Submission to the National Disability Strategy: Beyond 2020 Stage 2 Consultations

This submission was led by Dr Laura Davy on behalf of investigators within the Centre of Research Excellence in Disability and Health (CRE-DH) funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council, in October 2020

Given the majority stakeholder view that the vision and outcome areas of the current National Disability Strategy are still the right ones, this submission focuses on the implementation and governance of the next iteration of the Strategy.

The submission addresses the following three areas:

1. Leadership of people with disability

Facilitating the participation of people with disability and their representative organisations in the development and implementation of law and policy that impacts them is an obligation under Article 4 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). People with disability must be represented in all aspects of the Strategy’s governance structures and agenda setting and decision-making processes.

2. Coordination of the Strategy

Reviews of the current Strategy showed that it was not effectively implemented across all levels and portfolios of government. Outlining government responsibilities is not enough; the effective coordination of government responsibilities for implementing the Strategy by an appropriately resourced and representative agency or body is also necessary.

Collecting quality data to inform policy development and implementation is an obligation under Article 31 of the CRPD. Funding will need to be allocated to developing suitable national data frameworks and to the oversight, collection and analysis of this data. The CRE-DH has developed the Disability and Wellbeing Monitoring Framework to measure and track inequalities between people with and without disability in relation to the social determinants of health and wellbeing which may be a valuable input to the development of a monitoring framework for the next Strategy.

www.credh.org.au