Page 1041 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2012
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workforce. There are 48 clients employed in office support agencies. There is a garden maintenance business that has operated since 1989 and works out of three locations; the Cut Cloth Shop that uses discarded clothes and materials and sells them to other Canberra businesses; Pack’N’Post, which is a packaging and mail-out business located in Belconnen and which packages folders and show bags for various clients; and a mail-out service that operates out of Woden.
LEAD also provides a similar range of services under the Australian Disability Enterprises framework. They have contracts with local regional councils, federal government departments and local construction companies to provide services that their employees can manage well and take pride in. And I know they would love to do more. They have more people on their books that want work. But in employer land, they tell me there is a great resistance to employing people with a disability.
It has to be said that Labor does not have a great track record in disability employment. The ACT government have a public service employment strategy and have engaged an HR officer to work across all business units to increase the number of people with a disability employed by the government. However, currently only 1.6 per cent of the ACT public service are self-identified as disabled, when 20 per cent of the total community are disabled.
A study of the employment of people with a disability in the ACT public service undertaken by People with Disabilities ACT in 2009 showed that there is a raft of relevant employment legislation, standards and policies already in place, so low levels of employments of people with a disability in the ACT public service is not for the want of policies. The report had 20 recommendations, including the introduction of apprenticeships, job auditions and work experience opportunities for people with a disability. It proposed disability awareness training programs for all employees. That was in 2009, and three years later only small increments have occurred.
In 2011, the then Chief Minister, Jon Stanhope, launched the ACT public service employment strategy for people with a disability. At the time he promoted the notion of targets, which, of course, the Labor government only the year before had soundly resisted, only to be rolled by the Liberals and the Greens in this place. In 2011, there were 327 self-identified people with a disability employed in the ACT public service. The target for this year is 441, and I would be interested to know from Ms Burch where we are with this target. In April last year we were already 55 behind last year’s target. So there is much work to be done if the aspirational 655 people is to be reached by 2015.
The government will always point to such activities as the post-school options expo held annually. This event is intended to provide prospective school leavers with the range of services and programs available. However, service providers have advised that it is limited in its scope and outlook. I am not sure that starting discussions with school leavers before year 11, as the motion suggests, is the answer. I know, from discussions with families, that conversations start well before year 11 in many families, but even then there is not always a successful outcome. So I do welcome the motion, and I hope that all of these additional components of it will lead to better outcomes.
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