Jordan Priest isn't sure about what he wants to do for work.
The autistic 24-year-old said he receives the Disability Support Pension (DSP), but that it's not enough to live out of home independently.
He said scrolling through rental listings in his home city of Canberra was depressing.
"I did expect the prices to be fairly high, $500 a week or whatever, [but] it's a bit soul-crushing," he said.
For four years, Jordan has had to attend regular mandatory meetings with a Disability Employment Services (DES) provider in order to keep getting his pension.
DES is the government's main pathway for helping people with disability find and keep a job.
But Jordan said after years of meetings and changing provider multiple times, he's no closer to finding a job.
"I don't really know what I want to do, I don't know how to get started," he said.
"Then they just essentially tell me all these things I should be doing, then expect me to do most of it and they just do very little.
"At first it was disappointment, and I just kind of sulked about it — now it's just getting frustrating which is kind of making me think I'd really just rather try and do things on my own."
What is DES and how does it work?
DES was established in 2010 and is run by the Department of Social Services (DSS), which funds 88 providers across more than 3,000 sites as of April 30, 2024.
The program has been consistently criticised for poor outcomes and exploitation, highlighted during the Royal Commission into the Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.
"One DES provider even recommended to a young person that they work in a call centre, despite that young person being situationally mute in social settings," Children and Young People with Disability Australia CEO, Skye Kakoschke-Moore said.
One third of participants got a job placement in 2022-23 and 37 per cent of people placed in 26-week placements completed them, according to department data.
Providers also receive regular service fees for each client they support.
Some have criticised the fee structure for incentivising providers to focus on people with the best chance of finding work, while leaving behind those with higher needs and continuing to receive service fees from them.
"It appears the current system incentivises providers doing essentially very little, where they can get away with that because it keeps young people on their books," Ms Kakoschke-Moore said.
Mandatory meetings with 'no positive advantage'
Lachlan McLennan, who lives with chronic depression and social anxiety, said he was taken off the disability pension in 2016 and started to receive JobSeeker payments instead.
"So I went from about $1,000 a fortnight to like $500 a fortnight," he said.
"Financially, it was crippling."
The 36-year-old Canberra man was then required to attend regular meetings with a DES provider to continue getting JobSeeker.
Mr McLennan said his mandatory meetings did not involve meaningful preparation for finding a job and caused his mental health to sink to the lowest point of his life.
"It was incredibly degrading, none of it was useful at all," he said.
Mr McLennan said he got back onto the DSP after 18 months of trying and was able to get his obligation to attend a DES provider waived.
"There was no positive advantage to attending those sessions or being anywhere in there," he said.
Have past attempts at changing DES worked?
Around the time Mr McLennan stopped having to go to a provider in 2018, the sector underwent widespread changes to address poor performance.
People with disabilities were now able to choose which provider they used and incentive fees were changed so people with higher needs generated higher outcome fees.
A new star rating system was also introduced to better measure the quality of providers within a local area.
A 2020 report conducted by the Boston Consulting Group concluded "the probability of a participant finding employment after any given period on the DES program has declined by around 12-14 per cent since the July 2018 reforms".
The star rating system was retired in October 2023 after a coding error was found to have compromised its accuracy.
'Massive sense of helplessness'
Jacob Cowling, who runs a social wellbeing network for young neurodivergent people in Canberra called Shift&Co, said for many of his clients, including Mr McLennan and Mr Priest, the difficulties of finding work had left them feeling hopeless.
"What stood out to me in my conversations with people is the hesitancy, the hesitation to actually engage with these providers.
"I think it brings on a massive sense of helplessness."
He said he's often taken matters into his own hands to try and help his clients find work.
"You'd start liaising and trying to coordinate with these different providers that they were working with and it was just a bit of a circus, really," Mr Cowling said.
"We didn't really know where to go, other than suggest that we'd go around handing out resumes with them and start trying to talk to and contact different employers."
'In that 15 to 20 years, nothing had changed'
Skye Shannon, who lives with spina bifida in the regional NSW town of Orange, first accessed a provider about 15 years ago in the prior iteration of DES.
She said on one occasion, she arrived at a job interview her provider had arranged, not knowing it was for an Australian disability enterprise (ADE), which are workplaces for people with intellectual disability.
They have been found to pay workers as little as $2.50 an hour and were formerly known as sheltered workshops.
"It just left me with the lasting impression of people who work in the industry, who work in the disability sector in general," she said.
"In that they just look at someone and make a decision based on what they're looking at, whether they've had a conversation with that person or not."
Ms Shannon said she then didn't use a provider for over a decade, but returned to DES after the pandemic for help finding work.
"It didn't really feel that personable for me, that they were actually going to help me find something else," she said.
"So I basically went back to just looking for [work] myself again after that, it sort of reminded me of what had happened the first time.
"It did surprise me and did make me sad, a little bit, that in that time, in that 15 to 20 years, nothing had changed."
Australia lagging behind on disability employment
The unemployment rate for people without disabilities remained relatively flat at about five per cent between 2003 and 2018, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
But during that same period that number rose for people with disabilities — from 8.4 per cent to 10 per cent.
The unemployment rate for people with autism was 34.1 per cent, more than three times higher than all people with disability and eight times higher than the rest of Australia.
But recently released ABS data found the unemployment rate for people with disability fell from 10.3 per cent in 2018 to 7.5 per cent in 2022
The unemployment rate for people without disability was 3.1 per cent for the same period.
Disability Discrimination Commissioner Rosemary Kayess said Australia was failing to meet its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
"Australia lags behind other OECD countries in closing the employment gap for people with disabilities," Ms Kayess said.
"The right to employment is not being recognised in a way that ensures people with disability have appropriate, sustainable employment options."
While DES was "just one part of a system that's failing Australia's obligations", Ms Kayess said it also had room to improve.
"Whilst it may fulfil getting through doors in some respects, it has the potential to be exploitative," she said.
'Pockets of excellence'
Kerryl Neville, chief executive of Canberra-based DES provider LEAD, said enforcing the mandatory requirements, like regularly attending a job provider, was not helping her clients.
"It's not an area I like to be in — my preference would be to work purely with people around their employment goals," she said.
"And so that kind of connection is a tricky area for us to be in, and not one that we embrace or feel like is beneficial when we're working with people."
The government committed $23.3 million towards establishing a Disability Employment Centre of Excellence in the recent budget.
It has been described as a future hub for training, resources and sharing best practice in the DES sector between providers.
Ms Neville said this was sorely needed to change the service for the better, and that the competitive environment between providers had stagnated innovation.
"I think we were a much better sector when we were working in a more collaborative process."
Inclusion Australia chief executive Catherine McAlpine said there were providers doing great work across the country — but that they were often the exception to the norm.
"What we see in the DES program is pockets of excellence and pockets of dreadful support," Ms McAlpine said.
"There's a small number of providers who specialise in supporting people with an intellectual disability who have worked out a methodology that works.
"And it's been frustrating to us for a really long time that we don't have a centre of excellence, or a place where other providers can learn from the success of the providers that do well."
'Anecdote is not the plural of data'
Disability Employment Australia is the peak body for the vast majority of DES providers.
CEO Peter Bacon said a lack of recent data made it difficult to assess the success of the service.
"You wouldn't run a business for six years without knowing your key performance metric," he said.
"So I don't know why we're spending billions upon billions … without understanding what it's doing to the key metric, which is how many people with disability are going to work and staying there and what difference that's making to disability unemployment."
Mr Bacon said the issues the service faced were a reflection of the world the program operates in.
"If you're delivering into a society and a labour market where there's still lots of exclusion, where there's still lots of ableism, that also constrains the ability of DES to be successful," he said.
He said that one person's bad experience with the service should not reflect poorly on all providers.
"The plural of anecdote is not data, so I don't think we should overly index upon those few people who have had a difficult service," Mr Bacon said.
"But that's not an excuse not to look at ways to improve the service, to make sure it's as human centric as possible, to make sure the people with disability are at the heart of it."
What's the government's plan?
The government announced a complete overhaul of DES in the recent budget, increasing funding to $5.4 billion over five years and promising to put people and quality first.
Social Services Minister Amanda Rishworth said it was one of her top priorities when she took over the portfolio in 2022.
Eight service providers were shut down in August 2022 in an attempt to weed out poor performance in the sector.
Ms Rishworth said mutual obligations would remain, but that their role would be diminished.
"It is about the relationship and about the person engaging with their service provider to achieve their employment goal," she said.
"Of course, if someone isn't engaging then there will be a process of compliance, but we're not going to start with the compliance as being the first order."
She said society had to reckon with its low expectations of people with disability being able to make long-term change.
"So it's about building confidence, it's about reducing those low expectations and looking at the strengths that people with disability bring," she said.
Ms Rishworth said while other attempts at changing the service had not succeeded, this time would be different.
"There hasn't been a situation or time where quality has been elevated, like we have elevated quality in this new system. I was shocked that quality was not measured as part of the outcomes of how DES services were actually rated," she said.
"We want to get the incentive right and we believe by putting the person with disability at the centre of this and pushing DES providers for continuous improvement to meet the needs of individuals, we think that that will deliver results."
Ms Kakoschke-Moore, said she hoped the government succeeded.
"I think the legacy of DES as we know it now, is one of a sense of broken promises, and that we need trust to be rebuilt with the system," she said.
"But we feel confident that change can happen, because to be honest, the alternative is too painful to think about."
Editor's note: This story has been altered since it was originally published to include employment data released on July 4.
Source: ABC