Delivering employment to the disabled

The number of people with disabilities employed by the Commonwealth government has declined significantly over the last ten years. In 2003-2004, people with disabilities made up 3.8 per cent of ongoing Australian Public Service employees, down from 5.8 per cent ten years ago.

Peter Botsman is a passionate thinker about the social exclusion caused by disability. His thoughts on disability policy are driven by his theory of the third way political agenda, which is depicted by his satirical suggestion that “Government is the last resort”, at the ACROD 2003 National Convention.

Botsman, a former CEO of the ALP think tank The Whitlam Institute, is a strong advocate of the third way political and ideological agenda, which discounts the collective capacities of government and the public sector to ameliorate the social and economic exclusion of people with disabilities.

The statement that “government is the last resort” proposes instead that the individual is the arbiter of their own past and destiny. While such a view has the benefit of identifying people with disabilities as having agency, it overlooks the necessary role of government in creating a space for the operation of such agency.

Botsman’s approach fails to place much hope in the collective ability of government to devise appropriate social policies or regulations in the intervening requirements of the parliament pertaining to people with disabilities. Botsman’s third way political economic agenda thus implies that there is an extended invisible hand in the market place to assist people with disabilities who want to make the move to a more inclusive future.

Relevant to this context, and providing a critical counterpoint to Botsman, Mickey Kaus (1994) argues that:

[t]he military, after all, is relatively inefficient. Like a public works program, it’s a big bureaucracy. It isn’t subject to a lot of competitive market forces. Yet when we need it to fight, it’s usually gotten the job done. And we tolerate its inefficiency because there is no better alternative. You can’t fight a war with private enterprise. And, as I suspect [the political economy of the third way] will discover, you can't “end welfare as we know it” by relying on private enterprise either. (Kaus 1994:3)

In conclusion, my knowledge and experience of disability allows me to argue that the employment policies of affirmative action and government as employer of last resort, provide practical solutions to the problems of social and economic exclusion and un-employment for people with disabilities.