Editorial: Towards
Social Inclusion?
Last month, the National Convention Centre
in Canberra hosted an event titled
Towards
Social Inclusion. A practitioners guide to
building a more inclusive Australia.
For a cool
$3,188.90 for a two day conference, participants
were offered
'practical advice, real case studies, and workable solutions'
to make social
inclusion a reality. The targeted participants were 'Federal
and
State Government Departments/Agencies, Local Councils and the
NGO
sector'.
There is a
small indigenous community on
Cape York
with a population of
1200 people where a recent census of services and their
providers was
undertaken by government. It found that a total of 400 staff,
from government
and NGOs, were employed full-time in servicing the 1200
people in that
community.
As Noel
Pearson comments in this issue
"For every
three men, women and
children, there is a bureaucrat or service provider
supposedly working to
improve some aspect of their lives."
The social
inclusion industry is booming. For-profit conference
management
companies like Criterion Conferences can comfortably charge
$3,188.90 for
a two day talkfest, pitched at bureaucrats and NGOs, on
building a more
inclusive Australia.
Their industry counterpart, IIR Conferences, also a
for-profit and a global
operator, ran a similar event on 'disability reform' in March
in conjunction with
Minister Bill Shorten and billed it as a
National Disability Summit.
Following an outcry from people with disabilities about the
socially exclusive
nature of the event, Shorten got his department to subsidise
the attendance
of people with disabilities so that the for-profit IIR could
maintain its margins.
When it comes to living off the taxpayers, the for-profit
conference
management companies lead a very competitive field.
The
Towards Social Inclusion event defined the business
of social inclusion
in these terms:
"Following their election in 2007 the Rudd Government
announced a
commitment to decreasing disadvantage and building a more
inclusive
society. They established a national Social Inclusion Board,
put together the
Social Inclusion Toolkit and put in place mechanisms that
encourage
greater collaboration between governments and NGO’s.
With the foundations laid, it’s now up to our Federal and
State Government
Departments/Agencies, Local Councils and the NGO sector to
make social
inclusion a reality. The question is: How do we do this most
effectively?"
To this, we
say: No, dead wrong. Government departments and the NGO
sector cannot make social inclusion a reality, because they
leave society
(individuals, families, communities, neighbours,
friends, voluntary
relationships) out of the picture. Without society, you are
left with 400
workers servicing 1200 residents, perpetuating dependence,
deepening
disadvantage, changing nothing, and gobbling up taxpayers
money. Ad
nauseum.
In
disability, chronic illness management, mental health,
and indigenous
communities, service delivery can be done in either of two
ways - it can
empower or it can disempower. The Rudd Government's
hospital-centric
acute sector-focussed approach to health reform is a
continuation of
disempowering health care delivery models that have remained
unchanged
since Victorian times. The
National Disability Insurance
Scheme agenda
proposes to rob people with disabilities of the right to take
personal
responsibility for directing their own support arrangements
and hand
exclusive decision-making authority to a monopoly insurer.
In both cases, the language of reform is hitched to a
managerialism that is
locked up in the assumptions of ServiceLand and blind to the
critical
importance of nurturing self-managing capacities in
community-based
settings.
Charlie Leadbeater offers some invaluable insights into
how this mess in
social policy and service delivery has come about. And what
we can do
about it.
CLICK HERE to
tell us your views.
Noel Pearson
The poor are a goldmine
"In one Cape York community with a
population of about
1200 people, a census of services and their providers was
undertaken by a government department.
The number of people from myriad government and non-
government organisations that live more or less full-time
within, or who fly or drive in and out of, this community,
was more than 400.
For every three men, women and children, there is a
bureaucrat or service
provider supposedly working to improve some aspect of their
lives.
In this particular community, there is a precinct where
the service providers
dwell. It looks like a UN enclave. The housing is better and
the workers who
work there enjoy salaries and conditions that are
incomparable with their
local colleagues. Routinely, government employees work
alongside
community members but are on double the salary for the same
work. When
a riot erupted in the community, counsellors were flown in to
deal with the
psychological impact on government employees, but the actual
community
victims of violence and mayhem were left to fend for
themselves.
I have been working on a reform agenda in Cape York
Peninsula aimed at
rebuilding indigenous responsibility and self-reliance for 10
years now.... I go
through peaks of optimism and troughs of depression when I
think about our
reform agenda. When I see the school attendance rate at
Aurukun go from
30 to 70 per cent because of the role of elders from the
Family
Responsibilities Commission, I'm on a high.
But the curve dives precipitously downwards when I face
what is the biggest
truth of the impact of our reform work: we have managed to
quadruple the
size of the bureaucracy that is now dedicated to solving
indigenous
problems. This is the most salient truth and yet the most
obscured....
So the first problem is an age-old one of
ever-pullulating bureaucracies: like
maggots engorged on a roadside carcass, whenever there is a
new budget
line the frontline departments of government serve themselves
first. This is
the real Aboriginal industry.
But just because this is an age-old problem does not
mean that we should
just knowingly shake our heads in despair and move on. It has
to be
confronted. The fact and nature of this problem should not
just be accepted.
We will never revive the flagging near-cadaver of the
Aboriginal body politic
until we relieve it of the too many governmental parasites
that drain its very
lifeblood.
When I first mounted my critique of passive welfare 10
years ago I argued
that there were three aspects to the welfare paradigm. The
first aspect is
unconditional income support, what is popularly understood as
welfare.
The second aspect is what we called passive service
delivery. And the third
aspect was the mentality - among indigenous people and the
service
deliverers - that justified the correctness of these two
forms of passive
welfare.
The second form of welfare - passive service delivery -
was not understood at
the time of our critique, and has little public policy
understanding even today.
When we say that a large part of our welfare problem is
government service
delivery, people do not understand what we mean. After all,
service delivery
is supposed to be what is needed. Aboriginal disadvantage
supposedly
needs to be fixed by more comprehensive and more co-ordinated
service
delivery.
This is how you end up with 400 service providers for
just 1200 people.
Our point that indigenous passivity is very much a
consequence of
government service delivery has been completely lost in the
debate on
indigenous policy.
What my opponents and sceptics from the Left have failed
to understand is
that when we talk about disempowerment being the singular and
devastating
feature of Aboriginal Australia, we mean that our people have
had their
responsibilities taken away from us. Responsibility is power.
If we want our
people to be empowered, then we need to take back the
responsibilities that
the welfare state has stripped away from us.
Getting the fangs of government off our throats means
that we have to be
able to distinguish between empowering and disempowering
service delivery.
If we subjected the 400 service providers that are
engaged in this single
Cape York community to the analysis of whether they are
providing an
essential service or supporting Aboriginal people to take
charge of their own
lives, then you end up getting rid of 300 of them at least.
Yes, you need paediatricians and engineers flying in and
out of these
communities from time to time. But when you go through the
long list of
useless programs and service providers who say they are doing
something
essential, you can see how redundant and self-serving it all
is.
And ultimately the biggest structural reform in
indigenous policy is this: there
must be the means to get the leviathan back into its cage. It
will not retreat
by choice."
CLICK HERE
to read the full text of this article.
Ian Hickie The
Commonwealth's failure in health reform
"Australia does not win gold medals for
health care. In
fact, the World Health Report ranks us at number 32, way
below Britain and other OECD countries.
We do poorly because of high
out-of-pocket costs, a lack
of equity and poor access,
particularly in primary care,
mental health and oral health.
Now it is clear
that the focus of the Rudd
government's
$7.3 billion new investments is refunding of
our acute hospital networks, it is
unlikely that we will be
winning any gold medals in health in the near future.
In distinct contrast to the past 10
years of genuine reform in Britain and other
European
countries, very few substantial changes in the way we do
business
have been achieved.
We now have five layers of bureaucracy
(national, state, local hospitals,
private health and
"Medicare local").
There are no mechanisms for greater
competition between public or private
insurers or public or
private health professionals.
It is more likely that the new system
will accelerate rather than contain
healthcare costs.
Sadly, there has been no substantial
shift to reward systems that manage
those with chronic
illness outside hospital settings....
Mental illness accounts for 24 per
cent of health-related disability in this
country and is a
major driver of unemployment, underemployment, alcohol
and
substance misuse, emergency department presentations, family
breakdown and suicide.
We spend about 6 per cent of the
health budget on mental health services
and most
distressingly, only 13 per cent of young men and 31 per cent
of
young women with mental illness receive any help.
The real issue now is why, in this
phase of substantial health change, are
Kevin Rudd and the
premiers so determined to abandon some of the most
vulnerable people in our community?"
Ian Hickie is executive director
of the Brain and Mind Research Institute of
the University
of Sydney.
CLICK HERE
to read the full text of this article.
Health
Reform Campaign
Consumer-Centred Health Care
The hospital financing and health workforce
measures announced by the
Rudd Government in April will have little impact
on the need for
transformational system change to place consumers - not
providers or
bureaucrats - at the centre of health care.
Australia's health system is provider-centred, not
consumer-centred. This
means that the system is built around service providers, practitioners
and
institutions, rather than the users of
services and their families.
Neither side of politics is offering the leadership
necessary to drive
transformational change in the health system.
The following five
key ideas were generated at
the
Consumer-Centred
Health Care: Policy Innovation and Empowerment
conference on 22-
23 March 2010.
Together they form the core of our
five-point campaign for
consumer-Centred Health Care:
-
Person-Controlled Electronic
Health Record
-
A Care Coordination and Brokerage
Payment of $2000 for every consumer with a diagnosed chronic and mental illness
-
A
Person-Controlled Health Management Tool
-
A Health Care Price and Safety Information Service
-
110
Divisions of Consumers as Incubators of Innovation
CLICK HERE
for further information on the Campaign.
These
five innovations are not the last
word in health reform. They are simply
starting points for the
re-direction of reform efforts away from a narrow pre-
occupation
with hospitals to a focus on the total consumer experience of
health and health care. As starting points in this process, our
Campaign has
a focus on the funding and structuring of consumer decision-making,
empowerment, self-care
and self-management.
Our aim is to influence governments to implement this 5 point agenda. To
this
end, we will work to gather political support for the agenda from
politicians,
political parties, policy makers, and the community.
There are many ways you may become involved in
the National
Campaign for
Consumer-Centred Health Care.
- Invite a speaker from the
Campaign to visit your group or organisation
- Express your interest in
joining our Steering Group
-
Offer your expertise in developing
a public and political engagement strategy
-
Convene a regional
initiative/forum in your area
CLICK HERE to become involved in any of
these ways.
Tell us what you think. We would be pleased to
receive your comments or
suggestions.
CLICK HERE
to
use a
feedback form.
The
Pro-Am Revolution: Amateurs and Professionals
Charlie Leadbeater is a UK writer on
innovation and
social change and one the most influential thinkers in
the English speaking world. One of the key themes in
his work is the disappearing divide between Amateurs
and Professionals.
"The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine,
science,
education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and
their
ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what
they
were doing and had certificates to prove it.
The Pro-Am Revolution argues this
historic shift is reversing. We're
witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am,
bottom-up self-organisation and the
crude, all or nothing, categories of
professional or amateur will need to be
rethought.
Some
professionals will find that unsettling; they will seek to defend their
monopolies. The more enlightened will understand that the landscape is
changing. Knowledge is widely distributed, not controlled in a few ivory
towers. The most powerful organizations will enable professionals and
amateurs to combine distributed know-how to solve complex problems.
Pro-Am
activity will continue to expand. Longer healthy life spans will allow
people in their forties and fifties to start taking up Pro-Am activities
as
second careers. Rising participation in education will give people
skills to
pursue those activities. New media and technology enable Pro-Ams
to
organize.
After a
century in decline, amateurs will rise again. And they will change the
world."
CLICK HERE
to read
The Pro-Am
Revolution.
Charlie
Leadbeater Revisiting Ivan
Illich
"Professionals have an inbuilt
tendency, despite the best
intentions of many
individuals,
to become cartels, a kind of
priesthood. They are not just
gatekeepers of knowledge,
resources and status. They
determine what is
valid,
legitimate, needed or deviant.
They tell us where we are
deficient in our
learning,
health or behaviour, and what we
need to do to correct our
shortcomings. The public service
professions may have started
life with a
vocation to serve,
by providing specialist
expertise but they have now
exert a
self-justifying monopoly
over many areas of life.
Education has become what
teachers deliver in school.
Doctors and hospitals define
what it is to be
healthy. Care
is what social and care workers
organise for us. Professions
may
serve us but at the price of
ensnaring us in their language,
protocols
and codes and in the
process they disable us, by
rendering us confused and
dependent. A person going into
hospital quickly becomes
redefined as a
condition to be
diagnosed and treated. A child
going to school quickly
becomes
defined by their progress
against bewildering key stages
which set
out what they should
be learning by when.
Our
debates about public goods -
what it means to be healthy,
educated,
cared for - quickly
degrade into debates about
professions and their
institutions: how they should be
funded, who should get access to
them,
how they should be managed
and held to account.
By
definition what is not
professional, institutionalised
and properly
accredited - the
self-taught, the
self-administered - must become
odd-ball
and maverick, drop outs
and deviants, not to be trusted.
As professionals
extend their
dominion over our lives our
confidence in our abilities to
make
decisions and provide
solutions for ourselves
diminishes. We become
incapable
of acting without prior
professional approval. When we
do not get
the service we have
come to expect, when doctors are
not available, or
cannot
dispense the miracle cure, we
become angry and resentful.
Professionals even control what
tools we get to help ourselves -
over the
counter medicines for
example - and how we use them.
That is a brief sketch of ideas
articulated 30 years ago Ivan
Illich, a nomadic and
iconoclastic Catholic priest and
arch
critique of industrial
society. Illich set out his
ideas in a series
of short,
polemical and passionate books -
more like
pamphlets - in which
he set out a critique of the failings of
modern institutions and the
professionals who organise them:
Deschooling Society, Limits to Medicine, Disabling
Professions and Tools
for Conviviality.
As he put it in Deschooling
Society : "The pupil is
"schooled" to confuse
teaching
with learning, grade advancement
with education, a diploma with
competence, and fluency with the
ability to say something new.
His
imagination is "schooled" to
accept service in place of
value. Medical
treatment is
mistaken for health care, social
work for the improvement of
community life, police
protection for safety, military
poise for national
security, the
rat race for productive work.
Health, learning, dignity,
independence and creative
endeavour are defined as little
more than the
performance of the
institutions which claim to
serve these ends, and their
improvement is made to depend on
allocating more resources to the
management of hospitals, schools
and other agencies in question."
Illich was
writing for a different time,
when Mao was in power, before
Watergate, when the left was
still counter cultural, utopian
and radical, the
Vietnam war was
being prosecuted and the welfare
state was in its prime,
before
the rise of the free-market
right, globalisation and single
issue politics.
Yet Illich was
ahead of his time by being
behind the times: his critique
of
industrialisation harked back
to pre-industrial, communal
forms of
organisation, as well
as foreseeing a world of
networks and webs long before
the Internet.
For much
of the 1970s he was a darling of
the left, sharing some
intellectual
common ground with
Herbert Marcuse and the
Frankfurt School's critique of
a
one dimensional society, run by
large corporations in which were
insidiously encouraged to see
everything as a commodity. He
was an
environmentalist before
the movement had been born and
lived a spartan life
with few
possessions. Yet Illich was no
lefty. Although he was deeply at
odds with the Vatican, he never
left the Catholic priesthood. He
dismayed
many of his left-wing
fans with a withering attack on
Castro's Cuba and his
defence of
the traditional gender roles,
which enraged feminists. Indeed
many on the right would have
found aspects of his ideas
attractive. Illich was
in some
respects profoundly conservative
and anti not just industrialism
but
all things modern. But he
was also a libertarian, an early
advocate of a
version of
education vouchers and
individual choice in public
services. Illich
died in 2002,
from a cancer he had for many
years but which he refused to
have treated by doctors. He
believed modern society
encouraged the
delusion that
life could be lived without pain
and suffering. Towards the end
of
his life his writing became
more apocalyptic, at times
melancholy and
pessimistic.
Yet in a
short, golden period in the
mid-1970s, Illich set out not
just a
critique of industrial
era institutions and
profession but also some
highly
suggestive ideas on how
they might find a more
supportive, realistic and
balanced role in society. Those
ideas now have even more
purchase on a
world were people
are less deferential,
professionals are less trusted,
consumers are better informed
and more assertive, and
knowledge is
available from many
more sources. Illich's ideas
deserve revisiting."
CLICK HERE
to read more of this text.
Immigration,
Multiculturalism and Civil Society
Roundtable Series
Public debate on issues of immigration, ethnic and
social cohesion, refugees and multiculturalism in
Australia is virtually non-existent. There is a
subterranean disquiet about the unintended social
consequences of immigration, and a bi-partisan
agreement amongst our politicians to ignore this
disquiet for fear of stirring up latent racism.
Kevin Rudd has stepped back from talking
about a Big Australia because he
suspects he cannot control a public debate on immigration.
The corporate
sector wants as big a domestic market as possible for their
goods and
services, but they too are biting their tongue lest talk of
40 or 50 million
Australians creates needless political anxieties for their
people in Canberra.
The people who have quietly born the
brunt of this bi-partisan silence are
residents in working class suburbs and kids in working class
schools,
where newly arriving immigrants and refugees must find a
home, learn
English, and take the menial jobs that aspirational
Australians don't want.
Leafy middle class suburbs, where our politicians and policy
makers tend to
live, are not the places where this experiment in unregulated
ethnic and
religious diversity is left to play itself out.
What can be done to break down ethnic ghettos
in our cities?
How can all schools accommodate social
diversity, not just working class schools?
How can cultural interaction across
ethnic lines
be facilitated at neighbourhood levels?
Expressions of interest are invited from
people wanting to participate in two
roundtable discussions on
Immigration, Multiculturalism and Civil
Society in Sydney and
Melbourne in June.
Tuesday
22 June, 11am to 1pm, Melbourne
Wednesday 23 June, 11am to 1pm, Sydney
Our aim is to begin a process of open
and public discussion about these
issues. The first series of two roundtables will identify
issues and themes for
further work.
CLICK HERE
to express your interest in
participating. In your email, tell us a
bit about your interest in these issues.
Lifelong
Disability Entitlement Scheme
The
Lifelong Disability Entitlement Scheme
is a proposal for
transformational
change in the funding of long-term care and
support for
people with disabilities -
without the uncertainty, risk and loss of
control
associated with an insurance scheme.
It requires the Commonwealth
to legislate for a schedule of lifelong
minimum
disability entitlements for all
people with diagnosed disabilities. The
schedule
would comprise seven payments - six
fixed-amount annual or one-off
payments, and
one variable annual payment adjusted for
support need
factors over the course of a
lifetime.
The Scheme would replace all
existing state and commonwealth disability
programs. It would direct all payments to a
nominated agent of people with
disabilities,
rather than to service providers or to a monopoly insurance
company.
Disability is a part of
everyday life. It is not
a 'liability' or
'risk' to be insured against.
People with
disabilities and their families
have
struggled for decades to be socially
accepted as part of mainstream life. To
treat disability as
something to be insured
against is at odds with, and
runs counter
to, its social acceptance.
Self-direction and
personalised control of supports by people
with disabilities
and their families is a
basic human right. We do not think this
right to take
personal responsibility is compatible with an insurance
scheme which treats
decision-making about
supports (including eligibility) as a 'liability
management'
prerogative of an insurance company.
Our view is that such decisions should not be made by an insurance
company.
We invite you to examine this
proposal for a
Lifelong Disability
Entitlement Scheme
and compare its benefits
with the proposal by three
large service
providers (The Spastic Centre, Yooralla and
Disability Services
Australia) for a National
Disability Insurance Scheme
(NDIS).
You will
see that the emphasis in the
Lifelong Disability
Entitlement
Scheme is on social
relationships, participation, personal
responsibility and
self-direction - and
the provision of funding entitlements
designed to
maximise these features over a
lifetime for each and every person with a
disability and their family.
This easy to use table
compares the main features of both schemes:
| |
|
Lifelong Disability
Entitlement Scheme |
National Disability
Insurance Scheme |
| |
Eligibility |
Legislated schedule of minimum entitlements |
Assessed by an insurance company on the
basis of 'need' |
| |
Choice of agent
|
People
may choose their agent and freely transfer
on an annual basis
|
A single
monopoly
insurer |
| |
Cost structure
|
Full and open disclosure of unit costs for
supports and services |
Unit
costs subject to contractual arrangements
and closed information loop between insurer
and providers |
| |
Conflict of interest
|
Legislated prohibition on service providers
acting as fund holders |
Silent on the provider/fund holder conflict
of interest |
| |
Person-controlled information and management
tool
|
Legislated entitlement to a
person-controlled electronic record and
self-direction management tool
|
Decision-making falls under the prerogative
of 'liability management' on the part of an
insurance company |
| |
Retail market |
An independent Disability
Support Information Service to supply online
comparative price and quality data |
Silent on how a retail market
would be developed and regulated |
| |
Family carers |
Has a stated goal of supporting
families in their care role |
Has a stated goal or reducing
dependence of people with disabilities on
their families and increasing dependence on
formal providers of care |
| |
Work and benefits |
Builds self-direction and
self-generated incentives to move into
business or employment activity |
Assigns incentives to an
insurance company to move people off the
Disability Support Pension |
| |
Social relationships |
Assigns payments to
facilitate social networks and social
relationships as the key to a good life |
Silent on social
relationships, views people with
disabilities as detached isolated beings to
be managed by others |
CLICK HERE
for further information.
"Our right to take
responsibility" Declaration of Independence
People with disabilities and their
families are invited to sign up
to the
"Our
right to take
responsibility"
Declaration of
Independence.
This is a declaration that your right to take
personal responsibility for
disability
supports will not be given away to an insurance
company in the
name of a misguided managerialism.
The
text of the Declaration is:
|
Declaration of Independence
Self-direction and personalised
control of supports in disability is a basic
human right for myself
or my family member. This human right is not compatible with an insurance
scheme which treats decision-making about
supports as a 'liability management'
prerogative of an insurance company.
I declare that
decision-making about disability supports is
the prerogative of people with disabilities
and their families. I will not give away
this right to an insurance
company.
|
Use
this online form
to add your name to the Declaration.
Disability Support: Options for Reform Conference
21-22 March 2011
Papers and contributions are invited for presentation at
this national
conference on March 21-22 2011.
The
conference will provide an opportunity to explore the
options for reform
arising out of the Commonwealth's Inquiry into a National
Disability Long-
term Care and Support Scheme. This Inquiry will report to the
Commonwealth Government by July 2011. Its Terms of Reference are
available
here.
The conference will
examine the main proposals for reform, scrutinise their
strengths and weaknesses, and explore their implications for people
with
disabilities and their families.
Expressions of
interest are invited in presenting on any aspect of the
disability support reform process, including:
International
models of disability support
International case studies of disability reform processes
Funding models
Eligibility frameworks
Entitlement frameworks
Insurance models
Self-direction frameworks
Individual budgets models and case studies
Agents/ brokerage models
Fundholding and management models
Technology for self-direction and self-management
Legislative requirements for reform
Federal/state relations
Financial costs of reform
Transition issues
Assessments of the National Disability Insurance Scheme
proposal
Assessments of the Lifelong Disability Entitlement Scheme
proposal
Political leadership in disability reform
The deadline for contributions is
30 November 2010.
CLICK HERE
to submit your expression of interest and
abstract.
Kelly Vincent takes her place in
the Legislative Council
When the late Paul Collier,
disability advocate and
historian was elected to the Upper House in the South
Australian Parliament in March this year, his place was
taken by Kelly Vincent as the No.2 candidate on Paul's
group ticket.
At 21 years of age, Kelly became the youngest female
member of parliament in Australian history. Funded
service providers applauded her history-making election.
But as a valuable insight into the politics of social reform
in Australia, it is
worth recalling that not one disability service provider in
the state supported
Kelly's campaign. Every last one rejected approaches to
circulate material
on her campaign's behalf. Wary of offending their funders in
government,
service providers refused to tarnish their status as worthy
recipients of public
money by aligning themselves with a young poverty-laden woman
in a
wheelchair.
Robbi Williams is the CEO of the Julia Farr Association, a
leading disability
organisation in South Australia. Here is Robbi's message to
voters a few
days out from the South Australian election on
How to Vote.
Note the care
taken in crafting an unambiguous, but vacuous, neutrality:
"Neither I nor the
Julia Farr Association profess any formal
political affiliation,
so I'm not about to tell you who to vote for.
However, it may help to think the
matter through in the same way as any other proposition to
buy into
something.
For
example, if I want to buy a new appliance in
my price range, such as a vacuum cleaner, I
will want to know what it will do to make my
life a little better. The considerations
could include sustainability (how long will
it last?), goodness-of-fit (does it do what
it actually says it will do,and how will I
know?), reliability (will it work without my
having to cross my fingers each time?), the
'me' factor (is it the look that I want?
Does it fit my lifestyle?), and some measure
of assurance to give me confidence I'm not
buying a dud (is there a warranty?). If I
apply these considerations to each of the
available vacuum cleaners, then the one that
has the strongest showing is the one that I
might buy.
I
am confident that many of us apply this sort
of thinking (let's call this the
Suction Test) to the purchasing choices we make, so
why not apply it to the
voting choices we make also?
Given the fact that many people living with disability remain
shut out from a
good life, I think it reasonable, necessary even, to expect
every current and
aspiring Parliamentarian, and party, to have a formal policy
on disability. I
therefore recommend that voters apply the Suction Test in
each case.
To do this, you first need to familiarise yourself with each
party's policy. For
South Australia, in alphabetical order, to the disability
policy of
Democrats,
Dignity for Disability,
Family First,
Greens,
Labor,
and
Liberals....
In each case, you could apply the
Suction Test
by posing the following
questions:
Sustainability:
will the policy bring lasting benefit?
Goodness-of-fit:
does the policy make sense to you, in terms
of matching
the issues in the disability sector, or is it missing some
things? Is it likely
that the policy can achieve what it says it will achieve?
Does the policy
contain clear and tangible measures to assess its impact, or
is it fuzzy?
Reliability:
can the policy be relied upon to be fair to
people and to maintain
an honourable relationship with people seeking assistance?
Does the policy
mean that people can go about their daily lives without
getting unpleasant
surprises about support levels/availability? Can the policy
be relied upon to
adequately reflect the UN Convention on the Rights of
Disabled Persons?
Me factor:
does the policy enable people to develop
customised support
arrangements so that they can lives of choice?
Assurance:
what is the degree of warranty, the extent
to which the party is
guaranteeing that it will do what the policy promises?
Whichever party's disability policy has the best showing
against the Suction
Test can maybe help you to decide how to vote this weekend.
Good luck
with your choice."
CLICK HERE
for the full text of this article.
Below: Tony Abbott meets Kelly Vincent shortly after
her election.
Volunteer
Three roles available with
the Centre for Civil Society
The Centre for Civil Society is experiencing huge growth
in the scope and
scale of its
activities. If you are looking for a volunteer role that
is
intellectually stimulating and
practically challenging, we want to hear from
you.
We have
three roles for which we are seeking to appoint
volunteers.
Applicants are
invited from all states and territories, for varying
time
commitments.
-
Events Organiser
-
assisting in the organisation of forums and
conferences
-
Writer
-
mentoring and support is available in writing news
and opinion pieces on various topics which fit the
Centre's agenda
-
Administrative Assistant -
assisting in various administrative, financial and
database management tasks
If you have
an interest in any of these roles, please send a CV and
the
names of 3 referees along with
a covering letter on your interest in the work
of the Centre to
Liz Stewart.
Organising by Federal Electorate
CLICK HERE
to register
in your electorate
(there is no cost).
On registering, participants will
be
connected to an online forum in their
electorate, and will receive
access to resources and guidelines for local
activity.
CLICK HERE
for more information.
Events
June 22 2010:
Immigration,
Multiculturalism and Civil
Society
Roundtable Discussion
Melbourne.
June 23 2010:
Immigration, Multiculturalism and Civil
Society
Roundtable Discussion
Sydney.
March 21-22 2011:
Disability Support: Options
for Reform
National Conference
Melbourne.
