Graeme Innes is the Disability Discrimination Commissioner and Race Discrimination Commissioner with the Australian Human Rights Commission. At last week’s Comcare Conference in Canberra, Graeme spoke about the need to see beyond the disability to see the person and stressed that, even though accommodating a worker with disability is much easier than most employers expect, a significant proportion of the Australian community has skills that are being overlooked.

Employing a disabled person does not require a total redesign of a workplace: a “reasonable adjustment” is the expectation. 80% of “reasonable adjustments” to workplaces cost less than $500, which is considerably less than what most employers expect. In fact, the workplace changes are more accurately described as workplace "tweaks".

Questions and comments from delegates identified that managing the return-to-work of an existing worker who has been substantially disabled was not a common experience for the delegates and was a new concept for many.

Perhaps for this reason, it became clear that there were many legislative requirements for disabled workers that are not being seriously applied or understood by many workplaces.

Graeme suggested that the following actions can be taken to recruited staff from the pool of talented and disabled workers:

• Consider flexible working arrangements;
• Set recruitment quotas;
• Ensure that job requirements don’t discriminate;
• Choose recruitment specialists who support disabled employment; and
• Provide mentoring.

The issue of RTW for a disabled worker was front-of-mind in a panel discussion later in the Conference where one of WorkSafe Victoria’s recent RTW ads was shown - A worker with a shoulder injury returned to a rapturous welcome by his workmates after the anxiety of his home life. Although the ad is fundamentally positive, the circumstance could be considerably different if the injury had resulted in a permanent disability or if the injury had involved a mental health issue.

The Conference audience was predominantly HR specialists from the public sector and many of the employment obligations identified by Graeme Innes would have been familiar but for RTW Coordinators, OHS practitioners and business owners, his presentation was thought-provoking.