Advocacy for Inclusion (AFI) has called for fundamental structural reform of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (DDA) in a submission to the Attorney-General’s current consultation, arguing that minor adjustments will not address the systemic barriers that continue to exclude people with disability from full participation in Australian life.
AFI’s Head of Policy, Craig Wallace said “When the DDA was enacted thirty years ago, it represented a landmark promise that Australians with disability would be able to participate equally in public life. That promise remains unfulfilled.”
“The Act has provided important symbolic recognition and avenues for individual redress, but it has fundamentally failed to dismantle systemic barriers in employment, transport, education, housing and services”.
At a recent AFI community forum, people with disability shared stories about discrimination and exclusion that revealed a consistent pattern. The barriers aren’t isolated incidents but deeply ingrained across every facet of community life. There was clear recognition that piecemeal change cannot effectively dismantle systemic problems that pervade so many areas of daily life.
“We heard the signs of failure are all around us. Shops we cannot visit, homes we cannot live in, schools without inclusion, a health system that can’t treat us, disability employment rates mired for decades in the doldrums, buses people can’t get into and streets and cities strewn with barriers and basic services people cannot access, read, hear, see, understand or use. Even the offices of Federal Ministers are inaccessible to some of us. These things would be unacceptable for any group in the community and they are unacceptable for the 1 in 5 Australians with a disability a quarter of the way into the 21st century”, Mr Wallace said.
The Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability documented these failings in detail, providing four and a half years of evidence that creates unusual political space for ambitious reform
According to Mr Wallace, “this is the most significant policy reform outside NDIS that is on the table for the Albanese Government to deliver for disabled Australians in response to a Royal Commission that cost half a billion dollars and decades of evidence about structural shortfalls and barriers outside the NDIS. We need ambition to match the moment.
“The DDA’s limitations are structural: a reliance on individual complaints, the absence of proactive duties, and weak enforcement mechanisms. These features have made the DDA less a tool of systemic change than a framework for dispute resolution where the burden falls on exhausted individuals – one that is demonstrably inferior to comparable jurisdictions and fails to meet Australia’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
“Tinkering or a new coat of paint will not cut it. Without structural reform, Australia continues with a model that is reactive, burdensome and ineffective. There is a better way and there are places where disability discrimination laws have worked, such as the United States”, Mr Wallace said.
Specifically, we call on the Commonwealth Government to:
- Strengthen enforcement through enhanced institutional powers, including a body with authority to investigate systemic discrimination, issue improvement notices and impose meaningful penalties
- Introduce positive duties on large organisations and public authorities requiring them to prevent discrimination proactively and remove barriers before complaints arise
- Reform the unjustifiable hardship defence to ensure economic considerations do not automatically override fundamental rights
- Accelerate and strengthen standards development with mandatory timelines and elimination of exemptions that undermine accessibility and build in oversight and quality assurance work and consequences when access is not provided
- Embed accessibility into existing regulatory regimes so building approvals, transport licensing, education accreditation and procurement systems require compliance
- Maintain and improve individual complaints mechanisms alongside systemic enforcement
- Enact a National Disability Inclusion Act requiring Commonwealth agencies to develop and publish Disability Access and Inclusion Plans, with alignment across all levels of government (Federal, State, Territory and Local) through National Cabinet
“These reforms represent a shift from reactive complaint-handling to proactive prevention. They would create positive duties similar to those now operating in work health and safety, equal opportunity legislation in Victoria and the UK Equality Act, while leveraging the compliance tools of the groundbreaking Americans with Disabilities Act”, Mr Wallace concluded. You can find our submission here
Media comment: Craig Wallace 0477 200 755