Australia’s disability system did not begin with the NDIS. It began in a very different place.

In the first of a two-part review Peter Strong, former CEO of COSBOA, looks back at a disability system that once worked through local knowledge, relationships and community services. Now a locally embedded public function is being replaced by contracted systems, market logic and fragmented programs.

The history matters because disability policy has never been only about services. It has always been about citizenship. This is Peter’s story . . .

I first became involved in the sector when working in the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) in 1977, when I was referred to as the Disabled Persons Officer (DPO). My job was to work withpeople and seek jobs or the training necessary to get a job.

I worked with employers - the government provided support with changes to workplace infrastructure and with training and wage subsidies. I continued this work through to the mid-1980s, now called an Employment Counsellor, and never really left that sector. I’ve seen some change.

This history starts with initially dealing with wounded veterans, then moving to welfare expansion, institutional thinking, community activism, and more recently, rights-based reform. From the beginning, the story is not about a single policy breakthrough but more about a slow and uneven redefinition of what citizenship itself means.

This reflects our approach to most things.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, support for people with disability was conditional and heavily shaped by a welfare attitude.

The social security architecture emerging after Federation introduced the Invalid and Old-Age Pension (1908), but in the 1920s and 1930s eligibility framework still divided people into those who could work and those who could not.

Disability was understood through a medical or economic lens: a limitation on productivity
requiring subsistence support, not about participation.

World War I and its aftermath expanded the system in ways that would shape everything that followed.

The repatriation system for returned soldiers introduced structured compensation,
rehabilitation services and prosthetics provision on a scale previously unseen – because of the level of need. It was not framed as disability policy in the modern sense, but it
embedded the idea that the Commonwealth had an obligation.

The idea was simple: ‘Restore function and support long-term impairment caused by service’. This logic would later spill into civilian systems.

[continued from the abilityNEWS newsletter]

By the mid-twentieth century, particularly after World War II, Australia began building a more formalised welfare state. The Social Security Act 1947 consolidated a range of payments, including invalid pensions, into a more coherent system. Yet the underlying philosophy remained largely protective.

Rather than inclusion, income support was to prevent destitution rather than
participation supports to enable independence.

People with significant disability were still channelled into institutional care or segregated service settings.

This reflected international practices rather than uniquely Australian choices. From the 1950s through to the 1970s, institutionalisation was the dominant model. Large residential
facilities, sheltered workshops, and segregated schooling systems reflected a belief that specialist environments were the most “appropriate” response to disability.

These arrangements provided stability for some, but they also entrenched separation from mainstream education, employment, and community life. It is now recognised that this period created structural exclusion that took decades to unwind.

The turning point began in the 1970s and 1980s, driven less by government design and more through advocacy by those representing specific groups and by shifting social attitudes. Disability rights movements challenged the assumption that segregation was either necessary or benign. The language of rights, participation and accessibility started to enter policy.

Deinstitutionalisation gathered momentum, though unevenly, with many people moving from large institutions into community-based housing that was still often under-resourced.

What is often overlooked is what was lost when that model disappeared. The eventual closure of the CES and the shift to outsourced, privately delivered employment services fundamentally altered the operating logic of disability employment support. What had been a locally embedded, public service function - able to coordinate across community organisations, employers, training providers and social supports - became a contracted market.

With that came a profit motivation that, while intended to drive efficiency, also narrowed incentives. Outcomes became measured in placements rather than in sustained participation.

Cross-community activities - informal collaboration between local services, holistic training pathways and longer-term counselling and support - became harder to justify within tightly specified contracts. The system moved away from relationships and local knowledge toward compliance and throughput.

For people with disability, particularly those needing longer-term support, that shift often meant fragmentation rather than integration.

[to be continued tomorrow . . . ]

Peter Strong has worked around disability, employment and small business policy since the 1970s. The former CEO of COSBOA (the Council of Small Business Australia) for many years, he has worked for the federal public service, the World Bank and the UN. In this two-part contribution, he argues that Australia’s disability system has lost something important: locally embedded public service coordination that connected people, employers, training and community support.