse. Jeff is the Chief Executive Officer of disability advocacy network Australia, also known as DANA. As many of you will know DANA is the peak membership body for independent advocates in Australia. Prior to joining DANA Jeff worked as a senior executive for 15 years being a longstanding CEO of environmental offenders office NSW as well as People with Disability Australia and Jeff is a person with disability who has moved into the disability sector in recent years whilst also continuing to work in the environment sector and seeking to identify linkages between the sector. And again as a Victorian organisation we’re very respectful of and appreciate the role of DANA, Jeff, and I think there’s been a lot of challenges at the federal level with peak bodies and representative bodies over many years not being appropriately resourced to do the work and I really have lots of admiration for how DANA has pushed hard for…for peak bodies as well. So thank you. So I’m going to start with a question to all of the panel and how are people with disabilities and their representative bodies reacting to government’s proposed measures. Who would like to go first? Sandy, happy to start with you as we move along the panel this way?
SANDY: Yeah, okay. I just want to acknowledge, Deb, I’m here in the capacity as an ally. That limits, I think, my capacity to speak on certain things and I want to acknowledge that just to start with. I think we clearly are facing a big challenge in the disability advocacy sector around what’s occurring and where the politics is sitting for disability. These challenges are big and significant and Christina’s amazing address this morning highlighted the importance of just the resilience and the strength of people with disability and the allies and all of us that are working in this space are going to need to call on all of that to respond to these challenges. How do we influence and shape something that’s a lot, lot better from government at state and federal levels is really the key question, I think, for us and I don’t think it’s easy to answer that question of how. There’s going to have to be a lot of work and a lot of building of the kinds of collaborative and collective arrangements that Christina was talking about and I think though that the Royal Commission recommendations do provide us with some useful things to argue for. It’s been a very poor response so far from government to us as we can all see. So what’s our next step to make – to get them to do better, I guess, is the question for me.
DEB: Thanks, Sandy. Philip, really interested to hear your reflections around – from a deaf and hard of hearing community perspective. How is your community responded to – or reacted to government’s response so far?
PHILIP: Thank you for that, Deb. The DRC itself were really excited to get the report. There were a lot of recommendations to do with disability that we – you know, once in a generation opportunity for all of us. We were very excited to see what the outcome would be. And I think we were rather disappointed. Maybe not brave enough to say more than just a little disappointed in the recommendations in the report. The focus on deaf and hard of hearing people wasn’t there. There were a lot of recommendations for other disability groups and I was pleased to see that but for our constituents, our stakeholders, they collated a lot of stories. We had a lot of witnesses. People that gave evidence. They were pretty consistent with the messaging, yet that’s not reflected in the report. So when the government responded to the DRC we, again, were a tad disappointed that they really could have looked at what wasn’t in the report. What could have been added to it. What were the potentials. And I think they looked at the challenges. And there are a number of things that they pointed out, we’re already doing these things. We’ve already met some of these recommendations. I think we were left thinking, really? So, for example, when it comes to deaf education. Our constituents say they want other education with other deaf and hard of hearing people. We clearly stated that in our submissions. The community itself was mobilised to put in that recommendation that’s not reflected in the recommendations though. At the same time we were pleased with the Victorian Government’s response that said that at 7.15 there would be a focus on specialist schools and mainstream schools working in collaboration. So we were pleased with the Victorian Government’s response in that regard but that was the only one recommendation. They didn’t actually accept it. They looked at 7.14 which was getting rid of specialist schools but the Victorian Government we were really pleased that they did consider 7.15. That was in our favour. But in general there was no recommendations or focus on those that were deaf or hard of hearing.
DEB: Thanks for sharing that, Philip, and just really want to acknowledge for the organisation that you lead and for the community that you’re part of as well, like the work that has kind of gone into like to build that kind of confidence. For it to be safe for people to be able to share their story, to tell that story, the scaffolding around them. The debrief that happens after people render themselves even more vulnerable in terms of sharing stories. Thinking about some of the shame, the stigma, the trauma that sits around that storytelling and just want to say in solidarity I just want to acknowledge that. That the disappointment and the trauma that must come from they’re not seeing justice be done to those stories and that storytelling. So thank you for sharing those insights with us. Jeff, this question around how representative bodies are reacting to government’s proposed measures, thinking about the national ecosystem that DANA is part of. What can you share with us around the reaction or response so far to government’s proposed measures?
JEFF: Yeah. I think it was fairly universal or if I can talk from the point of view of DANA, to start with. I think the response was underwhelming is one word and a polite word in some respects but it was also demoralising for people with disability. I think it was underwhelming because we got at the federal level there were 13 recommendations which were accepted out of the 130, solely for the federal government, and that is in the context of people spending a decade getting the Royal Commission up. Four and a half years of a Royal Commission. 12 months of the government considering those recommendations and there’s all this work ahead. So there’s 117 recommendations which will fall back on all of us to push government to turn those recommendations into change. The transformative change that was promised us. The demoralising point, I think DANA is a disability-led organisation. 80% of our senior leadership team, people with disability, 60% odd of our staff are people with disability, if you take carers into account it’s just up to just over 80%. So there was quite a visceral reaction to the kind of ambivalence, if you like, of the response that we saw. Why I mention the last bit is some of the institutional changes that we were seeking around being disability-led have not come through in the recommendations. So this was a process where it was about giving people with disability control of our lives. There was a lot of the recommendations and the narrative around the Disability Royal Commission and the NDIS Review as well about people with disability being at the centre of it. We haven’t seen that. And yet we still continue, particularly in the – and I’ll stop for the moment because I’m sure future people can talk about it, we haven’t seen that. We’ve seen the government going away as a task force and coming back for things.
DEB: Thanks for sharing that, Jeff. I know I’m quoting Christina a lot but Christina is a leader of the Disability Leadership Institute and I think we want to run with a lot of the challenges, provocations and encouragement that Christina has provided us with today. Again, Christina said, people can say no. People have a right to expect better. So just, I guess, thinking about Christina’s encouragement and challenge to us. If these initial responses are really disappointing, people are feeling led down, how can we ensure that the momentum of change continues, despite that disappointment and perhaps not having that necessary, like, conditions being created in government’s response, like what can we do to, I guess, create that momentum for positive change? There was a question I was going to ask to Sandy but it might be something all of you might remark on. Is there anyone who would like to answer the question of creating that momentum of change?
JEFF: I’m happy to begin. I think the thing that flows out of my initial response is there’s still that enormous initial visceral disappointment. There’s still enormous room for agency on the part of the sector. So we’ve got – at a federal level and there’s a similar situation, I understand in Victoria. We’ve got 117 recommendations that are accepted in principle. We’ve got the imprimatur of the Royal Commission itself which I think we can hold on to. We’ve got Australia’s disability strategy that gives us a framework for implementation. So we as a sector can seek to hold the government to account around the things they’ve accepted in principle and to turn those into the change that we want to happen. No-one is resiling. Government is not resiling from the need to transformative change. We just haven’t got the kind of traction on those at the level we want. But there is enormous potential for us to use that, exercise our agency. There’s lots of mechanisms we can do to hold the government to account but I’ll leave it there for the moment.
DEB: Philip or Sandy, did you want to add to that at all? Do you have any reflections you’d like to share?
PHILIP: I’m just waiting for the interpreters to swap. Just in general when we think about state and Commonwealth governments and the staff working within them very knowledgeable when it comes to policy writing. Very knowledgeable about setting up systems but they themselves don’t have a lived experience of a person with a disability in general. They also need to have courage to ask the disability community to be more approachable, to be able to get feedback from us because we are people with a lived experience, rather than going on and doing their own thing in their towers, in isolation, and coming up with policies and processes that they end up having to render fit. They don’t fit us. We need to develop a good working relationship. We need the space to do that. We need the resources. We need the time to be able to come together and be included and be inclusive. So it was interesting the discussion today working with VCOSS and ensuring that there’s partnership with other disability organisations because often here the Victorian Government, when you compare what’s happening abroad, I think the Australian Government and the state government is forgetting who the representative organisations are and who are the service providers, that’s lost. Okay. Disability service providers they put us all in the same basket and we’re not. We’ve quite distinct. And it’s important we have a voice. We have disability organisations that represent people with a disability and we have service providers. It’s important, yes, to consult with both. Both parties have something to say but I think it’s really important that they consult with people with a lived experience so the Office of Disability, the NDIS reform, we need to have – and VCOSS, we need to have a good discussion between us. So just to give you one example. When it comes to the state government and state government doing better, one of the recommendations in the DRC 7.2 with regard to the Auslan workforce and we want to grow the pool of Auslan interpreters. Now, that sounds good but there’s a lot more to it. It’s multilayered. So deaf Vic and ASLITA, they’re the peak body of interpreters came together and sent a letter off to the Minister for industry and housing. We actually offered free – our time to give them advice. The Victorian Government response was that they are going to develop a strategy to increase the pool of Auslan interpreters. They’re meant to come up with that approach by September. Okay. So we sent off a letter two months ago. We received an acknowledgment letter of our email and a week later we received another letter, which was a thank you. That was it. That was the extent of the communications. We offered. We offered. We put ourselves out there. Where is the interest? Once again, we have to then approach them, knock on the door and us to be included. It’s more than just training interpreters. We need to have deaf organisations and interpreters coming together. Yes, we could do better. We need more representation. So government departments are responsible for specific recommendations and they need to find people with that lived experience. That knowledge. And they need to bring them onboard early. Don’t wait until you’re about to announce the plans and the processes that you want to put in place.
DEB: Thank you so much, Phil, and I think that what I’m kind of picking up from your remarks and like your reflections on strategies that you’ve tried and then how you need to recalibrate the strategies goes to some of the things that Christina was talking about earlier this morning, which is that something that you might politely construct as an offer actually is about reframing and saying, actually it’s not just an offer. It’s actually an expectation. Like this is the way we expect you to lever in our expertise and also that comes with a price as well you actually have to invest in resourcing that capacity in order to leverage that capability. So I think some really interesting insights there.
PHILIP: I think I’ll make a call tomorrow morning, Deb, and take you up on that.
DEB: Do you have any reflections to this question and start to put your hands up for questions for the panel, if people have them.
SANDY: I haven’t got a lot to add, Deb. Pretty amazing responses from Jeff and from Philip. Again, I just come back to Christina’s address. She said so many things that were just so fundamental to, I think, acknowledging the strengths that people with disability bring to all of this. The lived experience, the passion, the resilience, all those things are just so crucial to building what has to be in the end a collective response but it’s complicated. It’s hard. It’s going to take courage. Because of all the diversity in the sector. It’s so easy for that to be lost. I mean, I think the things that Philip was talking about just reflect how things get so, so lost and so easily dismissed or not heard. So that is a massive challenge but the answer, I think, is things like this conference today. I mean, I thought it was fantastic to watch the interactions with the people here with Lucinda’s address. I mean, that to me was just gold. I mean, this is the stuff that we need to be doing. It’s a long road but I think – yeah. There’s so much capacity here as well to build on.
DEB: Thank you. Are there any – I can see hands going up just towards the back. Julianne is coming with a microphone. Thank you. If you can just introduce yourself as well.
MARTIN: Martin Stuart, Blind Citizens Australia. Just imagine this, February ’15 approximately. We as a collective put out a media release, all of us, signatories, CEOs, sorry, Deb, I didn’t ask you before saying that. That’s my CEO. Imagine we put out at the beginning before our election campaign how we feel, what we think, what we know, and we speak to not only people with disabilities but to those who are related, who have family members. We speak about our productivity that would increase to become taxpayers, more likely to be if things are heard and therefore improve. So in my view this is an opportunity that we should be building now to create to release around that time. Not much point doing it now because it will dissolve into a bit of sugar and a cup of coffee and you know what happens, it eventually dissolves. We don’t want that. We want it to gain traction and be in the voter’s minds when they go to do just that. So that’s my solution-based and it is when I say solution-based. It won’t necessarily be the solution but it may create the solution. Let’s be honest here. We have not got a major political friend currently. The people who made the system, for example, the NDIS have let us down. You know who you are. The people who may be an alternative to the current government, well, they need to hear us. I think that’s the only way we’re going to gain traction. To make this an election issue. Point towards it. Have people think about their family members, if they’re not a person with a disability. Have people with disabilities agree with us because I’m sure we will be projecting their voice. Thank you
DEB: Thanks so much, Martin. I think that’s a really good opportunity for the panel to perhaps reflect on, what are some of the strategies that we can be using to effectively mobilise public and political fraught to push for more political change. Martin has talked about media advocacy as a tactic. Linking that to the election cycle….recognising that we’re not starting from a blank sheet. This is a community that has significant power and are able to really lean into that and realise its full potential. Any ideas from the panel?
JEFF: I’m happy to start, if you like. Yes, I agree with all those sentiments. I think we do have enormous power. I think we forget sometimes how much power we have, particularly if we’re united around that. So DANA did some work around a priorities project and that was a priorities project that was around looking at the big – I’m interested that Philip used the word – the term rather before that we’re in a generational moment. Exactly the same term I’ve been using as well. Despite the underwhelming response, et cetera, et cetera, it is a really exciting time. There is the power for change that still exists at the moment. The priorities project work that we did, did two things. It straddled the big reform processes. It was disability-led and that profoundly influenced the outcomes. We spoke to 130 people. We spoke to our members. We spoke to individual advocates. We spoke to people with disability. We spoke to the disability representative organisations and so on. The issues that came out of us straddled both the federal and the state. So things like foundational supports. It was advocacy itself. It was representation and inclusion about having people with disability at the centre. It was around eligibility and access for disability supports, which again is NDIS and outside the NDIS. So all those issues can unite us in the way that we move forward. It’s also becoming a bit of a model out there. I spoke before about continually trying to knock on the door around, nothing about us without us. I was at a session where we were hearing from the task force about the Disability Royal Commission the other day. Someone put their hand up and said, why is this taking so long? He said, well, you’ve got to remember that there’s nine entities around the table and they’ve got to agree and then we’ve got to go out to the community. We want to have 10 entities around the table, the 10th being us. Right. That’s what we need to change. That is the current abiding, if you like, DSS and task force model, despite where we’re trying to get to. But with the agency some of the changes they’ve had in the NDIA recently, where they’ve got a Board which is disability-led and some of the changes at the top, we’re now trying a – I call it shared decision-making light, because it is a little bit light, but DANA plays a role in that space about co-chairing the three monthly forums with the agency and that co-chairing means devising the agenda, putting the issues of the DCROs on the agenda, going back to them and prosecuting the case and so on and so forth. So there is a model out there we can use and go to government and say, no, it’s not about you working out what you want to do and coming back to us. We want to be at the table at the outset and I think we should keep focusing on that and keep pressing on that in and of itself.
DEB: Thank you. I think I’m running a bit short on time. Yes, I am. People have got to get to lunch. I might just see if Sandy and Philip have any other closing comments around mobilising strategies briefly and then we’ll draw this session to a close. Thank you.
SANDY: I’ll keep it brief. I would say go out and visit with your local MPs, state and federal, be in their face about these issues. Constantly be agitating on this stuff and I think the direct interactions with local MPs strikes me as maybe something we can do more in. It helps to shift the whole atmosphere around the sense of what’s required and that’s what we need. We need to shift that, I think. So that strikes me as one fairly simple kind of thing that we can – and it’s good to – when you’re doing that to share with everyone else about what you’re doing. So we all have a sense of what’s going on and what’s being said and we can do that in a collaborative way.
DEB: Great. Thank you, Sandy. Final word from you, Philip.
PHILIP: Just a very quick word. I think the focusing is on solutioning the answers. People can talk about problems all day. Okay. There’s plenty of problems. We’ll never finish that discussion. But that monologue. So we need to think about media and other organisations and governments and getting their focus on the answer, the solutioning. That’s where our focus needs to be. To be able to assist them in developing that solutioning. And government is public service. To make sure that they are also brave and courageous in listening to us and getting us onboard. Not paying expensive consultants or doing it inhouse but speaking to us.
DEB: Thank you. Thanks for that. And that draws this session to a close. Sorry it’s gone a little bit over but I’m sure you’ll all agree it was really valuable so thank you and look forward to a lovely lunch. Thanks.
MELISSA: Wow. Thank you very much to Sandy, Jeff, Philip and Deb for this fantastic conversation. We’ve all gained a lot from it. I think the conversation still needs to continue so please continue the conversation over lunch. I encourage you to continue connecting and discussing what you’ve heard. Remember to use the QR codes and also in the corner just where the little couch is next to the window a video station will be set up. So please go over there and do your little interviews and tell us what you think. Tell us how you’re feeling about the Disability Royal Commission or anything else that you’ve heard today. I encourage you to bring your lunch back at 1.15 because we’ve got a really, really special performance for you all. See you soon. Enjoy.
Afternoon – Session 1
Navigating the NDIS Amendment (Getting the NDIS Back on Track No.1) Bill 2024 – What Advocates Need to Know
Afternoon Session 1 - Transcript
DARREN: So a good choice of song. Appropriate choice of song. So the first thing I wanted to say is, there are so many people in this room who could give this presentation who are far more in the trenches than I am and I think one of the things we’re going to come across in reform is continually being led by people with disability. So I’m showing up here today looking to be led by your questions, and we are going to have time for questions, if I can shorten my speech I certainly do. I’m looking to respond to whatever you want to ask me. So I’m a little bit nervous about the tone set by the podium and the stage. It’s been a time. It is being a time, quite a time, and obviously when we meet and talk about disability, we are talking about something that is so complex, in terms of policy and law, that the people in this room, all of you, work everyday in a sector that is so volatile, so complex and so meaningful that we should never forget the value of a fight and in my tone today I want to make sure that whenever we talk about any negatives in the Bill, we’re also talk about how we continue to channel it towards the positive. We also talk about the achievements between the drafts of this Bill because people really showed up to do that thing, people with disability and their families have to do too often, which is educate. Show themselves and their lives to government and say, that doesn’t work, do you even see us? And I’d like to think even when people might have concerns about this Act, because it is an Act, always remember what the first draft was and then look at the finished act. It’s a much better piece of legislation after people with disability, their advocates and their representatives got their hands on it. Now, today the key thing is what are the key action items? Okay. And one of the dynamics that we’re all going to face over the coming years is the need to handle short-term imperatives, change that is happening in two weeks versus not missing the bigger picture, the vital divine moments when the course will be set. So we’re not reacting to reform, we’re not submitting on reforms, we also need to be shaping them, as best we can. What I’m going to do is try and talk about the short-term changes you will see, the case work you might come across and then we’ll look at the key design moments because I’m not showing up today with any kind of master narrative. I’m not trying to sell you on reform or sell you against even the Act. Fundamentally we’re not at a time where you can run a mast or a narrative on what’s happening. So words like dismantle appear maybe on social media. On the other side you could be holding up a phone finger with NDIS Review and we all have a script we’ve all agreed and we’re about to deliver on something fantastic. It’s far too premature to know where we’re ending up. The key thing this Bill, this Act did was open up space, open up space for change. Ultimately reform is going to be about stringing together concrete decisions. No change was ever made with law. No change was ever made with a nice report. The history of the NDIS tells us that it’s all about the relationships at the heart of the scheme and how people interact to make everyday decisions and we are going to have to build a chain of moments to deliver a successful reform. There will not be a big bang, it all comes into existence. Now, if we look at the critical challenge that’s about to arise in about two weeks the media reporting was not great. I think everyone would probably agree with that. It was quite problematic in its framing and there will be a session later on I see talking about that key issue about how do we talk about disability in this country because the frame is more important than any detail in any Act. But any piece has started to say, throw out there 14 billion and the then the word court will follow or the other side will say 14 billion refers to slow in growth, we are still growing. Okay. Now, I’m not going to enter that debate but this 14 billion figure is in the budget papers and it’s very important to understand where the 14 billion in savings, I’m not going to use a term like cults, 14 billion in savings where the agency has modelled where it’s going to get that money and it is in a very precise cohort of your clients. The cohort they are targeting for two-thirds of that money 8 billion is the cohort who over utilise their plans. So at the very tail end of the senate inquiry we finally got the study on which the savings are based. It was conducted in November last year. They took 113 participants and they looked at why are these participants requesting change of circumstances. Why are they over utilising their plan? Why are the funds exhausting before the plan ends? And the agency is buried, well buried under the pilot website. It’s a question I’ve noticed – I mean, I’m happy to circulate to Melissa or whoever if people want to read it, but the key thing is out of those cases 39% were legitimate change of circumstances. People you service and help. People in crisis situations. People whose home and living arrangements changed suddenly, whose informal support system collapses and they need increased support. So those change of circumstances clients under this Act there is still a mechanism to help them but it is tied around risk and threat to health and safety. Okay. So first thing is first, always no matter what the media is saying about cracking down on plan inflation and the plan is the plan, there is absolutely a mechanism to help somebody in crisis in this Act. You may have to use it and know that it’s there. 46% of the plans the agency could see no increased need. And the agency again had, and I’m just going to look at their data just to have it in front of me, so the 22% of participants in the study were accessing more or different supports funded, no increase support need. 20% were found…accessing supports requested but not funded. No increased support need was the category. And those were the two largest categories. Now, I’m going straight then to the cohort you’re going to have to watch in the coming weeks and months. If you have clients in those cohorts on either side of the line they may encounter increased regulation using this Act. And obviously we’re going to get into the list in a second, the list of what is an NDIS support. There are also due powers for the agency where there has been noncompliance of spending in the past to switch someone’s plan management, okay, to take them off self-managed. So I think all of us, I think when we throw to questions, I think a lot of you will already be encountering this because I’m already encountering this, a high degree of emphasis on compliance spending, spending to the plan and I guess I’ve become – you know, the tone is already down. How do we engage with this, it’s 8 billion. There’s going to be a lot of work done by the agency to get people to stick to the plan. To claim for the right support that’s specified in the plan and they believe a lot of people need it based on this study. For us, I think, the key message needs to be, this is about the agency’s responsibility, not about people with disability. There needs to be a process of designing out the confusion that might underpin these numbers. A process of designing out the abuse that might underpin these numbers, but the whole point is it is on the agency to design processes to support people into understanding, support people into safety and support people into better spending. We should not see in the coming months things like crackdowns and compliance, which lump the issues over the net at participants. What are you doing to communicate and design your systems better? It’s time to interrogate the agency. Now, like everyone – every participant and every family of participant I received the email announcing the changes this week and you will have noticed the tone because they know that there’s an awful lot of fear out there. And when I make these comments I am not about engendering fear for any kind of agenda. Okay. The agency is committing to, as we move to a new definition of NDIS support, as it begins the process of funding periods in plans, checking invoices more closely, it is committed to doing that in a way which is centred on assistance. Now, all of you would be looking at me and going, I’d like to get them on the phone to get that assistance. Okay. I’m not going to show up here and act like that’s an easy thing. But that tone is something we have to lean into. Okay. And the most likely thing that’s going to happen is not a debt, dare I say that word which is becoming very prominent in discussions around the scheme, it is going to be a declined payment. Okay. It’s going to be a checked in voice and a, sorry, you can’t claim for that payment. People need a real and practical clearing house. I’m standing here. I thought I would have the definition of what an NDIS support is to discuss, I don’t have it yet. Okay. We’re still waiting. Clearly in this situation a very loud and strong message needs to go out that you don’t start to do anything, disciplinary or punitive until you get your systems in order. Okay. Now, the second point I’d make and the second thing I’ve already started touching on, so we have to have an eye out for the clients who need the change of circumstance and make sure they find their way to the extra support they need. We need to begin a campaign of talking to people about how to use plans effectively. That key bit of consumer work that advocates need to be at the forefront of. Okay. The second stream is obviously, I’ve started dipping into it, the list of supports. Okay. Now, two things here. I can’t do the entire interface between the NDIS and other support systems. First of all, the day-to-day living cost debate, that’s probably the biggest area that peak organisations have put submissions in on. More people are going to have to show that things they have bought, whether it be an airconditioner, so many examples, where they have bought a product that is generally available the person with disability will have to show that it is solely and directly because of their disability. And they will have to show what a person showed yesterday in the AAT because irony of ironies the agency got it wrong in the AAT again yesterday. And a participant was able to show that their increased electricity costs were solely and directly due to their need to thermoregulate and the devices they need to run their household in a safe way given that they have disabilities. Now, what did the person with disability have to do? It’s up on AustLII if anyone wants to look at it, a case called Drayton. They did the extraordinary act of itemising their electricity bill. Of getting the average usage by Australians. Marrying it up. Then accounting for the concession scheme that exists at state government level. So you can imagine the complex and extraordinary accountancy a person with disability had to show to meet the solely and directly standard but the key point here is what’s the call, the practical call? Humility from the agency. Again, we cannot have a ramp up in evidential demands on people with disability and we definitely don’t want a system that varies in outcome depending on whether you can explain why you purchase something using the right magic words and you can tell by my tone I’m worried about that happening. That if a person picks up the phone to the agency and describes it in a way that is…the Act has a mechanism to help people. Okay. So there is a white listing mechanism which arrived late and hot in the proceedings in parliament. I very much would have liked to have put a submission in on the white listing provision but you can apply to the agency for a discretionary decision that the support you have bought is better than the NDIS support alternative. So it’s a process of substituting an NDIS support with something else and you have to prove that it is cheaper, that it delivers a better outcome and the agency can look at that situation and say, okay. We’ll white list this purchase. You can have that item. Okay. So very important to push out knowledge, change of circumstances exist. Use it. Be aware that that’s the cohort that’s going to experience the biggest change or the biggest amount of interaction with the agency. And then in terms of support lists, the white listing, get your applications in. Get participants making contact with the agency as early as possible before they are spending on anything that’s a line…call. Now I’m going to end then before we end for questions on the bigger picture and the biggest thing this Bill did is, of course, the budget. Okay. And everyone who got that email this week from the agency will have seen that at the basic level we are moving from line by line plans to the flexible global budget. Now, for advocates, particularly those who grew very accustomed to taking appeals to the tribunal it’s really important to understand and work on the change model. We can’t live in the old world where you could go to the tribunal and argue everything and persuade the tribunal member and you would get a different form of decision-making because in 12 to 18 months every dollar in every plan will be determined according to the same method. Every person will undergo an assessment. We have to pick the two. Once that assessment result is in that will be used to – as input in a method not yet written that will produce the total budget. Now, the key thing in terms of advocacy work is the AAT, the tribunal system, must follow the method. All it can do, if you appeal to the tribunal is say, we think you got the process wrong. You need to do the independent assessment again. And that’s a really important change in the sense that a tribunal member cannot make findings about how many needs your client has and they can’t decide how much your client gets. A tribunal appeal in 18 months’ time looks fundamentally different. It’s the independent assessment went wrong, we want our client reassessed. And that tells us where we’ve got to focus our energy, in terms of where the ball gain is. It is in the assessment tool and the method. Neither are written yet and who gets to write them and the influence people with disability have over their creation is everything now. Absolutely everything. How has the agency gone when it’s used assessment tools in its process? And it does use assessment tools in its process, it actually is inconsistent in which one it uses and that’s been an argument for reform. The audit office in 2023 gave a lovely report on assistance with daily living, which as we know is the largest support in the scheme in terms of outlay. Okay. And what they found there’s buried in it is wholesale variance, depending on what tool was used and depending on which tool was used on which disability. So assessment tools are inherently controversial. Assessment tools need to be carefully watched and people need to be accountable for what they produce, who has failed and who is supported by them. Okay. It’s not the case that I’m rejecting the expertise of those who create them but we have got to, I think, coming up to an election, I’m really worried that the election will be all about, we are fixing the NDIS. We are reforming the NDIS. And not about very specific demands. People with disability need to be at the table when the validation process for the two is created. People with disability need to be the ones who shape which is the population that is used to define whether this thing works. So…we want to see every bit of data about the tool that we’re going to use, we want to see what has failed by it, what it captures and what it values. And the same goes for the method. Because fundamentally what the vision will be is a vision of servicing for your clients. And I did a session with Ebe Ganon who is a fantastic disability leader and she said something that really stuck with me when we were doing a session together, I’m really worried that academics will be all over that process. Can I say as an academic I thought that was so important what Ebe said. When it comes to the method you are talking about what it takes for a person with disability to achieve their goals. Who is the expert in that? It isn’t sitting at the university of impactful sand stone. It’s sitting in our communities. And we have got to make sure the politicians go out into communities. They explain why this amount that is built into the method is enough and what it does and there’s a powerful incentive to use technicality and scoring, to obscure what people are actually getting. So those are my fundamental thoughts. In for the challenge.
MELISSA: Thank you, Darren. We’ll take about 10 minutes of questions so if you want to raise your hand a microphone will run over to you shortly. We’ve got this man in the black hat over here first.
SPEAKER: Hi Darren. Thank you for your time today and your time over the last nine months. From my point of view this Bill, one of the reasons why this Bill exists today is because the agency will tell you that they don’t have the capacity to make the right decisions with the old framework…what’s your optimism about the agency being able to do their job under the new framework?
DARREN: I’ll chat to you afterwards. It’s funny, I don’t get out much. I come here and recognise so many people. It’s lovely to see you all. But, look, what was the brief that was certainty to the Minister justifying the reform? What did it say? It’s very clear what it said. It said, there is too much contestability and inconsistency in the world of funding. The old framework model, you got differing amounts based on the goals you nominated. It was – there was an assessment tool in the old model. Like I used to come – I came here to this event a few years ago and we would talk about why is it that people get one thing at the AAT and one thing on the frontline. It’s because the frontline decision-making ran off of two short cuts. One was a severity assessment which was a functional assessment. If you could pay for a functional assessment you would get a higher rating and you’d get a higher funding. So there was that inequality. The second thing was the guided planning process which was a system of scoring. Now, there was the discretion to override that and that’s where you had another layer where you would have variable experience based on who the planner was and the Taylor Fry report page 138 showed what the planner was getting back, the KPI. There was a little line in there that said, we accept reversion effects in the creation of plans. Now, what’s a reversion effect? Basically if a planner had the discretion to award 6,000, they would give 5,999 and then all the plans would be at 5,900 and they would cluster. So when the agency launched a crackdown everyone would fall in line so you would see terrible things happen in the old model. So fundamentally if you were advocating for the new framework because what do people want to see? People are always positioning advocates as…what do I want to see? I want to see a publicly stated defined definition of needs that we’re trying to meet and is respondent a servicing vision for people. So we think we can get you a great outcome in this space with this figure and here are our workings. And then you’re getting the vision that’s been designed by all of us in a co-design world everyone is getting a servicing vision that is centralised and worked on by all of us as a community. We’re not getting volatility and whatever evidence people had to hand in the room on the day. So I am capable of positivity but like I think – the advice the Minister will be the planner has to do far less now. People can go to their planning meeting and they will be told, this is the model we have for you. Now, let’s hope the model is a good one but people won’t be going to the meeting saying, the…over me. I don’t know who this person is and they’re going to shape my life.
CHRISTINA: Hi Darren, Christina Ryan. We’re in the same room, so exciting. I’m really interested in understanding how much they think this is implementing the CRPD. What the human rights alignment part is. And how they are expressing that through the legislation. I’m a bit out of the loop now with these sorts of things so I’m relying on you to know that. That nexus. How are they going to turn up next time at their CRPD reporting and say, yeah, we got the NDIS so that’s one of our answers to implementing the CRPD. Yeah. But what does it look like? How does that actually do the job?
DARREN: So there was a big CRPD moment – when the first draft came out it was clear to me as a legal professional the Department of Social Services held a very conservative legal advice on the convention and I think people saw Commissioner Rosemary Kayess have a real moment of leadership early on in the senate inquiry where she expressed concerns that the Bill was not capturing the CRPD. There are basically part of the Royal Commission discussion is the division of labour between the states and the federal government. The federal government is responsible for implementing the CRPD. That is a holistic responsibility. We’re outcomes-based as we’ve always said. I don’t care if something lies on the stateside or federal side, as long as it’s met. I’m totally agnostic intergovernmentally. But what was really interesting was an argument was mobilised that only parts of the CRPD are sufficiently specific for federal government to legislate on. So very technical, Christina, but what I would say is I have some concern, and all of you would have read some of the enormous response to the Royal Commission report, there’s an emphasis on sending part of the stuff back to the states and some of that is not appreciating the CRPD challenge. So it’s very important for us as a sector that we are always in meetings, underlining to the federal government you have all the responsibility, you have all the power you need because of the achievement of people with disability internationally. So that’s a moment of concern. I guess I think the reason I talked about the 14 billion figure so directly is it’s very important to say and say to it, I think one of the reasons why they’ve started where they’ve started is to see, is there a saving in just running the thing according to the plans. So if you’re being optimistic about this, when they show up to the UN they will say, we haven’t actually caught the scheme. We have run it to the design of the plans. And the hope about the savings target is it isn’t a cop, it is targeting the spending of the need. I’m not advocating this. So understand that people are looking at the same information and seeing it in different ways. The biggest thing though is disability support needs is the key term in the Act. That needs to be defined as including CRPD principles, participation, all the stuff, Christina. At the moment we don’t have a definition of disability support needs because it’s going to come later. So we have to make sure when we start discussing what are the needs in the functional assessment tool they are all the things in the CRPD.
PATRICK: Patrick McGee from Disability Advocacy Victoria. Why do you think independent assessments were sought so hard by the advocacy sector and one when a…government was in whereas we have let them go in under a Labor government
DARREN: One of the things that annoys me the most about this Act, I think, is the way that people with disability have been conducted by the mainstream media. So I made that point about neigh saying neigh bobs about negativism which is a quote from an American politician. I think sometimes it suits politician’s interest to say that people with disability have one tone which is their stakeholder and they will always ask for more, more and that’s just the way it’s going to be. I think it’s more respectful to say that people with disability have all the abilities and all the concerns of the community and clearly concerns around sustainability were independently investigated. The work was done. We couldn’t even get a financial sustainability report back at the time of the first proposal. You couldn’t even – like imagine that. We’re talking about co-design now but there was a time in the scheme when you couldn’t get any kind of financial analysis of what’s going on. Couldn’t get it. Whatever you – I mean, one answer to your question, Patrick, is…politics. Pragmatism, the sustainability argument. I think all of those shaped it. But also I think the argument about – like I think we as a – like the comment I made there, there was always a functional assessment in the scheme. Did that surprise people? Like part of this was that this thing was a black box for years and people with disability and their representatives were locked out of key parts of the decision-making. So I think that point would be my way of thinking about it there was already a functional assessment for a lot of people in the scheme betterment to government.
SPEAKER: Hello…from women with disability Victoria. I was just thinking about the data that you saw and how the inquiry was made as to the spending of people’s plans, like did they take into consideration the cost of providers and the price guide, you know, like –
DARREN: Sorry, this will be the last question but it is a very good one. That is an example where people with disability have to have power. Think of the power of being able to pick 113 participants. Put it into a slide deck. Send it to the Minister and have that translated to legislation. That was a very complex review to carry out. It was carried out by two people. We can’t have that policy process. When I shared it I wasn’t endorsing it. 113 participants looked at. We needed to be in the room when that study was conducted. We needed to be driving that and we needed it a lot earlier in the process because what does it reflect? What would those might look like if they had advocacy support, folks? What are we measuring? Data is gold for us. So understand that some of the demands met by government we want following studies of following things. Where is the utilisation of…complain about politicians, get our hands on power and power is very often data is stories. So that’s the lesson I’m taking from that study. Obviously I didn’t intend on endorsing it but I have to declare it because that’s the typology they’re carrying into the reform goes. Thanks.
Afternoon – Session 2
Panel Discussion: Making Victoria the Safer State- Safeguarding People with disability against Violence Abuse Neglect and Exploitation
Facilitated by: Julie Phillips, Disability Advocacy Victoria
Speakers:
- Tanya Harding, Team Leader, Advocacy and NDIS Appeals, Rights Information and Advocacy Centre
- Dan Stubbs, Victorian Disability Worker Commissioner
- Colleen Pearce, Public Advocate
Afternoon Session 2 - Audio transcript
JULIE: Hi again, everybody. So the title of this is up here, making Victoria the safer state safeguarding people with disability against violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation. So as you know, and we’ve talked about a lot today, the Disability Royal Commission assisted in exposing the level of violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation against people with disabilities and they exposed that to the general population because of course we all knew about it. I don’t know about you but I haven’t seen any positive changes in the manner in which people with disabilities have been treated since these stories came out through the Disability Royal Commission or afterwards. And on top of that as has been said a few times today we also know the state and federal responses to the DRC have been pitfall and the recommendation in relation to the improvement of legal oversight and regulation for the authorisation review and oversight of restrictive practices was only accepted in part by the Victorian Government. And on top of that as many of you know the Victorian Government has a plan to shut down disability specific regulators. So there are a lot of reasons why people with disabilities are subjected to violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation, none of them good reasons, and to stop this abuse we need a multipronged approach and today we’re looking at the part that regulators play. So who do we have here? Starting furthest away, Dan Stubbs is the Disability Worker Commissioner and was appointed that in 2019. As Commissioner Dan is responsible for the regulating the conduct for Victorian disability workers. I have written on my cheat sheet all Victorian disability workers but that is actually not the case and we will get to that. He responds to complaints about disability workers and has the power to ban workers from the sector for breaching the Code of Conduct. Dan is passionate about the rights and entitlements of people with disabilities. Previously he worked in the community legal sector as a lawyer and in various leadership roles. He has also worked extensively in developing countries where he led work on disability. I didn’t know that. Dan also has a long history of leadership in Australian systemic advocacy organisations of people with a disability. Tanya, Tanya Harding, is the team leader of advocacy and NDIS appeals and works for RIAC. Tanya is deeply committed to promoting the rights and well-being of individuals with disabilities. As a disability advocate she has, like many of you here today, witnessed the challenges faced by individuals with disability, whether physical, sensory or cognitive and their families. These challenges range from access barriers to discriminatory attitudes. Tanya describes her purpose as dismantling barriers to create a more inclusive world, amplifying the voices of people with disability and empowering people to navigate complex systems and speak up. Colleen Pearce. Colleen is a proud Yuin woman who became Victoria’s first public advocate, a position she has held since 2007. As a last resort…under legislation she is also Chair of the community visitor Boards. Colleen fiercely advocates for the human rights and interests of people with a disability and a mental illness. She has more than 40 years’ experience managing community and health services in both the government and nongovernment sectors. Her outstanding contribution to community services in Victoria was recognised with a Commonwealth Centenary Medal. She was added to the Victorian honour role of women in 2016. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from RMIT in recognition of her work in the disability sector in 2018. In 2020, she was awarded an Order of Australia medal. Colleen is also a Board member of connecting home, an organisation that works with the Victorian Stolen Generations. Welcome, everybody. Very impressive line up. We are very lucky. So I’m just going to throw open a question to everybody and see if anyone specifically wants to answer it, and maybe you all do, and my first one is, what does good regulation look like and how can it change our social landscape? Who wants to jump in first on that one?
DAN: I’ll give it a go.
JULIE: Dan, thank you.
DAN: I’m going to state the obvious so that others can add to it and disagree. But I think good regulation – but first of all thank you for inviting me to this amazing conference. It’s such an amazing privilege to come and talk to advocates. Good regulators are independent from obviously the organisations and the people they regulate and from government and so that makes good regulators fearless to criticise, either the government who provides the funding to that sector, or the organisations and people that deliver those services in our case. I also think in our case the other side of good regulation is constantly thinking about those who you work for. Those who I work for. Otherwise talked about in a more paternalistic way is those who we protect. People with disabilities. And we, as a regulator, whilst holding that independence carefully and strongly I think we also do that other hard piece of constantly checking with people with disabilities and their allies, including advocates, about how we do it better. What do you need from us? And I think that’s a never ending, kind of, process where we ask people to the table to give us critical feedback about how we do it better. I’m sure there’s other aspects to it and I’d love to hear from Tanya and Colleen.
JULIE: Any additions to that.
TANYA: I have a whole list. I can…if that’s okay. I’m more on the view of more stricter consequences for providers and workers that are not doing the right things. I am sick and tired of sitting with people on a daily basis who are either too scared to speak up for fear of either missing out or not being able to get another service provider. They’re too scared to speak up because – or they’re not wanting to speak up because nothing happens anyway. I think that stricter consequences for violators needs to happen. How we do that I’m not asking, like I don’t know the answers to that, but I think that there needs to be more meaningful and quicker penalties handed down to those providers or workers that are doing the wrong thing. I look at the example of WorkSafe where penalties came in against providers for not having proper workplaces safe. I think that we need to go down those lines, how we do that I don’t know because I’m not legally minded or anything like that, but I think that that needs to happen. They shouldn’t – you know, I don’t know how this could even be managed or worked on, I’m just throwing things out here, Dan, I’ve just got a list, service providers shouldn’t be able to, if they’ve been found doing the wrong thing, they’re then able to get another ABN, maybe under another name or assuming name and continue the same abuse, exploitation or neglect. The checks and balances. I really struggle with why – I think Commissions need to have the checks and balances in place face-to-face because people can tell you whatever they like over the phone, but unless you actually walk into someone’s home and see what’s actually happening and see what evidence there is that they’re actually providing the supports that they say they’re providing. Empowering people with disabilities. Like we say empowering people with educating them and sticking up for their rights. This is also training…and service providers needs to be recognised. There needs to be the checks on those. I know they’re in the codes of conduct. But are they ever checked on? …these people working with our most vulnerable people are actually being checked on? I don’t think so. Sorry, I’ve got a list. Sorry, Colleen. (Tanya).
COLLEEN: Keep going.
TANYA: Proactive measures around having regular audits and risk assessments. Trying to mitigate those potential risks before they result in the harm. That proactive sort of stuff. The…people don’t trust Commissions. They just don’t. Look at our Royal Commission right now. That’s come back with an absolute flop and people poured their heart and soul and it took advocates an amazing strength to try and even bring people to the table to even report their stories and actually really sell their stories and tell what it’s like to live with a disability and how wrongly they’ve been done by. And look what’s happened. How does this even happen? I know we’ve all been asking that. I don’t think things are checked on. I don’t think there’s enough face-to-face visits. I think often people say to me, but they’re taking the side of the service provider. Tanya, they’re not believing me. What do you say to a parent when they’ve got a child in a residential setting who has been dragged by her hair, shoved up against a wall, not able to access the fridge because she’s had too much to eat and is being restricted in every shape or form. How do you tell a parent that that’s okay because the Royal Commission will try and fix things because we’ve reported all of that and then months down the track nothing happens and things are still the same. This lady is not being abused by the way now, but we’ve got parents that lie awake at night because of their children worried about them being abused or neglected. I’m just raising all of these concerns. And I think that there’s a legal and social accountability that strong regulations ensure that perpetrators of abuse are held accountable, and I don’t think people are held accountable. They get a – I’ve worked a lot with a couple of Commissioners, including yours, Dan, trust me they’re amazing. I got a response within two hours but I was dumbfounded. It was amazing. It was wonderful. However, but then the heat is off a little bit and you don’t hear anything for five to six months. That’s a really long timeframe. We’ve got people that need results quicker. We need quicker and faster responses and more accountable responses. That was my list.
JULIE: Thank you, Tanya. Colleen, do you have anything to add?
COLLEEN: Look, I wanted to support many of the things that Tanya said. I just wanted to emphasise a couple of things. One is that regulation in and of itself will not safeguard people with disabilities. We need a broader system and we do need, what Tanya was talking about, to be able to monitor and typically regulators don’t have the resources. Community visitors do do some of that monitoring but we would say we visit less than 40% of people with disabilities in disability housing, in acute mental health services and SRSs. We just simply don’t have the resources and with the explosion in accommodation, which is a good thing, but we don’t have the resources to be able to see people and without people on the ground you are never going to find out what is happening in places where often people are very, very isolated. And I think the other thing too to think about is that we really need to have good legislation. If regulation has poor legislation it doesn’t have the powers that Tanya was talking about. Then regulation will just simply not do its job. And then on top of that you’ve got to have the will power of the regulator because in the past I’ve seen regulators who just are weak as dishwasher and they may have some regulation but goodness me trying to get them to act and trying to get them to act in a timely way and then trying to get them to tell you what they did. So I think there is strength in the new social services regulator. So let’s see what happens there. But regulation is insufficient to safeguard people with a disability.
TANYA: So how do we get that fixed? What do we do with that?
JULIE: Hey, I’m asking the questions.
TANYA: Where’s that Darren? He’s smart, isn’t he? Naomi, your team, you guys can work out that, can’t you?
JULIE: Well, let’s keep going. I’m going to go into the individual questions now because I think we’re a bit short of time and if we have enough time we’ll go back to general ones. Tanya, as someone on the ground working with people with disabilities what are the impacts when regulation isn’t strong enough on the everyday lives of some of these people? Why is it so important that we get this right from your perspective?
TANYA: It leaves the people – I’ve got a list of these too. So I did a bit of homework but I just put together a lot of my experiences and how people have reported things to me. It leaves people with disability at more risk of even more vulnerability. They’re often left with nowhere to go. They often seen advocacy support but it’s usually their last resort. And then it’s about trust as well. People – when you are being overpowered by people who are telling you that they are doing the best job that they possibly can for you because they’re amazing and you’re getting out because we’re doing all of that, but little does the person know that they’re actually over using their funding or they’re not actually not helping them. They’re actually disabling them more. People start to trust those people and then when things start to go wrong they don’t know who to trust. They don’t know where to go. Our local MP office is inundated right now with service providers and support workers and people just calling out for help because they’re consistently, either running out of their funding because of mismanagement of funds that they didn’t know – that they just thought going to the pitchers was a great idea. Little did they know they weren’t supposed to go over day. Just once a week or something. Financial hardships. It’s an inability to get services and supports that they require, especially in rural and remote communities. We talk about choice and control and I absolutely hate both of those words because it’s been rammed down our throat and yet every time we go to any of the meetings or any conversation that you have with somebody they’re saying, what choice do I have? What control do I have over my life? Because I don’t have any choices. There’s two service providers in this local area. If I choose to go somewhere else it’s going to take them two hours to get here. The NDIA are not going to fund those services and supports to come to that person. Then it becomes, well, maybe you shouldn’t live in a little old town that has only 1,000 people because that’s not a good idea because that’s not a funding. I digress. It business come a reduced quality of life. That people are exploited even more so and unscrupulous providers and their plan funds are usually spent before the end of their plan and that can leave them without services and then they’re at another significant risk because they can’t get hold of the agency. Then they’re on a list of a thousand or so reviews that need to happen and then it becomes a cycle of, there is no help for people.
JULIE: I might skip over to Dan. In the intro I mentioned you had been appointed in 2019. When is your term up?
DAN: Monday week. I’ve got six more days, folks. Get in.
JULIE: I assume you’ve heard about whether you’re going to be reappointed or not.
DAN: No, I haven’t.
JULIE: Wow.
DAN: So check with the Minister. I’m waiting for my letter.
JULIE: We would be keen to hear an update about that. Assuming you will be reappointed, yes that does sound like a threat –
DAN: I assume they will. They have to have this position. It’s a statutory position. It is a little unusual that I haven’t heard by now. Yes.
JULIE: Very unsatisfactory. And before when I was talking about the fact that your organisation had regulation over disability workers and I had the word all written down before me. That’s not true, is it? You used to be responsible for teachers working with disabilities. But you aren’t anymore. What happened there?
DAN: So to try and cut a long story short because we don’t have a lot of time the Minister for Education approached the Minister for Disability and over a bit of a period of time where the two departments interacted on this and ultimately the Minister for Disability tabled a regulation to carve teachers out from regulating us. So it’s ultimately a regulation owned by the Minister for Disability who decided that teachers are regulated by another body that’s a Victorian institute of teachers and teachers don’t do disability work. Teachers in mainstream schools or specialist schools don’t do disability work. The base of the decision was that all teachers do is educate and not do disability-related work, even though – and in our Act we specifically identify one of the areas that disability workers and practitioners work in is assisting people with disability with learning.
JULIE: Okay. So not good news, is it? A new regulator already had the powers lessened. Okay. So, Dan, what do you think – actually because of time I’m just going to skip around and then go back to some of these questions. But as a person with a disability leading a statutory authority, how important is it for you…pivotal roles in the disability sector. If you think it’s important, if you can explain why?
DAN: It’s obviously a bit of a Dorothy Dixon because I actually think it’s crucial and I think lived experience of actually having a disability does give some, not all, but some insight. I have some experience of relying on the sort of services that I regulate. In other disability-related regulators you would have a person with a disability leading it to have some experience of the type of regulatory or human rights activities you’re seeking to promote. And I think then I think it adds to the credibility of the regulator and it overall helps with the type of organisation, the type of leadership that’s provided and that, in my experience, filters right down to some of the most important people in that organisation, those who are answering the phones, investigating the issues on the whole culture of the organisation. And I’m proud to drive an organisation that has – we require 20% of our staff have people with disabilities and that’s a bit low frankly but that’s what I’m making sure we have and it’s things like that that actually drive the culture of the organisation to increasingly strive to improving what we do for people with disability. I’m sure Christina could have given a better answer to that but that’s my approach.
JULIE: Thanks, Dan. Colleen, after a long and distinguished career, you’re actually leaving, is it how many weeks?
COLLEEN: Three weeks.
JULIE: Three weeks. So you can say anything you like now?
COLLEEN: Anything.
JULIE: Okay. So –
COLLEEN: I always did say whatever I wanted to say.
DAN: That’s true.
JULIE: You must feel an extra freedom now. So if you were able to make any decisions you liked in the next three weeks to change anything you wanted about the office of the Public Advocate, to make it more efficient, more responsive to people with disabilities, what would you do?
COLLEEN: Look, it’s a very difficult time. I use the weasel word that government uses, fiscally challenged environment. They cut…out of the…in terms of being responsive it’s very difficult. In terms of rights on the ground, community visitors, I call them our human rights warriors. They can only visit 40% or less of the places where people with disability live. So we’re already seeing a reduction in the ability to support people with disability. So I think they’re two of the things that when you take so much money out of a service system and you fail to adequately resource important services then you’re doing a disservice to everybody. But we only see a small group of people with disability and that’s the point I tried to make when I talked about regulation only being a small part because there’s many people with disability who live more broadly in the community who are very isolated and I think one of the things we really need to tackle is the whole issue of inclusion. So that’s much broader than my office but we won’t see real changes in safeguarding until we’ve tackled that. And secondly, I’m preaching to the converted, but the other issue, the other missing bit of the picture is adequately funded advocacy services. Now, we really need both of those things in order to have a more inclusive society because without that people with disability will not be in safe spaces at all times.
JULIE: And the community visitors program, is that still voluntary?
COLLEEN: It is.
JULIE: And is the independent third persons program still voluntary?
COLLEEN: Yes.
JULIE: I didn’t know about the $1.4 billion cut. Isn’t it interesting, what do you make of the fact that we have this Royal Commission into disability into…that reveals all these terrible things and then at the same time we’re cutting regulation. Do you think that it’s just incompetence and left hand, not really looking at – is there a lack of someone looking at the whole big picture here in planning? I mean, it sounds astounding.
COLLEEN: I think what we saw with the introduction of the NDIS is a split between state and Commonwealth. So already the responsibility is split. It’s very difficult to get information from the Commonwealth about what’s happening on the ground. So have you ever tried to get an answer out of the quality and safeguarding commission after you’ve made a complaint? So you’ve split the oversight bodies and then people have become much more siloed. So you’ve got split responsibility, siloed service systems and people falling through the gaps. So we’re seeing more and more people in very difficult circumstances and it’s hard to find out who’s responsible and how do you get the support that you need. So I think that’s one of the consequences. One of the things I would say about – in support of regulation, and just looking at the new social services regulator, people with disability across a whole range of services, not just in the disability sector, and we see it particularly in the removal of children with disability. We have high rates of children in child protection and in other service systems. And one of the things that if we had a social services regulator that was really – took into account the lived experience of people with disability, listened to their voices, perhaps they may be able to influence the broader service systems in ways that we haven’t been able to see as yet. I think that’s one of the potential positive aspects of a regulator. That’s see if they can do it but they need the resources. They need the skills. They need the advice of advocates and people with lived experience in order to ensure that when they are regulating the broader service sector that they’re actually looking at the needs of people with disability wherever they are, not just in the disability services system.
JULIE: And going back to you, Tanya. How do you say from your position as an advocate that regulators could enhance their responsiveness and effectiveness in addressing complaints. You were making a comment before about how you didn’t hear from people for five or six months or something like that.
TANYA: Yeah. In response to what Colleen said about contacting the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission, as an advocate we have to fight really hard to make them stand up and listen. Just as an example we received – I’ve been working with a lady that was completely neglected and was being enabled to live on her floor. Quite horrific. Quite very sad and absolutely disgraceful and disgusting. However, the complaint took over 12 months to get a – I’ll get to what you were talking about because it sort of goes on from that. The complaint took 12 months to get – it went through a couple of complaint officers and 12 months later we got a response that was half a page long that almost turned around and said, there’s nothing to see here. Even though there were a massive amount of photos taken for evidence. So as advocates and as people with disabilities we need to make sure we stand up and say, that’s not okay. We need to ask for reconsideration and explain the reasons why we want reconsideration. Luckily they agreed with me and I’ve had the Commission fly down three times, not just for this particular lady, but for a few other people where they’ve actually flown down from QLD. We’ve got to make them stand up and listen and to understand that this is not okay and it’s not normal. So lucky, I don’t know whether that was lucky or it’s just being passionate and saying, I’m not accepting this and where do I go if you’re not going to listen to that. In response to that question, I think that there needs to be continual engagement, which I know that the Commissions do try to have continual engagement however once again they’re not funded enough and their resources are very slim on the ground. Reduced response time to complaints. Even the smallest complaint can turn into a massive complaint. It can start off as a small complaint about something. But to that person that’s a real life problem for them. And I think for those people once again that are doing the wrong thing by someone there needs to be those – I talked about those penalties and infringements. We’ve got service providers out there that are laughing in the face of the Commission. They’re laughing in the face of these regulators. They know they’re not doing anything. Whether they don’t have the powers, I think we need to establish more powers or they need to have more oomph because often Commissions – sorry, Dan – you’re often talked as being toothless tigers and there’s a real thread to that because we’re not seeing on the ground anything happening to some of these people that have got really significant complaints. It’s taking too long. And I don’t know what the answer to that is but I think that that’s really important. I think that – and people want to see that things are being done and that they’re being validated and heard. And to establish, maybe through clear and set timeframes for handling complaints, whether there’s a standard of okay, if it’s something around this particular issue. We need to make sure we’re working really hard to try and resolve that. I don’t know what the answer is to that but I think they’re some of the ideas that –
JULIE: Okay. Thanks. One last question for everyone to chip into if they would like, and that’s if you have one improvement that you could make that would result in greater effectiveness in the regulatory space for people with disabilities, what might it be?
DAN: Start at the other end this time. I’ve got too many, I’m trying to narrow it down.
COLLEEN: Look, I’ve already said it, I think the issue is where is the place of people with lived experience in the regulatory system and where is there voice and what we’re hearing, what we’re saying is that the regulator needs to have, not just the legislative powers, but the will power to act and that’s what we need to see and they need to be held accountable and we need to make sure that at all levels people with disability are included in the process because without that we won’t see the change that we want.
JULIE: Dan, short-listed.
DAN: I’ll quickly – so I 100% agree with Colleen and I think some other aspects are, I think it’s perfectly legitimate to be actually asking people with disabilities and reviewing the powers that regulators have. At the end of the day we’ve got this act of parliament that we implement that maybe doesn’t do enough. We’ve been using it for four years. I know that I don’t have the powers to deal with the issues that come up that I need. And so I think it’s perfectly legitimate that having done it for three years we need to look at what different tools we have to respond to problems and to respond to them quickly. So I think that’s a big opportunity for us. I also think that sometimes we as a regulator, we regulate the disability workforce in the NDIS and outside of the NDIS. We often forget there are thousands of disability workers outside of the NDIS and we regulate the people who manage and supervise those but often the problems that we see are systemic within the organisation and that’s not something we can get at as a workforce regulator. So that’s another issue that I see as a challenge. And I’m just going to put it out there that I think eventually we will have disability worker and practitioner registration. I know it’s controversial. But I think that will actually help us drive quality and respect for people with disability and the services they receive as well.
TANYA: Dan, I think there needs to be conversation about that because as much as that sounds like a great idea on paper and I love the idea, however we’ve got registered providers through the NDIA right now that are absolutely disgraceful and they are actually accountable to a higher level than those that aren’t registered. So there has to be some sort of, I look at maybe the – like the nursing federation or something like that, that has specific tick boxes or specific something, standards.
DAN: That’s what I’m talking about. We’re in furious agreement, Tanya.
TANYA: I’m glad. I didn’t want to be arguing with people. I argue a lot with people. I think all things that are put in place, all of these things need to be put on the table no matter how silly they might sound because I don’t think a lot of consultation has happened with a lot of these things.
DAN: We regulate accountants more than we regulate disability workers.
TANYA: We’re people, not money.
DAN: This is important. Sorry for all the accountants.
JULIE: Thank you. To sum up we’ve got diminution of powers for a newly formed regulator. We’ve got budget cuts. We’ve got movement in the opposite direction of having disability-led disability specific regulators and who is not represented here today is the commission for children and young people who have also had some of their powers lessened, particularly again interestingly in the same education area. So we have a lot to do, don’t we, comrades, about this state of affairs. We probably need to spend some time…and especially a thank you to Colleen for fitting us in just before she leaves. If we can have a special recognition of…
MELISSA: Thank you very much. I think we might have some time for maybe two questions before we go to a break. So if anyone would like to raise their hand and I’ll have a microphone come around, just two questions and then we’ll go to a break.
FREYA: Hi, my name is Freya. I’ll try and articulate my question well. As somebody who accesses disability services and…I know there’s been plenty of times when I’ve had to make complaints to various bodies or that I should have made complaints to various bodies but I find the process and I know a lot of people find the process incredibly confusing and inaccessible. What can we do as a community to increase accessibility and understanding of what people need to do, support workers and support coordinators and individuals with disability to – yeah, I suppose, increase our awareness of the processes that are already in place for safeguarding for disabled people.
SPEAKER: Look, I wanted to mention the…it’s okay to complain. That was a really fabulous piece of work that they did. That was when Victoria was responsible for its own disability services. And I think with the splitting of the service system between the Commonwealth and the state, that very simple clear message that the DSC had it’s okay to complain and validating people when they made complaints has been lost. We really need to revive that as a campaign but we need to have a one stop shop or at least one number, it’s okay to complain but to whom? And the service system is now so fragmented, so difficult to understand, so difficult to navigate that it would be very helpful if there was one place that we could go and those referrals could then be – the idea of no wrong door. You need to complain about this, we’ll help you get there and that’s what we need.
MELISSA: Okay. Thank you. Who has got the microphone next?
DAN: I just want to say I and the organisation that I work with, we’re hungry for that kind of feedback. And we receive it, I’m proud to say that our biggest single group of complainants is people with disabilities but I know there’s so many people with disabilities we’re not hearing from because of that issue of when you want to make a complaint, it’s not always clear where to go. But we are desperate to receive an email, if someone wants to give us any feedback. I’m conscious of it’s not necessarily just now, it’s on us to improve. I know when a person with a disability makes a complaint to us, we’re asking that person do the hardest thing they’ll ever do and that’s make a complaint about the service they rely on, a support worker they rely on. So trying to make that easier is something that I’m always on the look out for. So, Freya, I’d love to talk to you to receive more of your experience and your thinking.
MELISSA: Thank you. We’ll go to our last question up the back there.
MARTIN: Martin Stuart, Blind Citizens Australia. Now, I’m not going to be criticising here, I want to be constructively critical. I’m a person who has a lived experience of having since 2002 where upon after a train accident I needed support workers. I’ve had them there for 22 years. Now at 24 hours per day. It’s not because I’m vulnerable. It’s not because I need any protection. So we’ve got to be careful as advocates when we talk about this to not over use those words. I suspect that most people who have support workers are not vulnerable. My home is not a hospital. It’s a home. So I don’t want too much monitoring. The less, the better. I just need to be supported. So be careful what we’re wishing for here. We don’t want to be over regulated, over legislated and there’d be significant disadvantage. There are some service providers who really try it on when it comes to you wanting to live in the way that you do and they say, you can’t do that. Well, yes, I can and should. Just help me to decide upon the support worker who is adequate for what I want to do. Not say you can’t do it. So we’ve got to be extraordinarily careful about an over legislated, over regulated for people like me and many, many others. We don’t want our civil rights taken away. We just want to be supported and facilitated. I understand that there are others who will need to be protected and are actually vulnerable but not me and not many. Thank you.
SPEAKER: Martin, I’d just like to respond to that a little bit. The regulation, the regulator isn’t about people with disabilities. It’s about those who are doing the wrong and those who are providing a service that are being paid very well to provide that service and are doing the wrong things, they’re the people we need to get out of that sector. The people that we are trying to protect people from – not to put you in a cotton ball or cotton wool, it’s about you living your life to the best that you possibly can. But it’s about the people that are doing the wrong things and there are so many out there. It’s not just a few. It’s a lot because money talks and money has driven the NDIS unfortunately unintended consequences of programs and systems. I don’t know whether everybody remembers the sell of the NDIS when it rolled out, we’ve got a bucket full of money that you can do whatever you like. And guess what service providers have tapped into that and continually are doing that. So they’re the people that we’re trying to regulate, not the people with disabilities.
MARTIN: What the legislation meant that we as a receiver of support worker services needed to be monitored just in case the wrong thing was done because the protectionist attitude was taken, well they wouldn’t know so we’ve got to look. That’s the danger and we’ve got to be careful and we’ve got to get our lived experience into that environment to make sure the legislation never goes to reading that way.
SPEAKER: Which again why it’s so important to have people with disabilities leading reforms to the regulation sector.
MARTIN: Hear, hear. Totally agree. Thank you.
MELISSA: Thank you very much. That’s a great way to wrap up today. Thank you very much, Dan, Tanya, Colleen and Julie. It’s been a really, really good session about regulation and how we can drive a safer state. We’re going to break now for afternoon tea. Just remember you can use your QR code to have a say about anything you’ve heard today. We will have a station set up in the corner over here just to do some video interviews. You can still have a say that way as well. Please return back at 3.30 for a master class on effectively engaging with politicians presented by a politician himself. So we’ll see you at 3.30.
Afternoon – Session 3
Playing the Political Game
Speakers:
Ryan Sheales, Director Communications, VCOSS
Ryan Batchelor, Labor MP for Southern Metropolitan region in Victoria’s Legislative Council
Afternoon Session 3 - Audio Transcript
SPEAKER: Thank you very much for that introduction…you’ve made it through to the last session of the day. Thank you for your…stick with us for the next half an hour or so. But I do believe this will be an interesting and dare I say educational session as well. Briefly my name is Ryan Sheales. I’m the Director of Communications as Melissa indicated at the Victorian Council of Social Service. To my left and our guest this afternoon is – he’s the member for southern metro, Melbourne south east and eastern suburbs. He has a long and distinguished CV which I won’t read out in full, I won’t put you through that misery, but is obviously a state MP elected in 2022 but has served as the head of Julia Gillard’s…as a senior adviser in the federal and state government before crossing the fence and becoming an MP yourself. You could have got all of that from…he’s also a rising star of the Victorian parliament on the Labor side of politics so we’re very lucky to have him here today. If you could please welcome Ryan Batchelor.
RYAN B: Thank you for having me here. It’s great to be here.
RYAN S: Our topic for discussion is advocacy and what makes good advocacy. It’s a…with your background and experience as the topic. What makes good advocacy to government?
RYAN B: I think at a really basic level, being really clear about what you want is the key to good advocacy. It might sound pretty simple or trite but it’s amazing how many times people will come through the door, whether in my time as a ministerial adviser in Canberra Chief of Staff and I spent little bits of time as a public servant in Victoria…the most successful advocates are people who come in knowing what they want and having an idea about how they can work with you, either as a politician or an adviser or a bureaucrat to get that outcome. And in my experience, those are the people who have a clear sense of what they’re trying to get to are the most effective at getting there.
RYAN S: We spent a lot of time dancing around…
RYAN B: I think it’s right….the nature of problems. One of the things that being in politics as a politician, like I’ve worked in and around politics for a long time now. I don’t even want to say how long it’s been, more than 20 years, that there’s so much going on all the time. And as a politician you’ve got to be across everything that’s happening in your communities, ministers, their large portfolios, generally they’ve got multiple portfolios. So there is a lot confronting us. I think one of the really important things when you’re going and talking is that you just can’t assume that the politician you’re talking to has got as much knowledge about all of this as you do. So you do have to do a bit of education. You’ve got to do a bit of problem definition. And telling that – those problems in a way that uses all those narrative storytelling techniques, that’s got some good data backing it up but also doesn’t just stop at that. I think good advocacy has to bring the politician right into the centre of what it is that you’re talking about, make them understand at a very personal level and at a system level what it is that you see the problem as being and then move that to where the solutions take you.
RYAN S: Now, we do only have a short time this afternoon but I want it to be chock full of all your questions. So Ryan and I will keep speaking for another couple of minutes but the roving mics are in the room so please do get the attention of the VCOSS and DARU staff members and we’ll get to those questions as soon as we’re ready to go. In terms of who to advocate who to…Prime Minister, whoever it may be, what are the other options? You’re currently a back bench MP. What are the other options to get to a parliamentarian?
RYAN B: Yeah. I think local connections to local members of parliament are really important and you shouldn’t underestimate how quick and effective it can be, is if you’ve got a good relationship with the local Member of Parliament in your community and present a compelling case to them, often they can access a Minister pretty quickly, whether that’s just walking in the halls of the parliament and we get called in and out of divisions in the legislative chamber all the time. Incidental conversations are often some of the easiest to have. If you had a meeting with your MP, you’ve got a particular concern about a service provider in a local community or whether it’s one of their constituents who is experiencing a problem that clearly is happening to a whole lot of other people, making sure they’re aware of it and asking them to raise it. Often people are a little bit shy. You’d find it hard to believe. Particularly individuals can be a little shy about saying, well, can you raise my issue with Minister X or Minister Y. It doesn’t always result in positive outcomes but it is a really effective way of connecting with your local Member of Parliament. Getting them to go and be an advocate on your behalf. Really good way to do it. Bringing them out into your community as well. Having something to show them at a local level, really important.
RYAN S: And what do you mean by that? Show them at a local level? Can you give me examples of where you’ve seen that done well.
RYAN B: Yeah. I think politicians get – you know, we could fill our diaries with people coming into the office and wanting to talk about issues. What I think – certainly I like and what others, and my colleagues like, is actually going and visiting a service provider. Seeing something actually happening in action. Talking at a casual and informal level to – whether it’s people with disability, whether it’s carers, service providers, understanding that at a simple and effective level. Making that connection. I think one of the things that we did a lot back when I was working at federal politics, when I was working for Julia, was in that period when we were trying to get the NDIS up and running. We were trying to get commitments to it. Obviously we’re in a different space now. Not across what’s happened in the last 10 years or so since I left federal politics but one of the great experiences we had was we had a big community meeting out in the school or somewhere in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, I can’t remember where it was, but one of the things we had there was representatives from the local deafblind group who came and set up a conversation between members of the deafblind community and the Prime Minister and the ministers who got to experience at a very first hand way what that communication was like for them and showed some of the first-hand barriers. It was a different setting than they were used to seeing. It wasn’t a brief impact. It wasn’t words on a page. It was authentic communication from people in their community. It made a big difference.
RYAN S: Yeah. Wonderful. Sometimes to get to that point for people on the outside of politics seems impenetrable. The political system is opaque. Sometimes by design, sometimes because it hasn’t been demystified yet. You mentioned in passing before having a good relationship with your local MP. Invite them to something in your community. How do you make that first connection? I think it’s something that advocates sometimes struggle with.
RYAN B: Persistence. It is really important. It’s finding whether it’s writing in, emailing, taking moments a really important and doing it – I think particularly if you’re trying to cold approach someone out in the community where they’re at another event or whether you’re putting in a request for a meeting, those initial requests and that initial approach has got to be as – really as friendly as you can possibly make it. You don’t want to go from zero to 100 in terms of the intensity of the information you’re presenting straight away. You do need to build that up, I think, in the process. So I think that’s the first step. But when you get there and get in the room, I think you’ve got to be really clear about what it is you’re there for and to make sure you’re walking out the door having been really clear with the politician about exactly why this matters to them and what it is you’re seeking then to do.
RYAN S: And often you will know this better than me but you don’t get long in a constituent or a political meeting like that so every minute must count.
RYAN B: Yeah. I think the more important the person, the less time you obviously get. That’s obviously a kind of standard rule. I mean, someone like me, we could sit and talk for an hour or two about disability policy. Put me in my happy place.
RYAN S: You’re here till about 8, is that right?
RYAN B: That’s right. But particularly if you’ve got – you’re trying to get in to see a Minister, you’re trying to see a leader of a government, whether that’s a premier or Treasurer or senior people, you’ve really got to be sharp in your advocacy. You’ve really got to have a clear sense of what it is you’re trying to do in getting there. A good friend of mine from my time in Canberra gives this – it’s not my advice but hers is that she likes to do a kind of pre-brief meeting outcomes note to the staff. When she goes in she says, here’s what we’re going to come to you with and here’s what I’m writing down, what I’m trying to get out of this conversation before we get in the door.
RYAN S: Hang on, this is an advocate writing a note to the principal staff seeing here’s what we want out of the meeting.
RYAN B: It’s kind of a pre-brief and a plan for the meeting. So they’ve got a good sense of where you’re trying to go. Obviously you do that once you’ve got the meeting secured obviously. And obviously you can stray a little bit from what’s written down. But that is a good process she advocates people do so that they’re really clear in their mind so they don’t get A distracted. Politicians are very good at distracting people who come to meet them on – you know, we can take them off on journeys about – meanders through the meadow, in terms of –
RYAN S: Have you seen the view out of my 14th storey window?
RYAN B: All those things. There are myriad ways to distract in a meeting and if you’ve done the hard work to get in there, you want to be really clear about what it is you can get out of it. Having a plan going in is worth its wait in gold.
RYAN S: Now, do we have any questions in the audience? I haven’t seen anyone waving at me. We have one down the middle. Thank you, Emma. I’ll get you of course to state your name and where you’re from and jump straight into your question.
HEATHER: Heather Ryan from the Youth Disability Advocacy Service. So we provide – part of our service is youth advocacy based on our charter of human rights. We do that statewide. There’s where it, the advocacy team for disabled young Victorians for the whole state and two of us are part-time. We can’t go local because that would – we don’t have the capacity to build relationships with local parliamentarians on behalf of our young people that we advocate for. My question is sometimes we need to raise things very urgently and we don’t have time and that’s because of the safety of the child or the young person concerned and the usual systems haven’t worked.
SPEAKER: What do you mean by the usual systems?
HEATHER: The usual options to raise. I’ll give you a really common example that we see. A young person who is in out-of-home care in child protection who is also an NDIS participant and both the federal and the state government systems are both waiting on each other to see what the other one funds before they cough up their funding. So in the meantime where it’s a matter of weeks away when this person turns 18 when child protection at 11.59 p.m., before their 18th birthday, they’re out. We have a lot of difficulty sometimes just trying to get the state government and federal government or to get someone to talk to, to go hey, we know everyone is actually on the same page here. Everyone wants the same thing but we just need some action, instead of a whole bunch of people talking in fortnightly meetings discussing what’s actually going to happen. We do really well in achieving outcomes for these young people but what I’m really keen is how can we, I suppose, activate some kind of public service or government response to speak to their friends in the Canberra branch and get something actually happening
RYAN B: I think here we’re at the intersection between where systems work and how – or don’t work but also what other policy settings should be existing in a systems level. What are the policy systems for these types of cases and individual cases for individual case work and the way I would think about it is this happens to me regularly, when people come into my office and they’re constituents of mine and say, I’ve got this particular problem with X, Y or Z, it’s so frustrating that these people don’t talk to these people. How do we help solve it? The usual systems should have mechanisms that are now – that allow the case work issues to be dealt with because we can as members of parliament pick up the phone and ring. It’s less effective on an individual level than you would like it to be. We are not particularly powerful when it comes to individual cases. It is much more effective for us to advocate policy-based issues. Right. Simply because – particularly I spend a lot of time working in child protection, child policy type work as well. There are always mechanisms to alert on crisis issues but they’re pretty few and far between. The system’s got to have a…for the types of individual advocacy you’re talking about. I think what we need more broadly though is making sure that those individual cases, and I know three staff, two part-time, is not losing what they’re telling us, what those signals are telling us about the state of the system and then figuring out with your members, when you’re doing your broader advocacy piece what the –
HEATHER: We’re not funded to do broader advocacy pieces. Sorry, but we’re not
RYAN B: Well, the system – like that’s why you’re here, right? It’s not just you. It’s all of us together have responsibilities to advocate, to improve the system as a whole. And that’s what we’re here to do. That’s what you’re here to do and that’s what we’ve got to try and do.
RYAN S: And I will say also we’ve got a question in the middle over here and while we’re getting there, work through your peak body. I know you know this. I come from peak body land. You would expect me to say nothing less but work through your peak bodies where you can because they can also assist with the broader advocacy pieces. It’s a large piece of what we do.
NAOMI: I’m Naomi Cunningham from…so peak body is great. So we’re the peak body for the 50 community legal centres around Victoria. I’ve just got a couple of questions.
RYAN S: We’ll make them quick because we have seven minutes left on the session.
NAOMI: If we get in to talk to the local Minister and we’ve got specific asks, as in specific policy recommendations that we want to see enacted, what can we ask that back bencher or local MP to do, other than chat with the relevant Minister. That’s the first question. Secondly, how can we hold those MPs to account and check in that they do what they said they were going to do
RYAN B: In government we are constantly running – where there’s an annual budget cycle, budgets don’t – and the annual budget process isn’t just about getting funding for things. It’s also an avenue into a policy-based conversation. So that happens every year. So don’t – I think a lot of people think that budget conversations are just about money and money is important for everything but it does also open the door to a policy-based discussion as well. So we do that. But as a government caucus, as backbenchers we engage with our parliamentary committees often. So there’s often ways we can bring up issues in that parliamentary committees work. I see it on too many parliamentary committee inquiries to mention at the moment. But that’s a good way. We also have internal policy conversations. We’ve got both policy development processes that occur where we can submit – workshop good ideas for policy reform with ministers, through parliamentary secretaries, with ministers. So there are those mechanisms that occur all the time. But it does require people to have an idea about what it is you’re trying to achieve.
RYAN S: And I imagine, and we’ll go to the next and perhaps last question, it’s useful if lots of different parliamentarians, backbenchers are hearing similar things. If you’re coming to the caucus meeting saying I heard this, I heard something similar, it will carry more weight.
RYAN B: Exactly. We talk about those things regularly.
RYAN S: I think there was a hand down here. Julianne is racing from the back of the room. Thank you, Julianne.
JULIE: Hi, I’m Julie from Women Disabilities Victoria. My question is what is the government doing to support people with disabilities to get into politics?
RYAN B: Great question. I don’t know is the short answer. There are a range of programs that exist that have been really successful, particularly focused on women, getting more women into politics. The Victorian parliament is now gender equal for the first time ever, which is pretty phenomenal when you think about all the challenges that are still ahead of us. But I don’t know if there are any particular – whether those programs have a particular focus on women with disabilities or whether there’s particular programs for women with disabilities to get into politics. Great question. I’ll follow it up.
RYAN S: …but about the very small number of existing parliamentarians…you’re holding up four fingers. There we go. It’s depressing you can all do that on one hand. I’m sorry? Sorry. People not per cent. Yes. So a disappointingly and concerningly low figure so definitely room for work and improvement there. We might have time for one more question. I wrapped this up prematurely now and if we don’t I might just ask because we’ve been talking a lot about what we might call inside track direct government advocacy. There’s a mass of stream we’ve hardly scratched the surface of of public facing advocacy. I want to know really how effective that is and when it’s effective. We love an open letter in this sector. We love a coordinated social media campaign tile, those sorts of things. Do they make a difference in office?
RYAN B: They can…they’re like seismographs a little bit. When you see a spike in something you clearly know there’s an issue going on in community, particularly the chain email, the consistent social media. You do notice it. It absolutely does. It should never be all that you do because with my first point, you’ve got to come with the ask and outcome. Raising awareness is important. And whether that’s through that kind of attract or whether you do things publicly, use the media, they are absolutely tools that should be in your toolkit, as should working on relationships, building trust so that you can engage is the hard thing to do but building trust so that you can advocate directly and so both of those things can happen at the same time. That’s how you get, I think, to successful advocacy. You can’t just rely on the inside track and outside track. You’ve actually got to be doing both and using them effectively back and forth.
RYAN S: Everything, everywhere, all at once if I can steal that movie title.
RYAN B: Not always. Sometimes if things are going well, you’ve got to modulate accordingly. Like if you are trying to get attention then you might want to do more attention getting things. If you’re gaining traction you might be wanting to dialling back the attention grabbing and investing more in the development detailed work because you don’t want something attention grabbing to distract from the good work that you’re – the progress that you’re making. So you’ve got to be thoughtful about that.
RYAN S: Fantastic. Can you please join me in thanking Ryan Batchelor.
Conference Close
Speakers:
Melissa Hale, Manager, Disability advocacy Resource Unit
Conference Closing - Audio Transcript
MELISSA: Thank you very much. You’re both Ryans, for sharing valuable insights and effectively communicating our agenda and engaging with the right people. I’m sure I speak for all of us the strategies and advice we’ve gotten today will be really useful for us when we move forward. So colleagues, as we draw today to a close I want to take a moment to reflect on the opportunity that we have before us. We stand at a pivotal moment where real transformative change for people with disabilities is not just a possibility but a necessity. The Disability Royal Commission into violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation along with the NDIS Review has given us a once in a lifetime challenge to reshape our systems and make sure the future, whether rights for people with disabilities are upheld with integrity and commitment. Today we’ve explored some critical questions. What steps must be collectively taken to ensure people with disabilities can live free from violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation. How do we establish robust strong regulation to prevent these basic human rights from occurring again and what role does disability advocacy play in stealing Victoria, and indeed our entire system in the right direction. We’ve also examined the royal champions of change. Who are the voices we need to lead us in this campaign and make the principle of nothing about us, without us a reality. True allyship means walking alongside us with understanding and unwavering support and this unity has never been more crucial. After a long 10 month wait our government has finally responded to the Disability Royal Commission, however the response has not met the high expectations by the Commission’s recommendations leaving many of us feeling disappointed and it’s clear there’s still so much work to be done so what’s next? How do we harness our collective power to ensure that people with disabilities have strong safeguards they deserve and when it comes to engaging with our politicians, what strategies will make them not only…but act. This conference has been a significant step forward in connecting with the disability advocacy community and addressing one of the most pivotal areas in the activation of disability rights. The conversations we’ve had, the insights we’ve gained and the strategies we’ve discussed will guide us as we move forward. Thank you to all our speakers, panellists and participants for your invaluable contributions. Your passion and dedication are the driving force behind this movement. Together we the power to turn this opportunity into lasting and meaningful change. Thank you to our Auslan interpreters and captioners, our volunteers and our incredible staff who dedicate themselves to making this conference the best it can be ever year. Thank you to our organisation supporters, DAV, VCOSS and the Office of Disability, without you none of this would be possible and our amazing advocates in this room, let’s carry the momentum from today forward. Continue to advocate with strength and unity and work together to create a future where every person with a disability can live with dignity and respect. Thank you and safe travels.