Craig Wallace is the Acting CEO of Advocacy for Inclusion: the disability sector is at breaking point. Photo: Region.
It has not been our practice at Advocacy for Inclusion in past elections to campaign for money for disability advocacy, as our focus is ensuring that governments come through with improvements for health, housing, education, transport, disability support and income support.
We don’t ask for money for ourselves. I can’t remember doing it in more than a quarter of a century of advocacy work in this city. We advocate for other people, not our own organisations. For us, it’s always the issues, and that’s how it should be, right?
However, there comes a breaking point. In this election, we need to point out that disability is now an incredibly frenetic and complicated reform area with a growing population of people needing help. We have multiple reforms underway at once, requiring engagement. It’s like being in the movie Twisters. You settle down with some popcorn and then look up, “Oh look, there’s another one”.
As everyone reading this knows, the NDIS is both an epic achievement and an epic tangle of Commonwealth bureaucracy. It’s mostly good, but almost everyone needs help grappling with it.
The creation of Foundational Supports – a kind of NDIS 2.0 – represents yet another wholesale reimagination of the system. In addition to funding public servants to deliver these reforms, there is a practical requirement to fund people with disabilities and organisations to engage.
The NDIS has taught us painful lessons about the costs and consequences of failing to engage organisations and people with disability during periods of reform.
In the ACT, we need to engage with combined state and local government functions, so there is a stack of work we need to do to ensure Canberrans with disability have any hope of accessing taxis, buses, streets and paths, housing and our hospitals and schools.
This is the work we do on coffee number eight in the wee small hours after we’ve spent the day whirling around the latest NDIS disaster. But as this city grows, ages and pours concrete over every millimetre of space, we’re going to need to do more at the municipal level if we want Canberra to work for disabled folk.
In the last few weeks, we responded to the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (the biggest royal commission in history), wrangled with a complete reorientation of disability supports under NDIS and engaged with complicated strategies driving better access and inclusion in health, education, justice and the broader community. Take a look if you don’t believe me.
I’m not complaining – we asked for this. And disability is, thankfully, far from the third-rate issue stuck in a political parking lot, which it was in the 90s. Yet funding and capability haven’t caught up, so the risk is we don’t get it right.
Increasingly, the people and organisations I work with feel like we’re stacked on a house of cards wobbling with the precarity we’ve come to expect from Canberra’s light touch building regulation. One touch and maybe the whole deck will come crashing down.
There is a high need for individual advocacy in Canberra, with some organisations reporting extensive waiting lists. Many of the people we help are in extremely complex circumstances and at risk of falling into homelessness, acute health care or the justice system. We have to make difficult choices about where we engage and who we help to maintain staff health and morale. People have to sleep and eat occasionally.
For years we have absorbed and masked the real costs of our work through cross-subsidisation, part-time work and reliance on the passion of staff and volunteers, but that house of cards is now collapsing under the sheer weight and complexity of these times.
We can’t go on like this – in this election, the time has come to appropriately resource the community organisations that Canberra people rely on for help, advice, representation and support.
Advocacy for Inclusion supports the ACT for Community campaign in calling all candidates and parties to commit to ensuring community organisations have enough funding to deliver their essential services.
You can help directly influence the parties and candidates in the lead-up to the ACT election by showing your support for the ACT for Community campaign by sending them a message.
Craig Wallace is the Acting CEO of Advocacy for Inclusion. Craig is a disability advocate who has worked and volunteered in the ACT community sector since the late 1990s.
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