Dr. Iris Elliott:

To add to that, it is well established that disabled people, their families and carer system often experience heightened levels of poverty. There is great concern about a business that has developed around assessment of need where people have to pay for an assessment of need in order to even be in the ballpark of accessing support services. That is a concern for us in terms of people’s economic rights. We recently did the report on cost of disability and assessment of need has started to become part of that cost of disability in terms of accessing support services. The absence of a right to support services, as we just said, puts limits on people’s participation in their communities and access to education and employment which also has economic impacts on the person and their family members too.

We have just made a submission to the forthcoming successor strategy on the roadmap to social inclusion which we can share with the committee. We are asking for an anti-poverty strategy that would specifically look at the cost of disability, etc.

We are also concerned about the process of assessment of need and the very formal, high-level assessment of need moving towards diagnosis when everything the UNCRPD is about is trying to shift from a medical model of disability yet to even get access to very basic services, people have to be diagnosed with particular conditions. It is not an agile, time-sensitive, proportionate access to services. I would raise the concern that this is about the design of an assessment system that enables people to have the right to support services.