The recent debate about expanding employment for people with disability would make you think that easy access to welfare benefits was the main problem. In reality, the major barrier is a lack of job opportunities. Despite a strong economy and low unemployment rate, employers and the labour market are still the major barriers to moving people from welfare to work.
Consider the Australian public service's performance as an employer of people with disabilities. Despite strategies designed to boost employment of people with disabilities, the public service has gone backwards. In 1986, people with a disability made up 6.6 per cent of public service employees. Today it is around 3 per cent.
According to the Australian Public Service Commission, the decrease in the number of ongoing employees with a disability over the past year has been the largest in more than a decade.
It's not that senior public servants don't want to employ people with disabilities. But, as in other workplaces, technological change is reshaping the demand for skills. Just as automation has transformed manufacturing and agricultural workplaces, information and communications technology has transformed office environments.
If you walked into a public service office in the early 1980s, you'd see typing pools, tea ladies, bustling mailrooms and whole floors full of people doing routine clerical work. You'd see senior staff whose office equipment consisted of a desk, a chair, a phone and a collection of pens and pencils.
By the mid 2000s the typists and stenographers were gone. Almost everyone is typing their own documents, operating a computer and working the photocopier. Much of the routine paper handling has been automated and there are few clerical jobs for people without post-school qualifications.
People with disabilities were disproportionately employed in low level positions and most of those positions have gone. On top of that, senior positions have become multiskilled, which increases the chances that the job includes a task that a person with a disability is unable to do.
Technological change is good. It makes improvements in living standards possible. But as US researchers Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee explain, change produces losers as well as winners. 'There is no economic law that says that everyone, or even most people, automatically benefit from technological progress.'
People who find themselves squeezed out of the labour market because their skills are no longer in demand have a higher risk of ending up on disability payments. As businesses exposed to technological change