Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If there's one sector you'd think would require a dedicated, caring workforce, it would be disability support services. People living with disability, who are some of the most vulnerable people in our community, deserve the very best of care. That's why we agreed, as a nation, to establish the National Disability Insurance Scheme. The NDIS started with great promise in 2013. It was going to answer a pressing need. Its game-changing promise was that it would give consumers living with a disability the funds to enable them to buy the services that worked best for them. The decisions were to be in the hands of people with disability first, and those of their loved ones.

The NDIS, as originally conceived, was to be the world's best practice, a generational shift in how disability care is managed. When fully rolled out, it was expected to support 530,000 Australians living with disability, through individualised funding packages. That's a wonderful thing. But the complex requirements in the disability sector surely require equally sophisticated solutions—not just gig-economy-style delivery, as though providing disability care is little different from having a couple of pizzas delivered to your front door on a Friday night after a few beers. Yet that's what's happening. The gig economy, like a virus constantly seeking out new hosts everywhere, has now latched itself well and truly onto disability services, and the government is allowing this digital Work Choices to spread unchecked. It's the introduction of AWAs, but this time via an app.

There's nothing wrong with improving the delivery of services wherever there's a demand for them. That's pretty basic stuff. But the gig platforms are more often than not the material of nightmares, both for recipients and for the people who try to make a living out of them. The Senate Job Security Committee inquiry even heard that it's unclear whether individual disability care recipients are personally responsible for the health and safety of gig workers engaged through online platforms. The inquiry has recommended that this be clarified in law. In disability care, there was always likely to be a problem of this sort. Since the NDIS has given people with a disability the funding and the ability to choose where their support comes from, that also means that there has been a rapid rise in online platforms in the sector. Supply follows demand like night follows day, or like dodgy operators selling unwinnable lottery tickets pursue the weak and desperate.

There are many thousands of support workers operating through these gig platforms. And guess what? The overwhelming number of them are engaged as independent contractors with almost none of the rights and entitlements of people who are employed as support workers by legitimate companies—no superannuation, no penalty rates, no sick leave, no long service leave, no compassionate leave, no domestic violence leave and, of course, no workers compensation. They are entitled to none of these things even though these contractors without worker entitlements perform the same roles under very similar conditions to other regular employees.

Boosters of the situation say it's a good thing that technology allows flexibility. They say it is flexibility for consumers to choose exactly what care they need, and flexibility for workers to choose how and when and where they provide care. But it is not reasonable that technology makes certain work easier to arrange, that the workers who perform it should lose their workplace rights and conditions.

The caring sectors overwhelmingly include work that was once universally regarded as middle class. Increasingly, we have suffered the holing out of the middle-class pay and conditions that defined it. Time and time again, at the job security inquiry, we've heard this story about workers simply being unable to sustain a living wage without being led along like ants by the gig platforms offering them crumbs, working two, three or more jobs just to make ends meet, often on low-hour or zero-hour contracts—a trick that labour hire companies use to brutally regulate the workforce. If you want to complain about your situation, it's fewer hours for you.

Catherine Dryden, a community care worker and a United Workers Union member, told the story of how exploitation occurs on the labour hire side of the care sector. She said: 'As a casual, I never knew if I had work or not. I worked for an agency in North Sydney. I would receive a phone call to work that day. I would have to drop everything and race up to Bankstown and cover a shift. I would do an active shift from four o'clock in the afternoon to eight o'clock in the morning with high-needs clients and then drive to Primbee and take a deaf client shopping at 10 o'clock for three hours. Sometimes I didn't work, because there was no work. A lot of people need a second job to survive. Our rosters are changing daily, even by the hour on some days. Workers are put on and taken off. We can't do overtime. It's frowned upon if it happens. Some care workers are doing six to seven hours a day domestic work. We can do a shower, for example, from seven to eight in the morning and then wait in our car for an hour, unpaid. It's classified as a meal break waiting for the next job at nine o'clock in the morning. We're having multiple meal breaks, unpaid, and working five hours on an average day over a 16-hour period.' That's a disgraceful situation. With the gig economy factored into the equation, the deal is even worse.

Mabel, a company that provides disability services, received $5 million last year in government assistance to help it provide COVID-19 surge capacity in the aged-care homes. That's the same Mabel that was criticised at the aged-care royal commission for not knowing how to use personal protective equipment as it provided that same surge capacity. That's the same Mabel that does not take responsibility for its individual workers. That's the same Mabel that claimed at the job security inquiry that it doesn't even set rates, that it relies—and I quote—'upon each and every service provider to individually assess the amount and/or hourly rate or fixed price that they need to charge customers or clients.' What tosh.

We know that these workers are at the mercy of the gig platforms. There is simply no accountability or transparency on how Mable and many similar firms conduct their business. They are just skimming off the top of the labour market. Just like gig economy juggernauts in other sectors—such as Uber, Deliveroo and Amazon Flex—these multinational industry predators do not even regard their disability-care workers as employees. But it's not like these workers are running their own lawn-mowing franchise or putting an ad for their services on Gumtree; this is not work where you just show up, get a pay packet in the hand, go home and put your feet up in front of the tellie. This is critical disability care. We're talking about it because it is so critical. It requires real and ongoing engagement from its workers.

And it's not as though it can't be done with a real and credible employment approach. The Senate job security inquiry has heard from some providers who directly employ workers, pay superannuation, pay tax, pay insurance and other entitlements, and cover them with workers compensation. Hireup told the Senate job security inquiry that 'people will say that it's too hard to create a platform that engages workers as employees'. I would say that we need to try harder so it can be done. If you want even more evidence, Hireup this week won a good design award for its employment model. The award recognised Hireup's redesign of its employment model, with eligible support workers having the option to be employed on a permanent basis while having choice and control in when they work and who they do work for.

But, even if we put to one side the pressure the system puts on workers, why should people receiving much-needed care under this new, evolving and impersonalised NDIS arrangement be subject to the whims of corporate cowboy app operators and the algorithms they worship? It is absolutely not reasonable that a person living with a disability receives care under the NDIS that is anything other than fulfilling, supportive and based on ongoing relationships with the caregiver, not a casual drop-in model where there could be a different person providing the care each time it's delivered—and this is what's happening right now across parts of the disability-care sector. Both workers and clients deserve respect.

Jordan O'Reilly, from Hireup, told the inquiry that the typical relationship through his firm was for nine months or longer and that a person is commonly engaging multiple times a week for many months at a time. But Hireup is the exception, not the rule. The Senate job security inquiry has clearly heard that the impact of gig work is different depending on whether transactional or more personal services are being delivered. It heard that the delivery of personal services is much more complex than a simple transactional approach that generally involves trust and a relationship between worker and client. But because the platforms-based provider model has flourished in the disability sector it has brought with it the greater likelihood of transactional, rather than personal, service delivery. It's easy to understand why this has happened. Platforms-based providers promoting a gig approach to disability care are rife, and the system encourages it. Here's what Lauren Hutchins, from the Health Services Union, said to the jobs security inquiry about it:

If you look at some of these platforms, they are a combination of Tinder and Uber. You put your profile out there and people with disabilities or their carers then make a decision based on the information that is provided. What you don't see is that these workers themselves often don't have access to workers compensation. They certainly don't have access to any form of leave and the arrangements in terms of their pay are often dodgy.

The Recruiting Consulting Staffing Association told the inquiry:

We're also somewhat concerned about the prevalence of these models in the health sector and especially in the disability care sector. We're very concerned that vulnerable clients, or representatives of disabled elderly clients, will not have the time to properly analyse or indeed understand that, when you source an individual through platforms as an independent contractor, you're not engaging somebody, even on a labour hire basis; you're simply being matched, introduced to them. We think that presents a large number of problems.

So there you go: even the employer organisation agrees that there's a huge red flag. People working in this sector want to give their all to the job. They do not deserve to be stymied by rip-off merchants. Natalie Lang from the Australian Services Union told the job security inquiry that the primary reason that workers come into the NDIS is because they believe in making a difference in the lives of people with disability. That's a good thing, but goodwill and commitment to people is not an excuse for exploitation, especially when you're talking about a $22 billion government funded scheme.

It's up to us to ensure that exploitation does not occur. The amendments in this bill are positive and the inquiry that prompted them was much needed. Tragic deaths like that of Adelaide woman Ann-Marie Smith must be avoided at all costs. The inquiry by former judge Alan Robertson found:

For each vulnerable NDIS participant, there should be a specific person with overall responsibility for that participant's safety and wellbeing …

That's what Mable doesn't provide. We don't yet have any guarantee about the change. The government's lack of consultation concerns me greatly. There wasn't even a formal response from the government to the Robertson review, which was triggered by Ann-Marie Smith's death. The Morrison government has failed to consult with people with disability on changes which directly impact their lives, and this bill is just the latest example. That's leaving aside the predatory effect of gig platform operators which are crowding out the space. In the process, they are creating the conditions for disaster for both NDIS workers and, just as importantly, the participants in the scheme. Those are the Australians to whom we owe the highest duty of care. It is our responsibility in this Senate to make sure that care is given by enacting legislation. It is also quite clear, if we want to make sure that we have a viable and ongoing system, that there need to be appropriate career paths, which Mable doesn't give but employee models do. Thank you.