IT'S the first question you get asked when you meet new people - what do you do? What job do you have?
"Probably because that's what defines us," Graeme Innes AM told Life Without Barriers' supporters on Tuesday.
"It sets our financial status, and as much as we don't like paying taxes, being on welfare is a much worse situation."
Mr Innes, a former Disability Discrimination Commissioner, was a member of Life Without Barrier's board for eight years.
He was invited back on Tuesday to launch the organisation's fourth Access Inclusion Employment Plan, and didn't pull any punches. When he first walked into their office it was assumed that he was there as a client, he said.
"It has, for all of its history been an organisation that has provided fantastic support for its clients, particularly people with disability , but perhaps not quite so good at empowering people with disability and that's an important difference."
In the latest plan, LWB outlines how it intends to become a more inclusive, progressive and welcoming employer, aspiring to have a workforce made up of at least 15 per cent of people with lived experience of disability within the next three years. It has also committed to do what it can to influence social policy and boost employment for people with disability across the community service sector and more broadly.
"People with disability are employed at a rate 30 per cent lower than the average Australian," Mr Innes said. "That has not changed in about 30 years." And those figures were unlikely a true representation of reality given the number of people who have given up. "I think the gap is worse than that and that is a terrible situation for us as a country." Research shows that people with disability take less sick leave, and make fewer workers compensation claims, MR Innes said.
They also stay longer in jobs and, because of the complexities of managing their own lives, make better managers. He himself went for 30 interviews after graduating, Mr Innes said, while his mates, who studied the same law degree at the same time, were walking into jobs without a problem.
"People couldn't work out how a blind person could be a lawyer," he said. He decided he had to start at the bottom, and took a job in the public service as a clerical assistant at State Lotteries, answering phones to tell people the winning Lotto numbers.
"People with disability have to do this, we have to start at the bottom and work our way up and prove ourselves and we are less likely to be promoted or trained to advance our careers," he said.
When you consider that about one in five Australians live with disability, that is a significant missed opportunity which must be addressed, Mr Innes said.
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