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Parent-Carers

Australia is one of six nations that have implemented a carer system, in which their program follows under a more liberal democracy style that has family carers provide the majority of care to disabled and frail older people. However, most receive no formal services: 56% of primary carers supporting a disabled person under 65 and 65% of primary carers of older people had no such assistance in 2009. An official 2011 report concluded that carer support is ‘administered in an ad hoc way across a number of programs and jurisdictions’ and a report on the welfare of Australians found that 38% of primary carers felt that they needed more support in maintaining their own health, as well as physical, emotional and financial support.

In 1985, Australia introduced Carer Pension, Carer Payment (CP), to provide income support for carers unable to support themselves through substantial paid employment. It is means-tested on the income of both the care provider and the care receiver, who must also meet an assessment of disability. However, it is not subject to activity testing and not included in the ‘activation’ policies applied to most other forms of income support for working-age people. In 2006, CP recipients participated in paid work, unpaid work, education or training for up to 25 hours per week, however, only 23% had earnings while receiving it. Reasons for this outcome included the strain of caring responsibilities, inadequate skills and training, and the carer’s own health problem or disability: about 40% of recipients had not been in employment when they started caring and/or receiving CP. Many carers rely on government income support as their main source of income, however, reflecting their lower rates of labour force participation and concentration in part-time work. In 2003, income support was the main source of personal cash income for 40% of Australian carers, compared with 24% of other people.

In a 2009 Survey of Disability, Ageing, and Carers (SDAC), Australia identified 529,000 working-age partner-carers – 27% of all carers of working age. Also identified 188,000 ‘primary’ partner-carers, who constituted the largest group of working-age primary carers (34%). Just over half (55%) of this group were women. Partner-carers in Australia tend to be older: 70% of working-age partner-carers were over 45, and over 40% were aged 55–64, although there were few gender differences in their age profiles (ABS, 2011).

Among working-age primary carers, nearly half the partner-carers spent less than 20 hours per week providing care, but around 20% cared for 20–40 hours per week and a third intensively (40+ hours per week). Across all age groups, women were more likely than men to provide intensive levels of care.

Female partner-carers had provided care over a longer period of time than males: among primary partner-carers, 58% of men and 63% of women had been caring for five years or more. Partner-carers in Australia, are most likely to provide high levels of support because they are likely to live with the person for whom they care. The SDAC data show that nearly half of all carers, and over 90% of primary carers, assisted a spouse with a profound or severe limitation. 73% of primary partner-carers supported a person with a head injury, stroke or other brain damage and 15% cared for a person with mental illness. Among those of working age, partner-carers were less likely to be employed full-time, or employed at all, than both other carers and non-carers, and those aged 55–64 were less likely to be employed than their younger counterparts.

In 2009, an estimated 288,300 Australian children aged 0–14 had some kind of disability: over 3% of 0–4 year olds, and almost 9% of 5–14 year olds. Of these, 166,700 had a severe or profound ‘core activity limitation’, where they need assistance with regular communication, mobility or self-care tasks. Estimates suggest that about half of all disabled children aged 0–14 have two or more disabilities and almost 7% have four or five. A review of payments to primary parent-carers in Australia found intellectual and learning disabilities (4.3% of all children) and physical/diverse disabilities (4.2%) to be most prevalent, while analysis of the primary disability of service users found that this was ‘intellectual’ for about 30% of people, ‘physical’ for almost 17% and ‘autism’ for about 6%.

The demographics of carers for the youth differ from the old as Australia's introduction of deinstitutionalisation in the 1980s support parents to raise their children at home, including care for most disabled children. Frustrated parent-carers of disabled children have expressed their struggles in Australia that carers of other people do not have, but often live in disadvantaged circumstances such as their incomes are often lower than those of other families: in 2003, 50% of primary carers of disabled children were in the bottom two income quin-tiles, compared with 34% of non-carers . Primary carers of children with severe disabilities were much more likely (67%) than non-carers (24%) to have a government pension or allowance as their primary source of income.

In response Australian Commonwealth and state/territory governments developed a a few initiatives to support all carers including young people with disabilities and their parents. They have developed a few programs that focuses on access to services for disabled children and supported combining paid work and family care for parents to care for their children. In Queensland, the Building Bright Futures Action Plan (2010–13) for children with a disability was developed to prioritize access to early intervention services, build evidence-based support and strengthen the disability services workforce. Another in New South Wales, the Stronger Together Plan (2006–16) is designed to enable children with a disability to grow up in a family and participate in the community, and to support adults with a disability to live in and be part of the community (with services such as respite, therapy, innovative care and family and sibling support). The Commonwealth even developed their own program called Helping Children with Autism package (HCWA) (from 2009) which provides funding for early intervention services such as the access to advisors who provide information on eligibility, funding and services; supported playgroups; new items on the Medicare Benefits Schedule (MBS).

Another initiative was introducing new policies that are more beneficial for carers specifically including the Carer Recognition Act (2010) and the Carer Strategy (2011) because mainstream programs often do not cater for reconciling work and care for parent-carers of disabled children for children with disabilities, which can severely curtail their parents’ opportunities for paid employment. The Fair Work Act (2009) was passed for parent-carers to have flexible working arrangements until their disabled child is 18. In 2008, the Commonwealth government began to conduct a major review of Carer Payment for children, with a task-force that included representatives of families of disabled children, carers, non-governmental organisations, academics and clinicians. The review found that because their children did not meet the definition of ‘profoundly disabled’, many parents were ineligible for Carer Payment. It led to a broadening of the eligibility criteria, with 19,000 parent-carers subsequently expected to be newly eligible for the payment.

Discrimination

In an article released on October, 2017, it is stated that about only 53% of Australians with disability are employed, compared to 83% of all working-age people. Australia ranks 21st out of 29 OECD nations when it comes to employment rates for people with a disability. Complaints about disability discrimination are the largest category of discrimination reported to the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), and the numbers have been steady for around 20 years. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) also found that the employment rates vary depending upon the “disability type” especially for those who have a “psychological disability” with the lowest employment rate at 29%. Employment can also be varied by “disability severity” for the relation as stated "employment decreases as severity increases". Only 26% of people with profound or severe physical disability are employed. Even with the DDA passed, disability discrimination complaints appear about 37% of Australian discrimination cases in the workplace.

Demographics

In 2015, there were 2.1 million Australians of working age with disability. Of these, 1.0 million were employed and another 114,900 were looking for work rounding to 53.4% of working age people with disability were in the labour force which compares to 83.2% of people with no disability. In 2015, 25.0% of people with a profound or severe limitation were in the labour force, compared with 58.9% of those with a mild limitation. In 2012, the labour force participation rate was higher for people with profound or severe limitations at 29.7%. In 2015, almost one in five Australians reported living with disability (18.3% or 4.3 million people). A further 22.1% of Australians had a long-term health condition but no disability, while the remaining 59.5% had neither disability nor a long-term health condition.

Older people: The SDAC also collects information from older people (those aged 65 years and over) from Australia's ageing population. The data shows that there were around 3.5 million older Australians in 2015, representing one in every seven people or 15.1% of the population in which this proportion has increased from 14.3% in 2012. Older Australians living in households were more active, with the proportion that participated in physical activities for exercise or recreation increasing from 44.5% in 2012 to 49.2% in 2015. The majority of older Australians were living in households (94.8%), while 5.2% or one in twenty lived in cared accommodation such as nursing homes. While the proportion of older Australians has increased, the prevalence of disability amongst them has decreased. In 2015, 50.7% of older people were living with disability, down from 52.7% in 2012. Two-thirds of older Australians (67.3%) that reported their income lived in a household with an equivalised gross household income that was in the lowest two quintiles. This proportion has decreased from 74.6% in 2012.

Employment restrictions: Of the one million Australians aged 15 to 64 years with disability (living in households) who were employed just over half (52.6%, or 543,800) reported employment restrictions such as needing time off work (142,900) or special equipment (42,300) because of their disability. In 2015, 762,600 people aged 15 to 64 years with disability who were not in the labour force had an employment restriction, of which 74.3% (566,700) were permanently unable to work.

Income: Disability can affect a person’s capacity to participate in the labour force and their ability to earn income. The following 2015 SDAC results relate to people of working age (15 to 64 years) who were living in households. In 2015, around two in five (41.9%) people of working age with disability reported that their main source of cash income was a government pension or allowance, followed by wages or salary (36.5%). Those with a profound limitation were more than twice as likely to report a government pension or allowance as their main source of income (82.8%) than those with a mild limitation (37.2%).

People with disability were more likely to have lower levels of income than those without disability. In 2015, approximately half (49.4%) of people with disability lived in households in the lowest two quintiles for equivalised gross household income, compared with 24.3% of those without disability (excluding those for whom their income was not known). People with disability were also less likely to live in households with incomes in the highest quintile (13.4%) compared to those without disability (26.5%).

Given the smaller proportion of people earning a wage or salary and their greater reliance on government pensions and allowances, it follows that income levels for those with disability would be lower than those without disability. In 2015, the median gross income for a person with disability aged 15 to 64 years was $465 per week, less than half the $950 per week income of a person without disability.

Models of disability

Rpizano9 (talk) 06:55, 8 December 2017 (UTC)