Submission To Committee On Economic, Social And Cultural Rights

Submission to the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights - Review of Australia's Sixth Periodic Report

January 2025

Joint submission by

People with Disability Australia

National Ethnic Disability Alliance

Acknowledging substantial contributions from

Women With Disabilities Australia

This joint submission responds to Australia's Sixth Periodic Report (Australia's Report) under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). It provides general disability rights perspectives, as well as perspectives specific to people with disability who are from CALD backgrounds and women and girls with disability.

We acknowledge the significant contributions by Women with Disabilities Australia to this submission, providing deep expertise in the rights and lived experiences of women and girls with disability.

Recommendations

• Recommendation 1: Include disability in priority follow up recommendations and take concrete, time bound and co-designed measures to address violence, abuse and neglect of people with disability and to ensure the effective enjoyment of economic, social and cultural rights by people with disability on an equal basis with others.
• Recommendation 2: Enact national legislation to implement ICESCR where action by states and territories is inadequate to ensure the effective enjoyment of ICESCR rights.
• Recommendation 3: Enact a national Human Rights Act that gives domestic effect to its international human rights obligations, including immediately realisable economic, social and cultural rights obligations.
• Recommendation 4: Strengthen Australia's Disability Strategy 2021-2031 by ensuring it is aligned to the CRPD and is framed within the human rights model of disability. Ensure it translates into measurable improvements in outcomes for people with disability, including through the collection and use of data by disability, cultural and linguistic background, sex and gender.
• Recommendation 5: Accept and provide a timebound, transparent and co-designed plan to implement Disability Royal Commission recommendations 7.14-7.15 (ending segregated education), recommendations 7.31-7.32 (ending subminimum wages and segregated employment) and recommendation 7.43 (phasing out group homes).
• Recommendation 6: Provide a transparent timeframe for the finalisation of the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) Review and development of legislation. The legislation must be developed in co-design with people with disability and our representative organisations.
• Recommendation 7: The Framework and Strategy must be co-designed with people with disability, embed a human rights approach to safeguarding and expressly reference the CRPD and Australia's other core human rights treaties.
• Recommendation 8: National safeguarding frameworks are accessible in community languages and delivered through culturally competent services; and ensures that violence prevention and response systems address intersectional discrimination through culturally-informed, trauma-responsive approaches.
• Recommendation 9: Engages in genuine co-design in all NDIS reforms and ensures that foundational supports are established before exiting people from the NDIS.
• Recommendation 10: The NDIS develops and implements a comprehensive action plan addressing the CALD participation gap, with measurable targets to achieve proportional representation. All NDIS data reporting must include disaggregation by cultural and linguistic background to enable monitoring of intersectional outcomes.
• Recommendation 11: All employment information is broken down to include details about people's cultural and language backgrounds. This helps to spot and tackle different challenges that exist at the intersection of these aspects. Employment programs should be sensitive to different cultures and designed to help individuals with disability from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds overcome the specific difficulties they face.
• Recommendation 12: All elements of employment reform are co-designed with women and gender-diverse people with disability to ensure that the unique forms of discrimination and abuse against this cohort are properly addressed.
• Recommendation 13: Develop national legislation to prohibit all forms of forced sterilisation, forced contraception and non-consensual menstrual suppression without a person's free, prior and informed consent. Embedding supported decision-making and accessible reproductive healthcare across systems to ensure that sexual and reproductive autonomy is upheld in practice.
• Recommendation 14: Ensure that social security measures, including JobSeeker, the Disability Support Pension and Rent Assistance are fit for purpose for all people with disability. Payment rates must be increased to ensure people with disability have financial stability and can live above the poverty line.
• Recommendation 15: Social security data is separated by cultural and linguistic background and DSP application processes are made accessible in community languages, with culturally competent support. Poverty measurement frameworks must include intersectional analyses of disability and cultural background.
• Recommendation 16: All health services are resourced to provide multilingual health materials and onsite interpreters as standard practice, rather than as optional additions, with particular attention to supporting people with disability from CALD backgrounds who require both language and disability communication supports simultaneously.
• Recommendation 17: A whole-of-government policy framework to address the social determinants of health affecting CALD populations with disability, including improving living and working conditions, reducing socioeconomic disparities through targeted measures and ensuring equitable access to education, employment, and social security.
• Recommendation 18: Removes the exemption in the Disability Discrimination Act that limits protections for migrants under the Migration Act, making sure that Australia's immigration rules and how it treats people with disability meet the standards set out in the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), specifically Article 5. It also aims to make the process clearer, fairer, and more consistent for migrants and refugees with disability applying for an Australian visa.
• Recommendation 19: Australia must mandate the "Liveable Housing Design Silver Standard" in the National Construction Code across all states and territories and commit to a national housing plan that meets the needs of people with disability.
• Recommendation 20: Detailed and accurate information about housing results is collected and separated properly. Guarantee that SIL (Specialist Supported Living) is kept separate from SDA (Specialist Disability Accommodation), so that different providers independently deliver housing and support services.
• Recommendation 21: Amends the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) to create a stand-alone duty to provide adjustments and establish a positive duty to prevent discrimination, which would apply to higher education institutions.
• Recommendation 22: Funding models must recognise and resource the intersectional needs of students with disability from CALD backgrounds; schools must have capacity to simultaneously support language acquisition and disability-related needs; that disability assessment processes in education are culturally responsive and account for linguistic diversity; and that professional development for teachers includes an intersectional understanding of disability and cultural diversity.
• Recommendation 23: Mandate greater transparency when automation AI is used in government decision-making and co-designs algorithms and processes with people with disability.
• Recommendation 24: All decision-making related to essential (housing, healthcare, NDIS, income support, education) must include human-in-the-loop with the authority to review and alter decisions that are contrary to wellbeing.
• Recommendation 25: Regular expert human audits of issues raised by customers, especially those from marginalised communities, and evaluate automated decisions to improve automation AI performance and annual audit reports of AI and automated systems are published.
• Recommendation 26: AI ethics frameworks explicitly address intersectional discrimination, and AI systems must undergo accessibility and cultural safety audits. Digital inclusion strategies must address CALD-specific barriers and ensure assistive technologies are multilingual.