Thursday, 20 September 2018

 Mr LIM (Clarinda) (10:05): It is estimated that nearly 100 000 Victorians are blind or have low vision and that this number will continue to rise as our population ages. It is well known that people with a disability still remain significantly underrepresented in Australian workforces. Forty-five per cent of Australians with a disability live at or below the poverty line. This is unacceptable and largely due to people with disability facing multiple barriers to employment, which restricts economic participation and independence. I am proud of our government’s Every Opportunity initiative. We have set a target of 6 per cent employment of people with disability across all Victorian government departments by 2020, increasing to 12 per cent by 2025. We are taking action through public sector employment and government procurement and through strong partnerships with Victoria’s community and private sectors.

I hope that we can build on our work in procurement to mandate AS EN 301 549 — the standard that exists to guide the procurement of accessible information and communications technology within the Victorian public sector. I also hope that we can work to ensure that Victorians with a disability are not disadvantaged by the growing challenges of the national disability insurance scheme and can investigate maintaining and expanding the multipurpose taxi program card, introducing audio announcements on buses and the quality of audio announcements on trains.