Goudie Sandra: Disabled Persons Employment Promotion (Repeal and Related Matters) Bill — In Committee 
Goudie Sandra: Disabled Persons Employment Promotion (Repeal and Related Matters) Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:638;Page:8141] 
SANDRA GOUDIE (National—Coromandel) 
: 
 I rise to support my most excellent colleague Jo Goodhew. We need to spell it out in probably simple terms—“Jack and Jill” language—so that those members opposite can understand what is really being said here. 
Members should consider the case of little Annie. She rocks up to the sheltered workshop because she has a place to go to and a job to go to. She goes in there gets support for her budget and meets her friends. She might do a little bit of what she calls work and what she values as being work and she has a really good time. She wanders from one department to the other and she has a bit of fun. She might do a bit of baking and she has morning tea. Then she might do other things like paint a picture. All of these different things happen within her sheltered workshop environment. 
But what will happen to little Annie when this Disabled Persons Employment Promotion (Repeal and Related Matters) Bill is passed? A labour inspector will go into the workshops—a labour inspector does not go into the workshops of Labour MPs—and make some sort of assessment as to what little Annie is capable of doing. The labour inspector will have absolutely no expertise whatsoever in being able to make those sorts of judgments and assessments. 
One cannot make an assessment in a little snapshot of half an hour or even an hour because the capabilities of people like little Annie vary from hour to hour. At one minute she might be feeling really energised and she can get out there and do a bit of work. But an hour later she might crash and need to have a lie down. She might be in a bit of a tizz because something has happened and it has thrown her out of whack and she may even have to go home. So how will a labour inspector be able to go into a sheltered workshop and give a qualified and proper assessment of someone’s work capability? 
If the inspector then decides that little Annie cannot work and does not have much working capability how can he or she tell Annie that she cannot be entitled to a minimum wage? She may be able to work inside that sheltered workshop but she has to have an exemption because she is not capable of work. [ 
Interruption 
] As I have just explained to the member the process of an exemption can be quite horrendous for that individual and labour inspectors do not have the expertise to make those sorts of judgments. 
How do we make Annie understand that she has been deemed incapable of working and that she has to have an exemption from being paid the minimum wage? I do not know how we do that. I do not know how we can blow people’s self-esteem away like that and tell them in any way shape or form that they would be able to understand and appreciate. They feel fulfilled they feel they are making a contribution and the sheltered workshop is supporting them in a whole raft of other areas apart from just making them feel valued as a working member of that organisation. 
The other part of that equation is how many of these people the sheltered workshop can support on exemptions if they have to pay the bulk of everybody else a minimum wage. They cannot do it. It is quite clear that none of these things have been taken into account. 
I was very concerned to hear that labour inspectors are looking at readdressing their involvement in the assessments. I would be interested to know just what they are expecting to do. The Department of Labour has recognised that people with disabilities “may have trouble finding a job”. If those people cannot get a wage exemption or the sheltered workshop cannot afford to look after them even with a wage exemption because of the minimum wages they have to pay to the bulk of the other people who go to the sheltered workshop then there is a problem. 
So I put it to members that this legislation in no way looks after people who have disabilities. Even if they have an exemption it does not provide them with the sorts of choices that we have in life. Here we have yet again the nanny State making these decisions for people who are not being given the opportunity to make them for themselves. 
Consultation was a very very real issue. One of the concerns people had was that the consultation process on  
Pathways to Inclusion 
 was never completed and much of the consultation that was cited as being done in regard to the Disabled Persons Employment Promotion (Repeal and Related Matters) Bill was ineffectual.