Community Visitor Schemes within the NDIS and OPCAT landscapes in safeguarding the rights of Australians with disability

Community Visitor schemes are a key mechanism in ensuring the safeguarding and achievement of human rights for people with disability in Australia. The unique powers of the Community Visitors to undertake unannounced, onsite visits to closed sites such as group houses, clinical facilities and supported residential services (SRSs) provide crucial ‘eyes on the ground’ monitoring and assessment of resident wellbeing, living conditions and service quality.

This study examines the ongoing role of Community Visitor schemes across Australia in safeguarding people with disability following changes brought by the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

Dr Rae West, Melbourne Disability Institute
Ms Jen Hargrave, Community Researcher
Dr Piers Gooding, Melbourne Law School
Contact: p.gooding@unimelb.edu.au

Report

Download the research report using the link below.

Community Visitors Research Report

Summary

Upholding the human rights of disabled people in ‘closed’ and ‘semi-closed’ care settings is generally agreed to require independent monitoring and reporting. Community Visitor schemes are a key mechanism in this independent process. The unique powers of Community Visitors to undertake unannounced, onsite visits to places such as Specialist Disability Accommodation (‘SDA’) (often referred to as group homes), involuntary psychiatric facilities, and supported residential services (‘SRS’) help monitor people’s safety, well-being, living conditions, and the quality of services they are receiving. Community Visitor schemes have been operating in Australian states and territories (except Western Australia and Tasmania) for over 30 years.

More recently, Community Visitor programs have been significantly impacted by the National Disability Insurance Scheme (‘NDIS’). The NDIS was established in 2013 but only fully rolled out across Australia in 2020. The NDIS primarily comprises of individualised packages of support provided to eligible people with disability. Participants then ‘purchase’ services from an almost fully privatised disability service sector. The new privatised approach has seen most governments move out of direct service provision. Yet state-run services were the main sites visited by Community Visitors in the past. Instead, the new NDIS service landscape comprises many private or non-government organisation (‘NGO’) service providers that are either registered or unregistered with the NDIS (with unregistered providers including individual support workers directly employed by NDIS participants).

This report seeks to examine the role of Community Visitors in being able to undertake adequate safeguarding in the diversified and privatised service landscape of the NDIS. Although there has been ambiguity about what constitutes a ‘closed setting’ for the purposes of Community Visitors, which has pre-dated the NDIS, the NDIS has intensified this ambiguity. Ambiguity centres on what is considered a ‘visitable site’. This includes ambiguity about whether Community Visitors have the statutory authority to visit what we describe in this report as ‘grey-zone’ sites outside of traditional sites. Grey-zone sites include controlled accommodations in which SIL providers are landlords of the accommodation setting while at the same time providing personal and community support to residents. Grey-zone sites also include Australian Disability Enterprises (‘ADE’) and day services. These sites are all examples of service settings in which it is unclear what role, if any, Community Visitors should play in rights-based monitoring, including whether Community Visitors are (or ought to be authorised) to visit them.

In all these settings, the potential remains for people with disabilities to face excessive control or coercion, and even outright violence and abuse, as the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (‘Disability Royal Commission’) has made clear in its recent Report (2023). To complicate matters, in 2017, Australia ratified the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (‘OPCAT’). OPCAT has implications for the disability service settings monitored by Community Visitor. Under OPCAT, Australia is obliged to create a reporting framework to prevent torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment in closed settings.

For Australia, this requires a federal model of ‘National Preventive Mechanisms’ (‘NPM’). NPMs are independent visiting bodies established at the domestic level, composed of one or more bodies, for the prevention of torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment (OPCAT, Article 3). An NPM has the potential to overlap with Community Visitor schemes in monitoring certain disability service settings. Hence, as well as considering the impact of the NDIS, this report takes the opportunity to consider the potential role of Community Visitors in Australia’s OPCAT monitoring obligations.