Dealing with Australia's skills shortages has attracted much attention in recent policy discussions from the Jobs and Skills Summit and beyond.
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So, too, have commitments to diversity and inclusion among Australian businesses.
Yet when set against these dual narratives, it is both surprising and disappointing to find that there has been no discernible improvement in employment rates for people with disability in Australia over the past two decades or more.
These are among the key findings from the Bankwest Curtin Economic Centre's new report Employment and Disability in Australia.
Employment rates currently sit at around 53 per cent for people with a work-limiting disability, compared to 82 per cent for people without disability - a gap that has actually widened over the past 20 years.
There have been many policies and strategies targeted towards improving opportunities for people with disability over the years but the evidence shows they haven't worked.
In fact, adverse incentives within existing policy measures look to have contributed directly to their failure to deliver positive employment outcomes.
For example, the current system offers greater rewards to Disability Employment Service providers that offer repeated short-term placements rather than longer term employment outcomes and puts restrictions on hours worked for those on placements.
Our analysis also shows the NDIS has failed to deliver any discernible improvements in employment outcomes; currently only around one-third of NDIS support plans for working age clients include employment-related goals.
Policies and actions need to recognise people's capabilities and potential, not their perceived limitations - which may be end up not to be true.
The report exposes far greater job instability, underemployment, and a higher rate of "churn" in labour market states for people with disability.
This includes moving in and out of the labour force altogether, as well as between jobs and unemployment.
It's hard to look past discrimination or unconscious bias against people with disability as a contributor to these gaps.
The education-to-work transition is crucial, and the report highlights just how transformative tertiary education can be in broadening access to employment.
Having a bachelor's degree removes entirely the employment penalty for people with disability, compared to people without disability.
And yet it's hard to reconcile the stated aims of the recently released Universities Accord with these findings.
The Accord commits to broadening access to education for under-represented groups, with targets to raise by 2035 the share of students from regional, rural, and remote areas, and from First Nations and low socioeconomic backgrounds.
And yet the ambitions for people with disability under the Accord are to "maintain" rather than expand participation rates in university courses.
The government's commitment to broadening access to education for people with disability is clearly out of step and needs to be strengthened.
So, what needs to change to shift the dial?
At the core, it's about attitude.
The guiding principle for policy should be a work first approach founded on the universal right to meaningful employment for all that want it.
People with disability, their families, and carers all need support in preparing for the transition from education into work.
But it's equally important that employers have access to information, advice, and guidance on how to be as inclusive as possible of people with disability.
Of course, this requires workplace settings to be as supportive as possible of people with disability as their work tasks demand.
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But it also requires businesses to curate an inclusive work environment that does not devalue the contributions of people with disability, nor limit their integration into the workforce.
The notion of open employment has been promoted as a model of inclusion, but it is anything but inclusive if the workplace experience of a person with disability is isolating or separate from the society of employees without disability.
One challenge revealed in this report has been to overcome the barriers and uncertainties faced by employers, many of whom say that they don't know where to start when it comes to broadening access.
This is why a National Disability Employment Agency is needed to co-ordinate policies and service delivery, share information, monitor disability employment outcomes, evaluate workplace inclusion programs, and promote best practice.
Policies and actions need to recognise people's capabilities and potential, not their perceived limitations - which may be end up not to be true.
And the economic return is massive - increasing employment by 10 per cent would add $16 billion extra each year to economic output.
But this shouldn't be about an economic return.
This is far more about recognising the right of people with disability to live with dignity, and to participate to the fullest extent possible in society.
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