At the New World Disability conference in Brisbane, Australia, ESN’s CEO John Halloran welcomed the commitment of the Australian government to investing in the future of its disabled people. The sheer scale of the new National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) is impressive as it seeks to be transform the lives of nearly half a million people from a welfare dependency through ‘compensation’ to an ‘social investment’ approach enabled by contemporary technology. This means encouraging solutions in assistive technology, the streamlining of administration and an online market place for support and care services. The NDIS will thus provide more choice and control over how, when and where their support is needed and trials across Australia commenced in 2013 demonstrated that technology can empower people with disabilities, their families and communities.
When asked to comment at a lunch sponsored by SAP, John Halloran welcomed the opportunity to return the interest shown when the NDIS Actuary Sarah Johnson spoke at ESN’s conference this year in Lisbon. He then informed the audience that ESN’s first activity entitled ‘Towards a People’s Europe’ in 1998 was a study of personal budgets in 8 countries and that a focus on choice and control has always remained central as ESN supported transition from institutional to community living across Europe.
Concluding, ESN’s CEO urged that in the setting up of the social market, government must ensure that those less visible and often with complex and long term conditions were not forgotten and that a quality framework ensured equity and inclusion.
Later in Canberra, John joined a focus group discussion the new SAP Institute for Digital Government (of which ESN is a foundation partner) from which Brian Lee-Archer, its director, launched at the Brisbane conference a short paper entitled ‘Social investment in the Digital Era’ in which he opened up the debate around the moral hazard of predictive analytics. These are interesting times for disabled people in Australia and hopefully also in Europe. Social services and technology innovators may themselves wish to learn from ‘down under’ and work together to improve life chances for all.
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