Little has changed since disability royal commission exposed deep institutional failings

Australia Broadcast Center

2 days ago

"Devastated."
"An insult."
"A failure of leadership."
That's what the disability community said a year ago when the federal government released its initial response to the $600 million Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability.
It came after four and a half years of shocking evidence that revealed to the wider public how people with disability had been sexually assaulted, forcibly restrained and sterilised, and ripped off by people and institutions meant to help them.
People with disability fought for years to get a royal commission and agreed to relive their biggest traumas in the hope it would finally bring about change.
But the overwhelming feeling last July, after the initial response to the commission's 222 recommendations, was that measures to address them were being kicked down the road.
Twelve months on, advocates are concerned the inquiry has vanished from public view, with many wondering where the progress is at from this once-in-a-generation opportunity for change.
"Many of the issues identified remain unresolved, without clarity on what action is being taken and when," Women with Disabilities Australia CEO Sophie Cusworth said.
Simply put, the royal commission has led to very little real-world change so far.
Per the Commonwealth's last progress update — released just days before Christmas last year — one of the biggest shifts has been the amendment of a contentious migration law.
The rest of the update mostly revolves around administrative work — things like reviews of various strategies and plans, establishing employment targets for the public sector and creating a "disability-inclusive" definition of family violence.
Greens senator Jordon Steele-John — who was instrumental in getting the inquiry set up in 2019 — said governments "not only kicked the can down the road" last year — they "crushed it".
Those governments — which missed the original response deadline by four months — agreed to start biannual progress reporting against all 222 recommendations from June 2025.
However, that's yet to start, with the government confirming it's been delayed until at least mid-August.
Commitments to bigger ticket recommendations — such as the phasing out of segregated education, housing and employment; creating a disability rights act; and changes to guardianship laws across the country — have been largely absent from progress reports, as well as from federal and state budgets.
When they have appeared in budgets, they've sometimes been in opposition to the commissioners' recommendations — for example, Queensland's recently announced plan to open half a dozen new special schools.
Many items from the initial response were listed as needing "further consideration", but exactly how far along that consideration has come remains unclear.
The federal government noted last year that responding to the royal commission wouldn't be easy, saying recommendations straddled several jurisdictions and the six commissioners themselves didn't agree on everything.
In a statement, a federal government spokesperson said it was taking the royal commission's recommendations "very seriously".
They said the government remained committed to working with the disability community and state and territory ministers to "implement meaningful change".
Senator Steele-John said that needed to be a matter of urgency.
"We need the government to take the opportunity of this new parliament to actually look at the recommendations with fresh eyes and to decide to join the disability community in the work," he said.
Governments have had the royal commission's recommendations since September 2023 but the systemic change it has demanded is clearly a long way off.
That change was never going to happen overnight. Genuine co-design with people with disability takes time, too.
Ms Cusworth understands that but she says the lives and safety of people with disability can't wait.
Sally Robinson, a professor of disability and community inclusion at Flinders University, has some sympathy for governments because of how complex the situation is.
"But I really do wish they would be more transparent so that we all had an idea about where that work was up to and why it's taking time," she said.
People with disability are used to feeling sidelined, but the royal commission was supposed to be different.
Two years ago, my colleague Nas Campanella wrote that, without change, the trauma of the inquiry would have been for nothing.
And as we sit here in the second half of 2025, many of those who poured their hearts into this huge opportunity for reform fear that's how things are shaping up.