policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
Hire education
Do universities do enough to
employ people with disability?
Daniel Valiente-Riedl interviewed
by Loren Smith
D
espite the fact that people with
disabilities are twice as likely to be
unemployed, more than a fifth of
employers who claim they’re open to more
inclusive hiring practices aren’t following
through. While 79 per cent say they
would hire someone with a disability, only
58 per cent actually do.
Although universities are among the
institutions most open to hiring people with
disabilities, many don’t, often due to the
perception that people with disabilities are
costly to accommodate. While this may be
10
true, why doesn’t the same reasoning apply
to pregnant women, for example?
This rhetorical question was posed to
Campus Review by Daniel Valiente-Riedl,
the general manager of JobAccess, a
government initiative that helps facilitate
the employment of people with disabilities.
While he was en route to Brisbane to
launch an employer toolkit, we asked him
for university-specific tips in this regard, as
well as why hiring people with disabilities
can be beneficial to higher education.
CR: I understand that universities don’t
have a legal obligation to hire people with
disabilities. Given that, why should they be
doing it anyway?
DV: Well, there are two things: they don’t
have a legal obligation to recruit people
with disabilities, but they do have a legal
responsibility not to discriminate. And that
person with a disability may just be the best
person for the job, and that is the way we
should view these things.
There is also a moral responsibility to
represent and to, in many ways, mirror the
population that universities are serving.
We know that about one in every five
Australians will have a disability. We know
that 25 per cent of Australians will live,
at one point or another, with a serious
mental health condition. So if we’re not
representing and we’re not mimicking
the populations that we are serving, there
seems to be a disconnect there.
And in terms of the benefit to employing
people with disabilities, obviously you are
tapping into a much larger talent pool.
There are about two million people with
disabilities in Australia, and only a million
of them are currently employed and
participating in the workforce, so you are
also opening up your recruitment in terms
of the talent pool that you can access.
Also, I think that it just enhances your
brand. It tells people with and without a
disability that you will be flexible, that you
will look at different ways of servicing
your community, so it’s got a number of
intangible benefits.
Also, the other really important benefit is
that it helps you with your culture. We know
that being inclusive and being diverse as an
employer enhances the culture for both the
employee and anybody that is accessing
your services, so for universities it will be
crucial to be able to do that.
Given all those benefits, why are universities
not hiring people with disabilities as much as
they could be?
Obviously there are various issues in terms
of our perception of what people with
disabilities can and cannot do. That is still
intrinsically linked with the fact that we
believe that people with disabilities can
only do entry-level jobs, and I’m not talking
specifically about universities here, but
about employers in general.
We know that in recent research the
Department of Social Services conducted,
77 per cent of all employers in Australia
were willing to employ somebody with
a disability, but only 35 per cent of them
exhibited any behaviours related to the
employment of people with disabilities.
So there is a little bit of a disconnect on
what we want to do and what we are doing.
Many employers also tell us they feel
that they are alone, but they’re not aware
of what service is out there to support
them should they employ a person with
disability. We know that around 70 per cent
of all employers felt that it was a step into
the unknown, which is quite conflicting
with what is actually happening because
we know that about a million people
with disabilities are in the workforce, so