October 27, 2024 • 65 mins
In this episode, Hannah chats with Shaun Bickley, a disability advocate and campaigner, about the practice of paying NDIS participants a subminimum wage. This is a fantastic episode, and we hope you learn something about this abhorrent practice and enjoy Shaun's passion and knowledge as much as we do.
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ABOLISH SUBMINIMUM WAGE NOW!!!!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
We acknowledge the original owners of the land on which we podcast, whose stories were told for
(00:05):
thousands of years. Today we are recording in Mianjin. We pay our respects to elders past
and present who may be listening. Sovereignty was never ceded.
This episode of What in the NDIS Now is brought to you by Astalti. Astalti is the software solution
for NDIS professionals built by NDIS professionals. Astalti is my go-to software and Astalti is
(00:33):
trusted and loved by hundreds of other NDIS providers. I love how easy it is to use and how
it keeps all my participant information, notes and invoicing all in one place available to me
anytime from any device. Sign up now for your 14-day free trial. Head to Astalti.com.au to sign
(00:56):
up now. See for yourself how much easier managing all your NDIS business needs are by using Astalti.
Thanks again to Astalti for sponsoring today's episode. A quick note before we get started that
there may be some swearing in today's podcast. If you don't like swearing or usually listen with
(01:18):
children in the car, you have been warned. You're listening to What in the NDIS Now,
a podcast where I, Hannah Redford, and my friend Sam Rosenbaum interview participants and providers
about all things NDIS. Welcome guys, gals and non-binary pals to another episode of the podcast.
(01:49):
I'm really excited to introduce you to our guest today, which is Sean. Welcome to the podcast.
Hi there. Sean, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, I'm an autistic advocate.
I am an NDIS recipient. Probably the advocacy that I'm most well known for is around sub-minimum wage.
(02:15):
In 2018, I organized the first city-level ban of sub-minimum wage, as far as I know in the world,
in Seattle, Washington, and later Washington state as well. Amazing. That sounds so cool.
What do you mean by sub-minimum wages? Let's start there. Well, in the US, as in the case in
(02:44):
Australia, it's legal to pay disabled people below the minimum wage. Here, even though the minimum
wage is about $23.00, $23.00 per hour, depending on industry, disabled people can be paid as little
as $2.90 an hour. Wow, that's quite a bit below the minimum. This is something that I am very
(03:07):
aware of and frustrates me. I was really excited to come across your campaign. People with disabilities
who have jobs need to be paid the same as everyone else because they have the same costs
as everyone else, for one thing, and because they're human. You need to be paid for doing work.
(03:39):
It doesn't make any sense to me why people with disabilities are paid well below minimum wage.
Well, the policy comes from originally the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in the United States
and the creation of sheltered workshops and a lower pay rate in the United States,
(04:02):
as little as one cent an hour or less. That policy has been around for some 90 years.
It hasn't actually done what it was intended to do to increase disabled participation in the
workforce. We have a very long view of history to know that. What has been successful are things
(04:26):
like supported employment and customized employment. Customized employment is where you
build a job around a person. When I say supported employment, I don't mean it in the euphemistic way
that DES or Australian Disability Policy uses it, but actually supporting somebody at work with a
(04:46):
support person, which we do here, but then we also just use as an excuse to pay them less.
Those things have been more or less international best practice since the 1980s,
regardless of what legal standards have been. They're what have actually been successful in
(05:07):
getting people employment because the vast majority of disabled people in Australia and
internationally don't work in sheltered workshops and don't work for sub-minor wage. They work in
community-based employment, including people with the most severe disabilities, including people
with intellectual disabilities, and so forth. We still have this system that is just sucking up
(05:29):
really large amounts of funding headed by people who are getting paid hundreds of thousands of year
and lobbying our MPs for very large amounts of money to keep staying in business, even though
what they're doing doesn't work. So can you tell us a little bit about your campaign in Australia
(05:50):
and what you've been doing? Yeah. I started working around,
I tried to see what was happening around disability employment policy, and there's certainly a lot of
(06:10):
advocacy by organizations like Inclusion Australia around what would be ideal. And
how disabled people should be paid what we're worth and paid an equitable rate.
It hasn't really been going anywhere. There hasn't been any momentum compared to what's
(06:31):
been happening overseas. And I'm going to have to draw a comparison here, but in the United States,
National Federation of the Blind, they started off a national boycott of the
Goodwill Industries, which is a nonprofit and mainly an op shop. And for a few years,
(06:54):
no one took them seriously. And then they started getting lots of publicity and started making an
impact. They got a national list of supporting disability organizations together. And it took
them maybe 10 years, but they started getting a lot of momentum. And now you're at a point where
19 US states plus DC have gotten rid of sub and sub and a wage. But then I look here, and there
(07:21):
really hasn't been the same kind of organizing. There's been policy statements by Inclusion
Australia, some labor groups, other organizations, but I haven't seen the same kind of
organizing of public alliances and so forth. So I eventually just decided to start
a letter and try to get organizations of any kind to sign on to it. And this was in
(07:50):
April of 2022, when the federal election was starting. And I had a lot of difficulty doing it
because the disability organization is much more hierarchical here. There's peak organizations
of unelected people who are in a position to be the leaders of disability everything,
(08:11):
and represent all disabled people, whether or not we want them in those positions. And yeah, so
in most cases, there wasn't support there or other organizations didn't want to do something if it
wasn't coming from peak organizations. Exceptions being Women with Disabilities Australia and
(08:32):
Inclusion Australia were very supportive of this. So I started getting individual signatures. I got
almost 2,000 of those. And so I started being able to get organizations to sign on board.
That got me more credibility, get more organizations to start getting MPs and counselors to sign on.
(08:57):
This is similar to what I did when I was in Washington State, where I got 88 state
organizations to sign on. And as I got more people who told me no before, I was able to peer
pressure them into signing on because I was like, oh, well, all four of your peer your peers are
signed on. Do you really want to be the only one who hasn't signed on? So, you know, I've been able
(09:19):
to do a similar thing here. So like right now, I've got 35 national organizations, 168 local and
state organizations, 16 senators and MPs, 41 state and territory MPs and 115 counselors. And then
about 2,100 individual people. 20. Yeah. That's amazing. That's staggering. In really a short
(09:48):
amount of time. I mean, it must not feel that way to you. But realistically. Well, because I've
emailed all 7,400 counselors in Australia, all 620 state and territory MPs, and I've got
5,000 counselors in Australia, all 620 state and territory MPs. I'm working my way to the federal
(10:12):
MPs. I've emailed all of the NDIS registered businesses and they were over 10,000. So I'm like
around 20,000 emails at this point, plus every other like NDIS business that I come across, or
disability business that I come across. I literally just ask everyone that I come across, I've got an
(10:34):
email company on here. I have a concrete coatings company. I've got some artists. I just had a
massage parlor sign on last week. Because every time Facebook suggests a business to me, I just
email them because this is just how I do things. And you know, I got a lot more success in
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Queensland, whereas I think people from other states are just like, who is this person and why
is he emailing us? But yeah. So I'm hoping that this will just kind of build pressure and at the
very least create a list of who our allies are that disability activists and our allies can use
(11:20):
to organize off. It's not really the end state, but it's at least something, it's at least what we
had more before and something we can try to use to push.
Yeah, yeah. So tell us a little bit about the policies in Australia and what's sort of happening
(11:41):
in Australia at the moment.
I'm going to ignore that question. And I want to talk more about the actual practices itself
because I think that there might be people who have concerns or I've gotten a few negative emails
(12:05):
or nasty responses back. And so I want to point out a few ideas about the concepts around
several wage. And that's essentially that the whole concept is based around the idea of putting
people in bad job matches and then not providing accommodations. The legal precedent for being able
(12:27):
to pay a seven wage is the idea that someone's in a job that they cannot perform. And so you're
paying them a fraction of the wage based on their productivity. And there's a few problems with that.
One is that if you go to, if I go to Coles or Woolies and one cashier is half the speed of the
(12:49):
other one, they're not going to be paid 50% of the cashier wage. And I've had people suggest to me,
oh, well, then that person could lose their job. And I'm like, no one loses their job at Coles for
being slow. I don't believe that. I have never seen that. So there's an inequity there.
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But also the way that these wages are determined is really manipulative. So who determines what a
normal speed is for any type of piecemeal or production type of work. So let's say that your
job is packing sprinkler heads into a box. They're going to determine what the normal non-disabled
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rate is. Well, if they've got a 50-year-old supervisor, a 22-year-old manager, a 22-year-old
supervisor, a 23-year-old supervisor who's been doing this for like two years, another 21-year-old
supervisor with experience in the job, they can get very different rates depending on which
(13:57):
non-disabled normal person they use to determine what the normal non-disabled rate is. So they're
not going to use that 50, that 60-year-old who's never packed sprinkler heads into a box because
they'd get a much slower rate. They're going to use younger people who have seen the job in practice
who know what they're doing, and they're going to get a much faster rate. So you can end up in
(14:20):
situations where a disabled person could be performing the job faster than a non-disabled
person is or would be under the same circumstances, but they're getting paid less because they're
doing less than that arbitrary magic line of what the normal rate is. But the non-disabled person
(14:40):
always gets paid the prevailing wage regardless of how fast or slow they are, what their performance
is, whether they're having a bad day or a good day, whether they were having a bad day or good
day on the day that they were timed, whether or not that was being timed affected their performance,
because you can imagine it's very stressful to have someone come in with a stopwatch and your
(15:02):
performance while they have that stopwatch is going to affect your pay for the rest of the year.
All of those factors come into it. Not to mention in assembly line types of jobs, much of the time,
your ability to pack sprinkler heads, for example, is dependent on whether or not people bring you
sprinkler heads. And if the other person hasn't brought them, the time doesn't stop for you.
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You're still being penalized if you only packed x many sprinkler heads in an hour,
even if it wasn't your fault that they weren't brought over to you. So there's a lot of factors
that come into how those numbers are determined. But anyway, so all of these ideas are that they
come from a 1930s policy. I mean, we in Australia got it in the 1950s, but we imported it from an
(15:51):
American 1930s policy that well predates any kind of disability or civil rights
laws here internationally, the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities,
the Human Rights Act, anything like that. Generally under the law, if I go get a job,
(16:13):
my employer is expected to make reasonable accommodations to me. Also, if I'm looking for a job,
I would probably go and try to find a job that I'm suited for and not one that I'm just placed
into because I have a disability and I live in this geographic area and every disabled person
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works at this factory in this town or shreds paper in this town or packs sprinkler heads in this town
or whatever you have. So also some of those jobs can be really boring. Like they expect people with
disabilities to pack those sprinkler heads and it's very repetitive and you're looking at the same
(16:59):
thing constantly and you keep counting to 10 because that's how many fit in the box. And
it's mind-numbing, repetitive stuff that can be boring no matter what your level of disability.
(17:20):
Your level of disability.
Right. And when non-disabled people do that kind of repetitive work in factories,
they're not expected to do it for $3 an hour. In fact, it being boring, repetitive,
are not used as reasons to penalize the person and pay them less. That's considered like
a negative attribute of the job that should be compensated for somehow with breaks.
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So as a model, as a business practice, shelter workshops, ADEs, as they're more modernly
euphemistically termed, don't work. They're about putting people into warehouses based on
their location and their disability into bad job matches and expecting them to perform
(18:12):
and already expecting them not to be able to do the job and then penalizing them for that expectation
that you've set them up to fail. And when non-disabled people look for jobs,
they look for something that's a good job match. You were in a signed job like,
oh, okay, well, you're a Burnett, you're going to work in this job. You live in this town,
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you're going to work in this job. You presumably had the choice to at least consider, do I want
to go to university? Do I want to work at trade? What do I want to do with my life? And these are
options that are often denied to disabled people. And that's how we end up in situations like this.
So what has been effective, what we know works, are things like customized services,
(19:08):
like customized employment, where somebody has a job designed around them, or supported employment,
where they go into a job and then they have someone to support them. And that's why a lot of people
have fear mongered here and in other countries that, oh, if you get rid of these, I've had people
(19:29):
tell me when I've contacted them, if you get rid of these, those people won't have anywhere to work,
unemployment rate will go up, they'll be sitting at home. And I'm like, well,
this has been happening since 1996. And nowhere, nowhere has it happened. Vermont banned its,
(19:50):
Vermont got rid of its shelter workshelves in 1996. And employment rates have gone up since then for
disabled people. So we have 28 years of data internationally showing that that getting rid
of stuff and wage only improves outcomes for disabled people. And it's not like we have to
(20:11):
rely only on international data for that either, because we can look around us and see that most
companies are not using this model to employ disabled people. Most disabled people find work
in community employment, including people with severe, severe disabilities and intellectual
disabilities. If this was an effective model, it would be everywhere. And the government wouldn't
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have to be propping it up with millions of dollars, most of which goes to salaries and overhead,
in order to keep paying people $3 an hour to do jobs that they're not suited for.
There's a huge amount of money going into propping up this industry that doesn't serve disabled
people, that has a much lower rate of keeping them employed. And it keeps people miserable.
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And you have family members who only support it because they're being told that the alternative
is that they won't have anything to do and they'll be at home on the couch all day.
And that's not true. We know that's not true. Yeah. And so what I've seen is sometimes it's
all the family knows. Like the cousin had this job and their neighbour had this job.
(21:24):
And they've never seen anyone with a disability have any other job. And so that's why they think
that the ADE is the be all and end all and the only place to go.
Yeah. Well, and there is a lot, there is an age difference there because a lot of the workers
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who are in ADEs are older. And it's a lot harder to transition people out when that's what they've
known. But ADEs as a rule are very, very large and wealthy companies. And they have a lot of money
to lobby the government. Certainly as an industry, if you compare that to the kind of places that
(22:12):
hire disabled people at full rates. And so there's a lot of money going into trying to keep these
places open. And it's really frustrating when we have disabled people saying that we want to be
paid equitably, disability organisations, we have a royal commission saying that this needs to go
(22:34):
away, not that they ever listened to royal commissions. And at the same time, you have
the current Labour government is opening pilot programs in Northern Territory in Northern Queensland
to explore putting NDIS clients into ADEs as part of their NDIS plans.
(23:03):
So this would be, this is a pilot program, but these are things that look at expanding it.
I just got an email from, because I've been emailing all of these MPs, and I just got a letter from
Minister Richworth's office on Monday. And I showed it to you on the way over here. And it was
(23:23):
literally just, we recognise your concerns about 7 Wage, and we pumped even more money into 7 Wage.
And yeah, it was just very tone deaf. And, you know, really shows their dedication to just
expanding this industry and keeping it alive and resisting any attempts at changing it and
(23:49):
getting disabled people equitable pay, as is happening internationally.
As we're recording today, the government did come out with their initial response to the Disability
Royal Commission. And like you said, they have decided that people with disabilities just need
(24:12):
to go and get a job. And this blows my mind that they could look at all the stories that came out
of the Disability Royal Commission and go, this is where we should start. Like, are you kidding me?
(24:34):
But even if that's where we're going to start, the idea of pumping more money into the things
that is not working also just makes no sense. If you want to get people with disabilities into
(24:55):
jobs, you need to say to employers, people with disabilities can do anything. And you just have to
set it up so that they can do it. And yet, like one of the issues I've found most in my working life
(25:15):
is the issue of having to take my children to 1 million different appointments. And so having to
often say, look, I can't work for these two hours because I've got to go to an appointment or longer.
I don't actually know how long it will take because it's a hospital appointment and it
(25:37):
sometimes takes four hours to get in, even if you have an appointment. So these accommodations
often also can't be met because they're like, well, you've got to keep to your KPIs. And
it's like, how do I do that when I've got all these appointments? Just to start with,
(26:00):
before you even look at the accommodations someone needs within the job that they're doing.
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there's a lot of issues there. I mean, I'm reminded of,
and I didn't go get the exact figures on this because I wasn't thinking about speaking about
this, but Labor's own job summit found that DES had a 1% success rate or 3% success rate. And it
(26:31):
was on the verge of collapse and now they found a way to profit up by putting new clients into the
system. So this is another service that's only for disabled people that does not serve us,
it does not help us at all that we're being forced into against our will because they make money off
(26:51):
us. Disabled people are just a profit to people in government and people in the disability industry.
And it's really frustrating. And I get that like when I interact with lots of service providers,
some support workers even, sometimes explicitly so. So most of these systems that are set up,
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and they love to go on about the idea that the NDIS is so expensive and everything. And I'm like,
well, we're not the ones who are profiting off that you are. You've set it up this way so that
you can profit off us. All of these employment systems don't work. They're designed to keep
people unemployed because the caseworkers make more money the longer they have us in the system.
(27:40):
So it's just everything about the employment system is really badly designed.
Them wanting us to get jobs is just an excuse to try to be able to cut services or force us
into more bad job matches. I mean, as you probably know, it's very difficult to get on the
(28:02):
disability support pension since I think the Giller government. So we have 40% of people in
job seekers are disabled, which means they have to meet mutual obligations and attempt to find work,
even though multiple studies have shown that everybody who can find work, pretty much everyone
(28:27):
who can find work has already found work. And most of the people are still on job seeker there
because they're disabled or because they have caregiving obligations or other factors like that.
So you have people like there was a famous case of the pilot in New South Wales with brain cancer
who cannot get on the DSP because his condition isn't fully treated and stabilized. So he's only
(28:53):
eligible for job seeker, but of course he can't find work. So he's had to sell all of his belongings
and continue borrowing money. You have people who have lifelong permanent disabilities,
but they won't qualify. It took me over three years to get DSP and that was coming into
(29:15):
it with 25 years of documentation of a permanent lifelong disability, just because they're so
keen on everyone should work and no one has any barriers and they want to penalize anyone who
doesn't find a job. And it's really difficult. And I think a lot of people probably could find
(29:38):
work or would be willing to work, but the issue is the barriers that exist in the work that
exists in the workplace and the government is doing nothing to try to address those barriers.
Instead, they're increasing them. Cutting off people's payments doesn't help people find jobs.
The low cost of the payments, which are well under half the poverty line, does not help people
(30:03):
find jobs. When I lived in the US, when I lived in Texas, which people love to look down on,
when I went through employment services there, they bought me interview clothes. They got me a
suit. They got me a shirt. The only thing they didn't get me were shoes because my feet were too
(30:25):
big for what was in the shop, but then they felt bad and gave me extra clothes instead. It would
have been very difficult for me to try to land an interview in a t-shirt and jeans or shorts. They
don't do that here, not that I've come across. They don't really have any interest in addressing
(30:47):
the reasons why people are unemployed or helping address those barriers. They just want to punish
people for not having them, which just drives people further into poverty, which just increases
the disability unemployment rate.
And increases distrust of the government and government departments.
(31:07):
Absolutely. They have plenty of models they could do if they were actually interested in addressing
any of these issues. If they were actually interested in disabled people should just have jobs,
damn it, they could make that happen. At least they could get a lot of us jobs, but they don't
want that. What they're looking for is a pretense to kick people off the job seeker. They want to
(31:35):
find ways to phase people off disability support pension. They want to be able to cut NDIS plans
as they have been doing drastically for the last two years. Or they want to find reasons to say,
hey, nobody else will take you for a job, so why don't you come to the shelter workshop for $3 an
(31:57):
hour run by our donors and come work for them. So when I did this advocacy before, the US system,
I know that there's sub and wage in Hong Kong and Israel as well. And I suspect the UK, but I'm not
(32:18):
sure about that. But in the US, city and wage supersedes state, supersedes federal.
And here it's all federal award wages. So I was able to organize locally and get a counselor to
introduce a bill to ban the city sub and wage and ended that. And then I worked on the state,
(32:47):
and I used what I did in Seattle as a stepping stone. And then I got 88 organizations to do
that. And then I got 88 organizations on board and I worked from there. And I did some other kinds of
transitional work on the county level and back in Texas, where I started originally.
(33:08):
Here, I've had to work on the federal level to address the core issue, it has to be a federal
issue. But there's still a state, there's still state and local aspects of this, right? So there
are four local councils, to my knowledge in Australia that pay the directly employed disabled
(33:31):
people for below minimum wage. So the four are Ballina Shire, Gilgundershire and Midwestern
Council in New South Wales and Manjumup in WA. So they are directly paying, that's the government
directly exploiting disabled people and paying them a few dollars an hour. And then there's other
councils that are preferencing ADEs in their business dealings. So I've learned from talking
(34:00):
to counselors around the country that ADEs often benefit from subsidized rent or peppercorn leases,
complimentary or discount room hire in council venues, council rate exemption or discounted
rate and favorable consideration and tender and procurement processes based on community goodwill.
So there's a whole lot of benefits that they get interacting with individual Shires.
(34:28):
For example, InterWest Council in Sydney gives them a 15% waiting based on the idea that
this is a social enterprise, the way that they would benefit an average loan business,
which is wholly inappropriate because it's not a disabled owned business, disabled people are not
(34:49):
benefiting from it. Some non-disabled person making hundreds of thousands of dollars is benefiting
from the ADE. There is scope for local councils to address this and I've asked, for example,
the Brisbane City Councilors, mostly without response, to try to address this. There are four
(35:11):
or three international jurisdictions that I know of that have passed legislation banning themselves
from paying a separate wage and banning themselves and their departments from
entering into contracts with any entities that pay a separate wage. Any ADE should be the
equivalent and that would be the City of Reno, Nevada, the City and County of Honolulu, Hawaii
(35:37):
and the County of King Washington, the last one being one that I organized. So there's no reason,
sure the federal government might continue to keep this in the books, but there's no reason that
councils should have to pay a separate wage or that they have to do business with entities that do
that, firstly. The other thing is looking at what the state and territory governments are doing.
(36:06):
In some cases, it might be the case that a state or territory government has enforceable law that
they need to preference these ADEs as social enterprises. I'm not sure if that's true. I
haven't gotten a response yet. I know that's not the case in Queensland, so there's nothing stopping
(36:27):
Queensland councils from deciding not to do it. But even if they do have a preference in case,
councils could still decide to wait with other factors to cancel out that waiting.
But on the state level, all the same things apply. States supersede councils. They could just decide
(36:49):
that no councils and themselves are going to pay a separate wage, that they're not going to contract
with entities that do this, et cetera, et cetera. So every level of government here could do
something proactively about it. And I've had a lot of, you know, the last couple of years,
I've had a lot of state MPs and councillors blow me off and say, you know, this is out of scope,
(37:16):
and, you know, they have nothing to do with it. Well, actually you do. You're just choosing not
to, you know, you've chosen not to support a value statement saying that you think that separate
wage should be abolished. And you've chosen not to explore any sort of legislation that would
improve things for disabled people in your area. So these are all things that people can demand
(37:41):
of their MPs or councillors wherever they live. On the state level, this would be called procurement,
procurement policies. So it would fall under a procurement portfolio.
Do you want to read out your statements? So if people want to sign on, they know what they're
(38:03):
signing on to? Sure. We oppose the practice of paying disabled workers sub minimum wage.
It is unacceptable that in 2024 disabled people living in Australia can be paid as little as $2.90
per hour, while the minimum wage for others is $23.00, $23.00 per hour. These practices don't
help disabled people find work. We know from the Disability Royal Commission that Australia has one
(38:25):
of the lowest disability employment rates in the OECD. As disabled people and allies, we support
transition to fairer, equitable work through more modern and just practices to support disabled
people in the workplace, such as supported employment and customized employment. We
acknowledge the international workers movement led by disabled people to end these archaic
(38:47):
practices which originated in the 1930s and seek equitable pay. This movement has seen sweeping
legislative success across the past decade. Disabled people demand equal pay for our work.
It is time for Australia to abolish sub minimum wages. So we have, there's also a plain English
version of the letter and a number of links to different sources on the figures given there.
(39:13):
Why have people opposed signing on to your letter before? Well, like I mentioned, some of it is
is more legitimate fear around not knowing what the alternatives are and thinking that
paying a minimum wage means that these businesses will shut down. And if you do the math on it,
(39:35):
you know, paying somebody who works a few hours a week isn't going to break the bank,
especially with the salaries that they pay their executives. Some people think that
the person will lose their pensions and their or their NDIS. NDIS is not means tested. And pensions
(40:02):
are for a lot of people, they're not going to make enough money for it to make a difference.
There are transitional rates like it's not at all or nothing. But to be honest with you,
the pensions suck. They're very low amounts of money. They come with, you know, they come with
a lot of rules and reporting. You can't even be in a relationship with a pension or they will
(40:26):
dock your pension because they assume that your non disabled partner should be supporting you,
which actually forces and keeps a lot of people into domestic violence situations.
The government can assume that your roommate is your sexual partner, even if they're not,
because they've just decided that statistically, you might be having sex with the person that
(40:47):
you're living with and dock your and dock your pension anyway. So if people can transition off
their pensions, because they can be paid a full wage for their work, that's actually a good thing.
And it's only non disabled people have ever told me that would be a bad thing. If someone's been
in a stable job for 20 years, and they could be paid enough to get off the pension, doing that,
(41:10):
then they should absolutely be paid enough to be off the pension. But I've also had some bizarre
things. You know, a lot of it is just based on the idea that like, these are the only jobs for
anyone. Like I said, you know, most people, you will see more disabled people just in the community,
in service jobs, in hospitality, behind screens, than you will see in ADEs. I've had really bizarre
(41:36):
ones. I did have someone tell me that I was going to take these jobs away from people like child
labor campaigners took, took cotton picking jobs away from children in India.
What? What? That doesn't even make sense.
He wasn't pro child labor though.
(41:56):
Yeah.
I'm not pro child labor either. Although if my children could get a job.
Yes, but I was terrible because I'm taking jobs away just like those terrible people took jobs
away from those kids in India. But anyway, yeah, so I've had like, I've had lots of weird responses
and I have, whenever I engage with these people, I'm like, I'm going to take these jobs away from
(42:22):
these people. I've had lots of weird responses and I have, whenever I engage with these people about
it, and then they realize that like, I know more about this topic than they do, they just stop
responding and like never, they never actually proactively engage with it or change their mind
about anything. They just like assume that they know more about this because obviously disabled
(42:43):
people can't do anything. And then like get annoyed at the idea that like, there's actually
these are bad for disabled people and all the data shows that getting rid of them and,
I mean, not even just getting rid of them improved outcomes, let alone using that money that we're
proactive, that we're pumping into this system and putting it elsewhere would have better outcomes.
(43:08):
I think that's something else that people don't understand. It's not even just that like,
it's not even just that some of us are over here trying to either working in the community or trying
to find community employment and some people are happily working for $2.90 per hour. It's that the
government is proactively putting tens of millions of dollars to keep a handful, just a few thousand
(43:35):
people stuck in this industry where they only make $2.90 an hour so that a few non-disabled people
can get really, really rich off us. And the whole system with ADEs, they have a lot of funding
streams that come in. So one, they're tax exempt. Two, they're directly underpaying their workers.
(43:58):
Three, they're utilizing their workers' NDIS funding. So if I go to a shelter workshop
and all ADEs only accept people who have NDIS, there's other places that pay civil wage that
are not ADEs, but ADEs only accept people who have NDIS. My funding is paying a support worker
(44:23):
who is supposed to support me so that I can do the job adequately. So even if this is a terrible job
placement for me, they're getting an extra non-disabled employee who can do the job.
They're getting two people who can do the job and they're only paying a couple of dollars an hour.
(44:43):
So they're getting all these different employment streams on top of that for
their benefiting from community goodwill because people assume, oh, you know,
if I buy goods or services from this company, I'm helping employee disabled people. No,
you're actually just making this one jerk really rich. So they have a lot of funding streams that
(45:06):
they're using federally and locally, like I mentioned earlier, to make money. And in a lot
of cases, they're doing so probably fraudulently. So I know a number of ADEs and other entities
will use that NDIS funding or support workers to pay for general operating expenses or to pay for
(45:32):
management, which is not what a person's NDIS funding is supposed to be used for. So it's a
very big, you know, we talk about this industry and it is an industry. It's huge amounts of money
that are being siphoned from the NDIS, from the tax service, from federal revenue, from local
rate payers, mostly in order to pay the profit margins of these ADEs. And that money could be
(46:02):
better used to support disabled people. In a lot of cases, it's supposed to be being used explicitly
to support disabled people. And it could be used so that that person could have a job in the community
and instead of somewhere isolated and get paid at least minimum wage, if not higher.
Yeah. One of the things I've found about people with disabilities is sometimes
(46:29):
they start up micro businesses because you, like you were talking about making a job around the
person. So sometimes I've seen people with disabilities go, well, I'd really love to do,
you know, jumper making. And so they decide to just make, create a micro business around
(46:54):
jumper making. I don't know why jumper making sprung to my head, but whatever. It's cold today
in Brisbane. I knew someone, a non-disabled person who really like had in her head, she works in
office, that she just wanted to make jumpers. I was like, maybe that's what she would do if she
didn't have to like work in an office. But anyway. Yeah. Okay. And, but, but I found this a lot. So,
(47:19):
so for example, a really good example was on a previous episode, we've spoken to an OT who
started up her own business because she has a disability and she was previously working for
a bigger organisation and she found that they just couldn't accommodate for her disability.
(47:41):
And so she went out on her own to be an OT because then she was like, well,
I'm going to work on her own to be an OT because then she can set her own hours and her own KPIs
and work around her appointments and around when she's exhausted from her disability and things
(48:02):
like that. And what I find is this happens a lot with people with disabilities because they're
the only person I feel like I can, I feel comfortable employing me is me because I know I'm
flexible with that. And so there's a lot of people with disability who start micro businesses.
(48:28):
Do you see that as an avenue the government could direct some of their money?
Yeah, I mean, I think that disabled people have to use a lot of different strategies to survive
and adapt to society because it won't adapt to us. And especially because the government is so
(48:51):
resistant to doing the bare minimum or even just not continuing to make it worse. So, you know,
we have people working in the open employment market, we have people who manage to get into
really specialized kind of places. Whenever I go to Melbourne, I always, there's a coffee shop I
like there, all things equal, they also sign the letter, but it employs all disabled people at
(49:14):
higher, at I think above minimum wage. And there's a waiting list now to work there. But there aren't
a lot of opportunities for disabled people to work in the community in places that will accommodate
us and not exploit us. You know, there aren't a lot of coffee shops like that or places. So people
(49:39):
end up doing things like you're talking about, you know, they do an Etsy shop, even though I think
Etsy is probably pretty exploitive with all of their artists, or they try to do a micro business.
You know, again, thinking about customized employment, comparing it. And I
written about it before, but when I was in Seattle, there was a woman who worked for the city. And
(50:05):
she had originally come out as a contractor. And she had made, basically, she was she'd come on to
get jobs for people with intellectual disabilities and high support needs. And, you know, when she
come on, they were like, it's impossible, we don't have any jobs, the city can be done by anybody
(50:28):
like that. And she was like, Okay, well, what about one job and she ended up creating a job because
you might have it in an office environment where you have lawyers working. And they're making
however many dollars per hour, but some of the what they do over the course of eight hours is
really is low paid work, like filing a clerical work that could be done by somebody else that
(50:54):
doesn't have to be paid, you know, hundreds of dollars per hour. And so she cut out parts of
their day from several different people and created a job that had easier requirements and
put in a put in place for somebody with intellectual disability to be trained to do that job. And what
I thought was really interesting was at the time that I had gotten seven wage banned in Seattle,
(51:18):
in 2018, there were only two people in the city. City of Seattle, by the way, has about
7800,000 people, two people legally being paid some wage, like stress legally, because they were
at least six or eight being paid illegally. But there were 113 people in this program working for
(51:39):
just the city of Seattle, not the private sector, making at or above the minimum wage for the city
with intellectual disabilities and higher support needs. And so, you know that like this person,
like what she did can can be done anywhere, you know, like that's something that that could be
(52:00):
set up in a lot of different places. Microsoft had until a couple weeks until like, three or four
weeks ago, an autism employment program, including in Sydney. And so the and that I as I understand,
allowed people to bypass some of the interview processes, a lot of autistic people would not be
(52:22):
good at even if they'd be good at that particular job. Not something that I ever did, because
contrary to stereotypes, I am not a programmer, not good with computers. And it's outside of my
interest, but it benefited some people. So you know, there are a lot of things that can be done
with customized employment, and I think that's something that's been really interesting. And
(52:45):
customized employment could be set up and could be and there are people with customized employment
here like like as an avenue, but it's not something that it's not something that we've sunk
10s of millions of dollars into because we're too busy making people rich. In terms of next steps,
I've noticed I've had a lot of trouble getting a number of state and federal MPs take me seriously,
(53:10):
even when I email them attach a letter. I've I've collated a lot of data so I can tell them you have
59 constituents in your in your electorate have signed this letter. And you have these organizations
in your constituency that have signed your letter, I've signed the letter. In addition to,
(53:31):
you know, these 35 national orgs, you know, that cover your area as well. And they still
tell me that I should be contacting my federal MP. So I'm considering if it would be beneficial to
try and start a an organization specifically around sub and wage. And if I did that,
(53:53):
I'd want it to have a range of disabled people involved geographically around the country,
rural and regional, if possible, people who have connections to different parties, although I think
a lot of us are very deliberately neutral, or not particularly beholden to anyone. And so if there
(54:21):
are disabled people who are interested in that, or want to get involved in that advocacy, that might
be something that we can to follow up on and we can look at. I'm also interested in more than just
the the award rate exemption, but other ways that disabled people are paid sub and wage. So when you
(54:43):
look at programs like work for the dole, where people are coerced into performing free labor
for the government in order to receive in order to receive pension, well, we already know that 40%
of people on jobseeker disabled and are just not able to get they're not able to get the DSP
(55:06):
because they're they had the misfortune to have brain cancer, or a fluctuating disability instead
of having an approved disability like spinal paralysis or something physical and tangible
that the the pencil pushers in at Centrelink understand as a concrete disability. So they
(55:32):
shouldn't be being forced to work for a sub and wage or no wage as the case may be, especially
under the conditions that that a lot of times they're those are they're working manual labor
there was an 18 year old who died a few years ago on a job site because it wasn't safe and they
(55:58):
weren't properly trained and he I don't remember his name but I know he called his father beforehand
that he didn't feel safe and then he died. I was speaking to a counselor in out in a more rural state
and she had been referred to work for the dole in her 60s and they wanted her to drive like two hours
(56:18):
to go to manual labor and that's not I don't think this person I'd advise is disabled but
it's really unreasonable to expect a 60 year old woman to go do bricklaying and
trench digging and such. Yeah and so that's and a lot of the same companies that benefit from
work for the dole also do sub and wage so places like the Salvos and Vinny's
(56:43):
companies do both of these things and it really just having these programs in place for the
government sends essentially slaves over to work for these private companies for free
also means there's fewer jobs because why would the Salvos hire anyone when the government is
(57:04):
sending those slaves over to work for free it it just in fact the only ones they hire I saw on
um was it I saw on the jobs website that they were hiring for a slave coordinator because they had
so many of these different positions so I guess they get a few of them but it it drives down the
number of available jobs because they're getting so much free labor from the government which is
(57:27):
also a a conflict because the government's providing free labor to these private private
corporations is it because they're lobbying I don't know why these companies are getting these
these benefits another example would be prison labor we know that prisoners in Australia
are overwhelmingly likely to be disabled we have statistics on mental illness a lot of people
(57:51):
kind of blow that off but developmental disability is a lot more concrete and a lot of cases
genetically provable so you know a study was done testing every single um youth prisoner in wa
or um youth offender in wa in a um in a facility and found that 89 percent of them had a
(58:20):
developmental a neurodevelopmental disability we are not 89 percent of the population
um and 36 percent of them had fasti specifically fetal alcohol spectrum disorder
um which is a huge proportion um Australia has I was just looking at statistics we have one of the
highest rates of maternal drinking in the world um really high there are no um we don't actually
(58:45):
have numbers on how much of the population is born with fasti um but it's going to be a lot higher
than most of the world and we have a really high maternal drinking rate and a lot of people don't
know that like one drink at a certain point of pregnancy can create fasti so um but then you have
neurodevelopmental disabilities like autism and down syndrome and fasti um I don't see why
(59:12):
prisons in wa are going to be any different from prisons in the rest of the country there's no real
there's no structural difference why those would be different so we have a huge number of
developmentally disabled people who end up in prisons instead of getting ndis services instead
of getting support and so you know I I don't want disabled people forced to work for free
(59:36):
or forced to work for three dollars an hour and prisons are another avenue where mostly
disabled people are made to work for a few dollars an hour um and it's not something that helps them
um learn skills it's not something that helps them accommodate their disability it's not something
(59:58):
that helps them when they're when they're released um it's not something that reduces recidivism or
does any of the things that we want as a society so all of these things are tied into
the exploitation of disabled people and our labor and they're things that um if the government was
(01:00:18):
serious about getting disabled people jobs that we would we would be looking at and we're not
absolutely so what is the best way for people out there listening to support your campaign
to support your campaign well I have um they can sign it especially if they have a um an organization
(01:00:42):
that they can sign on and bring to the table that would be that'd be useful I'm sure I know there
are people listening to this who haven't signed organizations on um they could you know contact
their um they could contact their MPs or counselors and put some pressure on um and they can you can
(01:01:04):
also contact me and I can give you a form letter you know like some talking points if you want
and you know there are some you know if we can trying to get rid of the sovereign wage
australia-wide is a really big task and it'll be really difficult but doing it doing it incrementally
(01:01:25):
in steps that is something that's achievable you know overseas um it's been happening on a state
by state and city by city basis so when I look at this I'm like okay well if there's people in
places like Balanashay or Manjumup who want to see their cities their council stop exploiting
(01:01:45):
disabled people they're really in a position to do something about it because if you can get your
local community to do something that's that's really easy um it's very difficult for me living
in Brisbane because Brisbane is the largest council in the southern hemisphere to take note of me
but it's probably easier to start there than it is with the whole country
(01:02:09):
so putting pressure on people here on our state MPs to change the system any of those things are
are possible if there's disabled people who are really interested in this and really want to be
involved um maybe contact me and we can figure out the logistics of putting together an organization
so that we have more credibility and can figure out how to coordinate who our targets are and what
(01:02:35):
areas we want to target and so forth I think that um when the election comes up I'm also
I'm also asking every candidate who's running for office again um so I'll be able to publish a list
of who those candidates are who who do and don't support that um and being able to distribute that
(01:02:56):
information through disability networks um to people who care about disability issues will be
really helpful as well. And your email address will be in the show notes so people will be able
to find all of the details in their show notes of this episode. So that brings me to in your
(01:03:20):
ideal world what would the future of the NDIS look like? The NDIS probably wouldn't exist to be honest
the NDIS um would just be healthcare and long-term services and supports and probably just be a
function of Medicare and so instead of being this siloed system that's just for disabled people
(01:03:40):
so then politicians can trot out oh disabled people are so expensive we'd be better off without
them and um oh this system is ballooning um ways that they don't talk about aged care because they
they think that they're going to be old one day and that they rarely talk about Medicare it would
just be part of Medicare and if you whatever you're qualified for you're qualified for without these
(01:04:00):
artificial barriers of um oh are you disabled enough for the NDIS and then are you disabled enough
for this service no we don't think you are I mean we did last year but now we've decided you're better
and um oh you know you've got to have a lifelong disability to get on this system but now we expect
you to get better and if you don't get better we're going to penalize you and cut your services and
(01:04:21):
if you do get better somehow we're going to penalize you and cut your services it was just
all in Medicare and you just get whatever you need whatever is relevant to you um that room
removes a lot of stigma they can stop paying tens of millions of dollars to lawyers they can stop
leaking our information to private law firms and then pretending to be Pikachu shock face whenever
(01:04:44):
there's a breach because they have no absolutely no um uh um technological security whatsoever
so yeah I think it would just that that we could just treat it as health care instead of treating
disabled people like some separate species who need a completely different system subject to
different uh different rules well I love that answer and that's exactly so I think that's
(01:05:12):
an awesome place to finish I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast and hopefully we
can do it again and catch up about how it's going all right all right bye thank you for listening
please share with people you know until next time as the Green Brothers say don't forget to be awesome
We acknowledge the original owners of the land on which we podcast, whose stories were told for
(00:05):
thousands of years. Today we are recording in Mianjin. We pay our respects to elders past
and present who may be listening. Sovereignty was never ceded.
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(00:33):
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(00:56):
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Thanks again to Astalti for sponsoring today's episode. A quick note before we get started that
there may be some swearing in today's podcast. If you don't like swearing or usually listen with
(01:18):
children in the car, you have been warned. You're listening to What in the NDIS Now,
a podcast where I, Hannah Redford, and my friend Sam Rosenbaum interview participants and providers
about all things NDIS. Welcome guys, gals and non-binary pals to another episode of the podcast.
(01:49):
I'm really excited to introduce you to our guest today, which is Sean. Welcome to the podcast.
Hi there. Sean, could you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, I'm an autistic advocate.
I am an NDIS recipient. Probably the advocacy that I'm most well known for is around sub-minimum wage.
(02:15):
In 2018, I organized the first city-level ban of sub-minimum wage, as far as I know in the world,
in Seattle, Washington, and later Washington state as well. Amazing. That sounds so cool.
What do you mean by sub-minimum wages? Let's start there. Well, in the US, as in the case in
(02:44):
Australia, it's legal to pay disabled people below the minimum wage. Here, even though the minimum
wage is about $23.00, $23.00 per hour, depending on industry, disabled people can be paid as little
as $2.90 an hour. Wow, that's quite a bit below the minimum. This is something that I am very
(03:07):
aware of and frustrates me. I was really excited to come across your campaign. People with disabilities
who have jobs need to be paid the same as everyone else because they have the same costs
as everyone else, for one thing, and because they're human. You need to be paid for doing work.
(03:39):
It doesn't make any sense to me why people with disabilities are paid well below minimum wage.
Well, the policy comes from originally the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 in the United States
and the creation of sheltered workshops and a lower pay rate in the United States,
(04:02):
as little as one cent an hour or less. That policy has been around for some 90 years.
It hasn't actually done what it was intended to do to increase disabled participation in the
workforce. We have a very long view of history to know that. What has been successful are things
(04:26):
like supported employment and customized employment. Customized employment is where you
build a job around a person. When I say supported employment, I don't mean it in the euphemistic way
that DES or Australian Disability Policy uses it, but actually supporting somebody at work with a
(04:46):
support person, which we do here, but then we also just use as an excuse to pay them less.
Those things have been more or less international best practice since the 1980s,
regardless of what legal standards have been. They're what have actually been successful in
(05:07):
getting people employment because the vast majority of disabled people in Australia and
internationally don't work in sheltered workshops and don't work for sub-minor wage. They work in
community-based employment, including people with the most severe disabilities, including people
with intellectual disabilities, and so forth. We still have this system that is just sucking up
(05:29):
really large amounts of funding headed by people who are getting paid hundreds of thousands of year
and lobbying our MPs for very large amounts of money to keep staying in business, even though
what they're doing doesn't work. So can you tell us a little bit about your campaign in Australia
(05:50):
and what you've been doing? Yeah. I started working around,
I tried to see what was happening around disability employment policy, and there's certainly a lot of
(06:10):
advocacy by organizations like Inclusion Australia around what would be ideal. And
how disabled people should be paid what we're worth and paid an equitable rate.
It hasn't really been going anywhere. There hasn't been any momentum compared to what's
(06:31):
been happening overseas. And I'm going to have to draw a comparison here, but in the United States,
National Federation of the Blind, they started off a national boycott of the
Goodwill Industries, which is a nonprofit and mainly an op shop. And for a few years,
(06:54):
no one took them seriously. And then they started getting lots of publicity and started making an
impact. They got a national list of supporting disability organizations together. And it took
them maybe 10 years, but they started getting a lot of momentum. And now you're at a point where
19 US states plus DC have gotten rid of sub and sub and a wage. But then I look here, and there
(07:21):
really hasn't been the same kind of organizing. There's been policy statements by Inclusion
Australia, some labor groups, other organizations, but I haven't seen the same kind of
organizing of public alliances and so forth. So I eventually just decided to start
a letter and try to get organizations of any kind to sign on to it. And this was in
(07:50):
April of 2022, when the federal election was starting. And I had a lot of difficulty doing it
because the disability organization is much more hierarchical here. There's peak organizations
of unelected people who are in a position to be the leaders of disability everything,
(08:11):
and represent all disabled people, whether or not we want them in those positions. And yeah, so
in most cases, there wasn't support there or other organizations didn't want to do something if it
wasn't coming from peak organizations. Exceptions being Women with Disabilities Australia and
(08:32):
Inclusion Australia were very supportive of this. So I started getting individual signatures. I got
almost 2,000 of those. And so I started being able to get organizations to sign on board.
That got me more credibility, get more organizations to start getting MPs and counselors to sign on.
(08:57):
This is similar to what I did when I was in Washington State, where I got 88 state
organizations to sign on. And as I got more people who told me no before, I was able to peer
pressure them into signing on because I was like, oh, well, all four of your peer your peers are
signed on. Do you really want to be the only one who hasn't signed on? So, you know, I've been able
(09:19):
to do a similar thing here. So like right now, I've got 35 national organizations, 168 local and
state organizations, 16 senators and MPs, 41 state and territory MPs and 115 counselors. And then
about 2,100 individual people. 20. Yeah. That's amazing. That's staggering. In really a short
(09:48):
amount of time. I mean, it must not feel that way to you. But realistically. Well, because I've
emailed all 7,400 counselors in Australia, all 620 state and territory MPs, and I've got
5,000 counselors in Australia, all 620 state and territory MPs. I'm working my way to the federal
(10:12):
MPs. I've emailed all of the NDIS registered businesses and they were over 10,000. So I'm like
around 20,000 emails at this point, plus every other like NDIS business that I come across, or
disability business that I come across. I literally just ask everyone that I come across, I've got an
(10:34):
email company on here. I have a concrete coatings company. I've got some artists. I just had a
massage parlor sign on last week. Because every time Facebook suggests a business to me, I just
email them because this is just how I do things. And you know, I got a lot more success in
(10:55):
Queensland, whereas I think people from other states are just like, who is this person and why
is he emailing us? But yeah. So I'm hoping that this will just kind of build pressure and at the
very least create a list of who our allies are that disability activists and our allies can use
(11:20):
to organize off. It's not really the end state, but it's at least something, it's at least what we
had more before and something we can try to use to push.
Yeah, yeah. So tell us a little bit about the policies in Australia and what's sort of happening
(11:41):
in Australia at the moment.
I'm going to ignore that question. And I want to talk more about the actual practices itself
because I think that there might be people who have concerns or I've gotten a few negative emails
(12:05):
or nasty responses back. And so I want to point out a few ideas about the concepts around
several wage. And that's essentially that the whole concept is based around the idea of putting
people in bad job matches and then not providing accommodations. The legal precedent for being able
(12:27):
to pay a seven wage is the idea that someone's in a job that they cannot perform. And so you're
paying them a fraction of the wage based on their productivity. And there's a few problems with that.
One is that if you go to, if I go to Coles or Woolies and one cashier is half the speed of the
(12:49):
other one, they're not going to be paid 50% of the cashier wage. And I've had people suggest to me,
oh, well, then that person could lose their job. And I'm like, no one loses their job at Coles for
being slow. I don't believe that. I have never seen that. So there's an inequity there.
(13:09):
But also the way that these wages are determined is really manipulative. So who determines what a
normal speed is for any type of piecemeal or production type of work. So let's say that your
job is packing sprinkler heads into a box. They're going to determine what the normal non-disabled
(13:37):
rate is. Well, if they've got a 50-year-old supervisor, a 22-year-old manager, a 22-year-old
supervisor, a 23-year-old supervisor who's been doing this for like two years, another 21-year-old
supervisor with experience in the job, they can get very different rates depending on which
(13:57):
non-disabled normal person they use to determine what the normal non-disabled rate is. So they're
not going to use that 50, that 60-year-old who's never packed sprinkler heads into a box because
they'd get a much slower rate. They're going to use younger people who have seen the job in practice
who know what they're doing, and they're going to get a much faster rate. So you can end up in
(14:20):
situations where a disabled person could be performing the job faster than a non-disabled
person is or would be under the same circumstances, but they're getting paid less because they're
doing less than that arbitrary magic line of what the normal rate is. But the non-disabled person
(14:40):
always gets paid the prevailing wage regardless of how fast or slow they are, what their performance
is, whether they're having a bad day or a good day, whether they were having a bad day or good
day on the day that they were timed, whether or not that was being timed affected their performance,
because you can imagine it's very stressful to have someone come in with a stopwatch and your
(15:02):
performance while they have that stopwatch is going to affect your pay for the rest of the year.
All of those factors come into it. Not to mention in assembly line types of jobs, much of the time,
your ability to pack sprinkler heads, for example, is dependent on whether or not people bring you
sprinkler heads. And if the other person hasn't brought them, the time doesn't stop for you.
(15:27):
You're still being penalized if you only packed x many sprinkler heads in an hour,
even if it wasn't your fault that they weren't brought over to you. So there's a lot of factors
that come into how those numbers are determined. But anyway, so all of these ideas are that they
come from a 1930s policy. I mean, we in Australia got it in the 1950s, but we imported it from an
(15:51):
American 1930s policy that well predates any kind of disability or civil rights
laws here internationally, the Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities,
the Human Rights Act, anything like that. Generally under the law, if I go get a job,
(16:13):
my employer is expected to make reasonable accommodations to me. Also, if I'm looking for a job,
I would probably go and try to find a job that I'm suited for and not one that I'm just placed
into because I have a disability and I live in this geographic area and every disabled person
(16:33):
works at this factory in this town or shreds paper in this town or packs sprinkler heads in this town
or whatever you have. So also some of those jobs can be really boring. Like they expect people with
disabilities to pack those sprinkler heads and it's very repetitive and you're looking at the same
(16:59):
thing constantly and you keep counting to 10 because that's how many fit in the box. And
it's mind-numbing, repetitive stuff that can be boring no matter what your level of disability.
(17:20):
Your level of disability.
Right. And when non-disabled people do that kind of repetitive work in factories,
they're not expected to do it for $3 an hour. In fact, it being boring, repetitive,
are not used as reasons to penalize the person and pay them less. That's considered like
a negative attribute of the job that should be compensated for somehow with breaks.
(17:44):
So as a model, as a business practice, shelter workshops, ADEs, as they're more modernly
euphemistically termed, don't work. They're about putting people into warehouses based on
their location and their disability into bad job matches and expecting them to perform
(18:12):
and already expecting them not to be able to do the job and then penalizing them for that expectation
that you've set them up to fail. And when non-disabled people look for jobs,
they look for something that's a good job match. You were in a signed job like,
oh, okay, well, you're a Burnett, you're going to work in this job. You live in this town,
(18:40):
you're going to work in this job. You presumably had the choice to at least consider, do I want
to go to university? Do I want to work at trade? What do I want to do with my life? And these are
options that are often denied to disabled people. And that's how we end up in situations like this.
So what has been effective, what we know works, are things like customized services,
(19:08):
like customized employment, where somebody has a job designed around them, or supported employment,
where they go into a job and then they have someone to support them. And that's why a lot of people
have fear mongered here and in other countries that, oh, if you get rid of these, I've had people
(19:29):
tell me when I've contacted them, if you get rid of these, those people won't have anywhere to work,
unemployment rate will go up, they'll be sitting at home. And I'm like, well,
this has been happening since 1996. And nowhere, nowhere has it happened. Vermont banned its,
(19:50):
Vermont got rid of its shelter workshelves in 1996. And employment rates have gone up since then for
disabled people. So we have 28 years of data internationally showing that that getting rid
of stuff and wage only improves outcomes for disabled people. And it's not like we have to
(20:11):
rely only on international data for that either, because we can look around us and see that most
companies are not using this model to employ disabled people. Most disabled people find work
in community employment, including people with severe, severe disabilities and intellectual
disabilities. If this was an effective model, it would be everywhere. And the government wouldn't
(20:34):
have to be propping it up with millions of dollars, most of which goes to salaries and overhead,
in order to keep paying people $3 an hour to do jobs that they're not suited for.
There's a huge amount of money going into propping up this industry that doesn't serve disabled
people, that has a much lower rate of keeping them employed. And it keeps people miserable.
(20:57):
And you have family members who only support it because they're being told that the alternative
is that they won't have anything to do and they'll be at home on the couch all day.
And that's not true. We know that's not true. Yeah. And so what I've seen is sometimes it's
all the family knows. Like the cousin had this job and their neighbour had this job.
(21:24):
And they've never seen anyone with a disability have any other job. And so that's why they think
that the ADE is the be all and end all and the only place to go.
Yeah. Well, and there is a lot, there is an age difference there because a lot of the workers
(21:47):
who are in ADEs are older. And it's a lot harder to transition people out when that's what they've
known. But ADEs as a rule are very, very large and wealthy companies. And they have a lot of money
to lobby the government. Certainly as an industry, if you compare that to the kind of places that
(22:12):
hire disabled people at full rates. And so there's a lot of money going into trying to keep these
places open. And it's really frustrating when we have disabled people saying that we want to be
paid equitably, disability organisations, we have a royal commission saying that this needs to go
(22:34):
away, not that they ever listened to royal commissions. And at the same time, you have
the current Labour government is opening pilot programs in Northern Territory in Northern Queensland
to explore putting NDIS clients into ADEs as part of their NDIS plans.
(23:03):
So this would be, this is a pilot program, but these are things that look at expanding it.
I just got an email from, because I've been emailing all of these MPs, and I just got a letter from
Minister Richworth's office on Monday. And I showed it to you on the way over here. And it was
(23:23):
literally just, we recognise your concerns about 7 Wage, and we pumped even more money into 7 Wage.
And yeah, it was just very tone deaf. And, you know, really shows their dedication to just
expanding this industry and keeping it alive and resisting any attempts at changing it and
(23:49):
getting disabled people equitable pay, as is happening internationally.
As we're recording today, the government did come out with their initial response to the Disability
Royal Commission. And like you said, they have decided that people with disabilities just need
(24:12):
to go and get a job. And this blows my mind that they could look at all the stories that came out
of the Disability Royal Commission and go, this is where we should start. Like, are you kidding me?
(24:34):
But even if that's where we're going to start, the idea of pumping more money into the things
that is not working also just makes no sense. If you want to get people with disabilities into
(24:55):
jobs, you need to say to employers, people with disabilities can do anything. And you just have to
set it up so that they can do it. And yet, like one of the issues I've found most in my working life
(25:15):
is the issue of having to take my children to 1 million different appointments. And so having to
often say, look, I can't work for these two hours because I've got to go to an appointment or longer.
I don't actually know how long it will take because it's a hospital appointment and it
(25:37):
sometimes takes four hours to get in, even if you have an appointment. So these accommodations
often also can't be met because they're like, well, you've got to keep to your KPIs. And
it's like, how do I do that when I've got all these appointments? Just to start with,
(26:00):
before you even look at the accommodations someone needs within the job that they're doing.
Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, there's a lot of issues there. I mean, I'm reminded of,
and I didn't go get the exact figures on this because I wasn't thinking about speaking about
this, but Labor's own job summit found that DES had a 1% success rate or 3% success rate. And it
(26:31):
was on the verge of collapse and now they found a way to profit up by putting new clients into the
system. So this is another service that's only for disabled people that does not serve us,
it does not help us at all that we're being forced into against our will because they make money off
(26:51):
us. Disabled people are just a profit to people in government and people in the disability industry.
And it's really frustrating. And I get that like when I interact with lots of service providers,
some support workers even, sometimes explicitly so. So most of these systems that are set up,
(27:15):
and they love to go on about the idea that the NDIS is so expensive and everything. And I'm like,
well, we're not the ones who are profiting off that you are. You've set it up this way so that
you can profit off us. All of these employment systems don't work. They're designed to keep
people unemployed because the caseworkers make more money the longer they have us in the system.
(27:40):
So it's just everything about the employment system is really badly designed.
Them wanting us to get jobs is just an excuse to try to be able to cut services or force us
into more bad job matches. I mean, as you probably know, it's very difficult to get on the
(28:02):
disability support pension since I think the Giller government. So we have 40% of people in
job seekers are disabled, which means they have to meet mutual obligations and attempt to find work,
even though multiple studies have shown that everybody who can find work, pretty much everyone
(28:27):
who can find work has already found work. And most of the people are still on job seeker there
because they're disabled or because they have caregiving obligations or other factors like that.
So you have people like there was a famous case of the pilot in New South Wales with brain cancer
who cannot get on the DSP because his condition isn't fully treated and stabilized. So he's only
(28:53):
eligible for job seeker, but of course he can't find work. So he's had to sell all of his belongings
and continue borrowing money. You have people who have lifelong permanent disabilities,
but they won't qualify. It took me over three years to get DSP and that was coming into
(29:15):
it with 25 years of documentation of a permanent lifelong disability, just because they're so
keen on everyone should work and no one has any barriers and they want to penalize anyone who
doesn't find a job. And it's really difficult. And I think a lot of people probably could find
(29:38):
work or would be willing to work, but the issue is the barriers that exist in the work that
exists in the workplace and the government is doing nothing to try to address those barriers.
Instead, they're increasing them. Cutting off people's payments doesn't help people find jobs.
The low cost of the payments, which are well under half the poverty line, does not help people
(30:03):
find jobs. When I lived in the US, when I lived in Texas, which people love to look down on,
when I went through employment services there, they bought me interview clothes. They got me a
suit. They got me a shirt. The only thing they didn't get me were shoes because my feet were too
(30:25):
big for what was in the shop, but then they felt bad and gave me extra clothes instead. It would
have been very difficult for me to try to land an interview in a t-shirt and jeans or shorts. They
don't do that here, not that I've come across. They don't really have any interest in addressing
(30:47):
the reasons why people are unemployed or helping address those barriers. They just want to punish
people for not having them, which just drives people further into poverty, which just increases
the disability unemployment rate.
And increases distrust of the government and government departments.
(31:07):
Absolutely. They have plenty of models they could do if they were actually interested in addressing
any of these issues. If they were actually interested in disabled people should just have jobs,
damn it, they could make that happen. At least they could get a lot of us jobs, but they don't
want that. What they're looking for is a pretense to kick people off the job seeker. They want to
(31:35):
find ways to phase people off disability support pension. They want to be able to cut NDIS plans
as they have been doing drastically for the last two years. Or they want to find reasons to say,
hey, nobody else will take you for a job, so why don't you come to the shelter workshop for $3 an
(31:57):
hour run by our donors and come work for them. So when I did this advocacy before, the US system,
I know that there's sub and wage in Hong Kong and Israel as well. And I suspect the UK, but I'm not
(32:18):
sure about that. But in the US, city and wage supersedes state, supersedes federal.
And here it's all federal award wages. So I was able to organize locally and get a counselor to
introduce a bill to ban the city sub and wage and ended that. And then I worked on the state,
(32:47):
and I used what I did in Seattle as a stepping stone. And then I got 88 organizations to do
that. And then I got 88 organizations on board and I worked from there. And I did some other kinds of
transitional work on the county level and back in Texas, where I started originally.
(33:08):
Here, I've had to work on the federal level to address the core issue, it has to be a federal
issue. But there's still a state, there's still state and local aspects of this, right? So there
are four local councils, to my knowledge in Australia that pay the directly employed disabled
(33:31):
people for below minimum wage. So the four are Ballina Shire, Gilgundershire and Midwestern
Council in New South Wales and Manjumup in WA. So they are directly paying, that's the government
directly exploiting disabled people and paying them a few dollars an hour. And then there's other
councils that are preferencing ADEs in their business dealings. So I've learned from talking
(34:00):
to counselors around the country that ADEs often benefit from subsidized rent or peppercorn leases,
complimentary or discount room hire in council venues, council rate exemption or discounted
rate and favorable consideration and tender and procurement processes based on community goodwill.
So there's a whole lot of benefits that they get interacting with individual Shires.
(34:28):
For example, InterWest Council in Sydney gives them a 15% waiting based on the idea that
this is a social enterprise, the way that they would benefit an average loan business,
which is wholly inappropriate because it's not a disabled owned business, disabled people are not
(34:49):
benefiting from it. Some non-disabled person making hundreds of thousands of dollars is benefiting
from the ADE. There is scope for local councils to address this and I've asked, for example,
the Brisbane City Councilors, mostly without response, to try to address this. There are four
(35:11):
or three international jurisdictions that I know of that have passed legislation banning themselves
from paying a separate wage and banning themselves and their departments from
entering into contracts with any entities that pay a separate wage. Any ADE should be the
equivalent and that would be the City of Reno, Nevada, the City and County of Honolulu, Hawaii
(35:37):
and the County of King Washington, the last one being one that I organized. So there's no reason,
sure the federal government might continue to keep this in the books, but there's no reason that
councils should have to pay a separate wage or that they have to do business with entities that do
that, firstly. The other thing is looking at what the state and territory governments are doing.
(36:06):
In some cases, it might be the case that a state or territory government has enforceable law that
they need to preference these ADEs as social enterprises. I'm not sure if that's true. I
haven't gotten a response yet. I know that's not the case in Queensland, so there's nothing stopping
(36:27):
Queensland councils from deciding not to do it. But even if they do have a preference in case,
councils could still decide to wait with other factors to cancel out that waiting.
But on the state level, all the same things apply. States supersede councils. They could just decide
(36:49):
that no councils and themselves are going to pay a separate wage, that they're not going to contract
with entities that do this, et cetera, et cetera. So every level of government here could do
something proactively about it. And I've had a lot of, you know, the last couple of years,
I've had a lot of state MPs and councillors blow me off and say, you know, this is out of scope,
(37:16):
and, you know, they have nothing to do with it. Well, actually you do. You're just choosing not
to, you know, you've chosen not to support a value statement saying that you think that separate
wage should be abolished. And you've chosen not to explore any sort of legislation that would
improve things for disabled people in your area. So these are all things that people can demand
(37:41):
of their MPs or councillors wherever they live. On the state level, this would be called procurement,
procurement policies. So it would fall under a procurement portfolio.
Do you want to read out your statements? So if people want to sign on, they know what they're
(38:03):
signing on to? Sure. We oppose the practice of paying disabled workers sub minimum wage.
It is unacceptable that in 2024 disabled people living in Australia can be paid as little as $2.90
per hour, while the minimum wage for others is $23.00, $23.00 per hour. These practices don't
help disabled people find work. We know from the Disability Royal Commission that Australia has one
(38:25):
of the lowest disability employment rates in the OECD. As disabled people and allies, we support
transition to fairer, equitable work through more modern and just practices to support disabled
people in the workplace, such as supported employment and customized employment. We
acknowledge the international workers movement led by disabled people to end these archaic
(38:47):
practices which originated in the 1930s and seek equitable pay. This movement has seen sweeping
legislative success across the past decade. Disabled people demand equal pay for our work.
It is time for Australia to abolish sub minimum wages. So we have, there's also a plain English
version of the letter and a number of links to different sources on the figures given there.
(39:13):
Why have people opposed signing on to your letter before? Well, like I mentioned, some of it is
is more legitimate fear around not knowing what the alternatives are and thinking that
paying a minimum wage means that these businesses will shut down. And if you do the math on it,
(39:35):
you know, paying somebody who works a few hours a week isn't going to break the bank,
especially with the salaries that they pay their executives. Some people think that
the person will lose their pensions and their or their NDIS. NDIS is not means tested. And pensions
(40:02):
are for a lot of people, they're not going to make enough money for it to make a difference.
There are transitional rates like it's not at all or nothing. But to be honest with you,
the pensions suck. They're very low amounts of money. They come with, you know, they come with
a lot of rules and reporting. You can't even be in a relationship with a pension or they will
(40:26):
dock your pension because they assume that your non disabled partner should be supporting you,
which actually forces and keeps a lot of people into domestic violence situations.
The government can assume that your roommate is your sexual partner, even if they're not,
because they've just decided that statistically, you might be having sex with the person that
(40:47):
you're living with and dock your and dock your pension anyway. So if people can transition off
their pensions, because they can be paid a full wage for their work, that's actually a good thing.
And it's only non disabled people have ever told me that would be a bad thing. If someone's been
in a stable job for 20 years, and they could be paid enough to get off the pension, doing that,
(41:10):
then they should absolutely be paid enough to be off the pension. But I've also had some bizarre
things. You know, a lot of it is just based on the idea that like, these are the only jobs for
anyone. Like I said, you know, most people, you will see more disabled people just in the community,
in service jobs, in hospitality, behind screens, than you will see in ADEs. I've had really bizarre
(41:36):
ones. I did have someone tell me that I was going to take these jobs away from people like child
labor campaigners took, took cotton picking jobs away from children in India.
What? What? That doesn't even make sense.
He wasn't pro child labor though.
(41:56):
Yeah.
I'm not pro child labor either. Although if my children could get a job.
Yes, but I was terrible because I'm taking jobs away just like those terrible people took jobs
away from those kids in India. But anyway, yeah, so I've had like, I've had lots of weird responses
and I have, whenever I engage with these people, I'm like, I'm going to take these jobs away from
(42:22):
these people. I've had lots of weird responses and I have, whenever I engage with these people about
it, and then they realize that like, I know more about this topic than they do, they just stop
responding and like never, they never actually proactively engage with it or change their mind
about anything. They just like assume that they know more about this because obviously disabled
(42:43):
people can't do anything. And then like get annoyed at the idea that like, there's actually
these are bad for disabled people and all the data shows that getting rid of them and,
I mean, not even just getting rid of them improved outcomes, let alone using that money that we're
proactive, that we're pumping into this system and putting it elsewhere would have better outcomes.
(43:08):
I think that's something else that people don't understand. It's not even just that like,
it's not even just that some of us are over here trying to either working in the community or trying
to find community employment and some people are happily working for $2.90 per hour. It's that the
government is proactively putting tens of millions of dollars to keep a handful, just a few thousand
(43:35):
people stuck in this industry where they only make $2.90 an hour so that a few non-disabled people
can get really, really rich off us. And the whole system with ADEs, they have a lot of funding
streams that come in. So one, they're tax exempt. Two, they're directly underpaying their workers.
(43:58):
Three, they're utilizing their workers' NDIS funding. So if I go to a shelter workshop
and all ADEs only accept people who have NDIS, there's other places that pay civil wage that
are not ADEs, but ADEs only accept people who have NDIS. My funding is paying a support worker
(44:23):
who is supposed to support me so that I can do the job adequately. So even if this is a terrible job
placement for me, they're getting an extra non-disabled employee who can do the job.
They're getting two people who can do the job and they're only paying a couple of dollars an hour.
(44:43):
So they're getting all these different employment streams on top of that for
their benefiting from community goodwill because people assume, oh, you know,
if I buy goods or services from this company, I'm helping employee disabled people. No,
you're actually just making this one jerk really rich. So they have a lot of funding streams that
(45:06):
they're using federally and locally, like I mentioned earlier, to make money. And in a lot
of cases, they're doing so probably fraudulently. So I know a number of ADEs and other entities
will use that NDIS funding or support workers to pay for general operating expenses or to pay for
(45:32):
management, which is not what a person's NDIS funding is supposed to be used for. So it's a
very big, you know, we talk about this industry and it is an industry. It's huge amounts of money
that are being siphoned from the NDIS, from the tax service, from federal revenue, from local
rate payers, mostly in order to pay the profit margins of these ADEs. And that money could be
(46:02):
better used to support disabled people. In a lot of cases, it's supposed to be being used explicitly
to support disabled people. And it could be used so that that person could have a job in the community
and instead of somewhere isolated and get paid at least minimum wage, if not higher.
Yeah. One of the things I've found about people with disabilities is sometimes
(46:29):
they start up micro businesses because you, like you were talking about making a job around the
person. So sometimes I've seen people with disabilities go, well, I'd really love to do,
you know, jumper making. And so they decide to just make, create a micro business around
(46:54):
jumper making. I don't know why jumper making sprung to my head, but whatever. It's cold today
in Brisbane. I knew someone, a non-disabled person who really like had in her head, she works in
office, that she just wanted to make jumpers. I was like, maybe that's what she would do if she
didn't have to like work in an office. But anyway. Yeah. Okay. And, but, but I found this a lot. So,
(47:19):
so for example, a really good example was on a previous episode, we've spoken to an OT who
started up her own business because she has a disability and she was previously working for
a bigger organisation and she found that they just couldn't accommodate for her disability.
(47:41):
And so she went out on her own to be an OT because then she was like, well,
I'm going to work on her own to be an OT because then she can set her own hours and her own KPIs
and work around her appointments and around when she's exhausted from her disability and things
(48:02):
like that. And what I find is this happens a lot with people with disabilities because they're
the only person I feel like I can, I feel comfortable employing me is me because I know I'm
flexible with that. And so there's a lot of people with disability who start micro businesses.
(48:28):
Do you see that as an avenue the government could direct some of their money?
Yeah, I mean, I think that disabled people have to use a lot of different strategies to survive
and adapt to society because it won't adapt to us. And especially because the government is so
(48:51):
resistant to doing the bare minimum or even just not continuing to make it worse. So, you know,
we have people working in the open employment market, we have people who manage to get into
really specialized kind of places. Whenever I go to Melbourne, I always, there's a coffee shop I
like there, all things equal, they also sign the letter, but it employs all disabled people at
(49:14):
higher, at I think above minimum wage. And there's a waiting list now to work there. But there aren't
a lot of opportunities for disabled people to work in the community in places that will accommodate
us and not exploit us. You know, there aren't a lot of coffee shops like that or places. So people
(49:39):
end up doing things like you're talking about, you know, they do an Etsy shop, even though I think
Etsy is probably pretty exploitive with all of their artists, or they try to do a micro business.
You know, again, thinking about customized employment, comparing it. And I
written about it before, but when I was in Seattle, there was a woman who worked for the city. And
(50:05):
she had originally come out as a contractor. And she had made, basically, she was she'd come on to
get jobs for people with intellectual disabilities and high support needs. And, you know, when she
come on, they were like, it's impossible, we don't have any jobs, the city can be done by anybody
(50:28):
like that. And she was like, Okay, well, what about one job and she ended up creating a job because
you might have it in an office environment where you have lawyers working. And they're making
however many dollars per hour, but some of the what they do over the course of eight hours is
really is low paid work, like filing a clerical work that could be done by somebody else that
(50:54):
doesn't have to be paid, you know, hundreds of dollars per hour. And so she cut out parts of
their day from several different people and created a job that had easier requirements and
put in a put in place for somebody with intellectual disability to be trained to do that job. And what
I thought was really interesting was at the time that I had gotten seven wage banned in Seattle,
(51:18):
in 2018, there were only two people in the city. City of Seattle, by the way, has about
7800,000 people, two people legally being paid some wage, like stress legally, because they were
at least six or eight being paid illegally. But there were 113 people in this program working for
(51:39):
just the city of Seattle, not the private sector, making at or above the minimum wage for the city
with intellectual disabilities and higher support needs. And so, you know that like this person,
like what she did can can be done anywhere, you know, like that's something that that could be
(52:00):
set up in a lot of different places. Microsoft had until a couple weeks until like, three or four
weeks ago, an autism employment program, including in Sydney. And so the and that I as I understand,
allowed people to bypass some of the interview processes, a lot of autistic people would not be
(52:22):
good at even if they'd be good at that particular job. Not something that I ever did, because
contrary to stereotypes, I am not a programmer, not good with computers. And it's outside of my
interest, but it benefited some people. So you know, there are a lot of things that can be done
with customized employment, and I think that's something that's been really interesting. And
(52:45):
customized employment could be set up and could be and there are people with customized employment
here like like as an avenue, but it's not something that it's not something that we've sunk
10s of millions of dollars into because we're too busy making people rich. In terms of next steps,
I've noticed I've had a lot of trouble getting a number of state and federal MPs take me seriously,
(53:10):
even when I email them attach a letter. I've I've collated a lot of data so I can tell them you have
59 constituents in your in your electorate have signed this letter. And you have these organizations
in your constituency that have signed your letter, I've signed the letter. In addition to,
(53:31):
you know, these 35 national orgs, you know, that cover your area as well. And they still
tell me that I should be contacting my federal MP. So I'm considering if it would be beneficial to
try and start a an organization specifically around sub and wage. And if I did that,
(53:53):
I'd want it to have a range of disabled people involved geographically around the country,
rural and regional, if possible, people who have connections to different parties, although I think
a lot of us are very deliberately neutral, or not particularly beholden to anyone. And so if there
(54:21):
are disabled people who are interested in that, or want to get involved in that advocacy, that might
be something that we can to follow up on and we can look at. I'm also interested in more than just
the the award rate exemption, but other ways that disabled people are paid sub and wage. So when you
(54:43):
look at programs like work for the dole, where people are coerced into performing free labor
for the government in order to receive in order to receive pension, well, we already know that 40%
of people on jobseeker disabled and are just not able to get they're not able to get the DSP
(55:06):
because they're they had the misfortune to have brain cancer, or a fluctuating disability instead
of having an approved disability like spinal paralysis or something physical and tangible
that the the pencil pushers in at Centrelink understand as a concrete disability. So they
(55:32):
shouldn't be being forced to work for a sub and wage or no wage as the case may be, especially
under the conditions that that a lot of times they're those are they're working manual labor
there was an 18 year old who died a few years ago on a job site because it wasn't safe and they
(55:58):
weren't properly trained and he I don't remember his name but I know he called his father beforehand
that he didn't feel safe and then he died. I was speaking to a counselor in out in a more rural state
and she had been referred to work for the dole in her 60s and they wanted her to drive like two hours
(56:18):
to go to manual labor and that's not I don't think this person I'd advise is disabled but
it's really unreasonable to expect a 60 year old woman to go do bricklaying and
trench digging and such. Yeah and so that's and a lot of the same companies that benefit from
work for the dole also do sub and wage so places like the Salvos and Vinny's
(56:43):
companies do both of these things and it really just having these programs in place for the
government sends essentially slaves over to work for these private companies for free
also means there's fewer jobs because why would the Salvos hire anyone when the government is
(57:04):
sending those slaves over to work for free it it just in fact the only ones they hire I saw on
um was it I saw on the jobs website that they were hiring for a slave coordinator because they had
so many of these different positions so I guess they get a few of them but it it drives down the
number of available jobs because they're getting so much free labor from the government which is
(57:27):
also a a conflict because the government's providing free labor to these private private
corporations is it because they're lobbying I don't know why these companies are getting these
these benefits another example would be prison labor we know that prisoners in Australia
are overwhelmingly likely to be disabled we have statistics on mental illness a lot of people
(57:51):
kind of blow that off but developmental disability is a lot more concrete and a lot of cases
genetically provable so you know a study was done testing every single um youth prisoner in wa
or um youth offender in wa in a um in a facility and found that 89 percent of them had a
(58:20):
developmental a neurodevelopmental disability we are not 89 percent of the population
um and 36 percent of them had fasti specifically fetal alcohol spectrum disorder
um which is a huge proportion um Australia has I was just looking at statistics we have one of the
highest rates of maternal drinking in the world um really high there are no um we don't actually
(58:45):
have numbers on how much of the population is born with fasti um but it's going to be a lot higher
than most of the world and we have a really high maternal drinking rate and a lot of people don't
know that like one drink at a certain point of pregnancy can create fasti so um but then you have
neurodevelopmental disabilities like autism and down syndrome and fasti um I don't see why
(59:12):
prisons in wa are going to be any different from prisons in the rest of the country there's no real
there's no structural difference why those would be different so we have a huge number of
developmentally disabled people who end up in prisons instead of getting ndis services instead
of getting support and so you know I I don't want disabled people forced to work for free
(59:36):
or forced to work for three dollars an hour and prisons are another avenue where mostly
disabled people are made to work for a few dollars an hour um and it's not something that helps them
um learn skills it's not something that helps them accommodate their disability it's not something
(59:58):
that helps them when they're when they're released um it's not something that reduces recidivism or
does any of the things that we want as a society so all of these things are tied into
the exploitation of disabled people and our labor and they're things that um if the government was
(01:00:18):
serious about getting disabled people jobs that we would we would be looking at and we're not
absolutely so what is the best way for people out there listening to support your campaign
to support your campaign well I have um they can sign it especially if they have a um an organization
(01:00:42):
that they can sign on and bring to the table that would be that'd be useful I'm sure I know there
are people listening to this who haven't signed organizations on um they could you know contact
their um they could contact their MPs or counselors and put some pressure on um and they can you can
(01:01:04):
also contact me and I can give you a form letter you know like some talking points if you want
and you know there are some you know if we can trying to get rid of the sovereign wage
australia-wide is a really big task and it'll be really difficult but doing it doing it incrementally
(01:01:25):
in steps that is something that's achievable you know overseas um it's been happening on a state
by state and city by city basis so when I look at this I'm like okay well if there's people in
places like Balanashay or Manjumup who want to see their cities their council stop exploiting
(01:01:45):
disabled people they're really in a position to do something about it because if you can get your
local community to do something that's that's really easy um it's very difficult for me living
in Brisbane because Brisbane is the largest council in the southern hemisphere to take note of me
but it's probably easier to start there than it is with the whole country
(01:02:09):
so putting pressure on people here on our state MPs to change the system any of those things are
are possible if there's disabled people who are really interested in this and really want to be
involved um maybe contact me and we can figure out the logistics of putting together an organization
so that we have more credibility and can figure out how to coordinate who our targets are and what
(01:02:35):
areas we want to target and so forth I think that um when the election comes up I'm also
I'm also asking every candidate who's running for office again um so I'll be able to publish a list
of who those candidates are who who do and don't support that um and being able to distribute that
(01:02:56):
information through disability networks um to people who care about disability issues will be
really helpful as well. And your email address will be in the show notes so people will be able
to find all of the details in their show notes of this episode. So that brings me to in your
(01:03:20):
ideal world what would the future of the NDIS look like? The NDIS probably wouldn't exist to be honest
the NDIS um would just be healthcare and long-term services and supports and probably just be a
function of Medicare and so instead of being this siloed system that's just for disabled people
(01:03:40):
so then politicians can trot out oh disabled people are so expensive we'd be better off without
them and um oh this system is ballooning um ways that they don't talk about aged care because they
they think that they're going to be old one day and that they rarely talk about Medicare it would
just be part of Medicare and if you whatever you're qualified for you're qualified for without these
(01:04:00):
artificial barriers of um oh are you disabled enough for the NDIS and then are you disabled enough
for this service no we don't think you are I mean we did last year but now we've decided you're better
and um oh you know you've got to have a lifelong disability to get on this system but now we expect
you to get better and if you don't get better we're going to penalize you and cut your services and
(01:04:21):
if you do get better somehow we're going to penalize you and cut your services it was just
all in Medicare and you just get whatever you need whatever is relevant to you um that room
removes a lot of stigma they can stop paying tens of millions of dollars to lawyers they can stop
leaking our information to private law firms and then pretending to be Pikachu shock face whenever
(01:04:44):
there's a breach because they have no absolutely no um uh um technological security whatsoever
so yeah I think it would just that that we could just treat it as health care instead of treating
disabled people like some separate species who need a completely different system subject to
different uh different rules well I love that answer and that's exactly so I think that's
(01:05:12):
an awesome place to finish I want to thank you so much for coming on the podcast and hopefully we
can do it again and catch up about how it's going all right all right bye thank you for listening
please share with people you know until next time as the Green Brothers say don't forget to be awesome
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