Given that workers with disability are packing boxes, cleaning and gardening for legal pay rates as low as $2.27 an hour when the national minimum wage is $20.33 an hour, an inquiry into the situation becomes urgent. Further, it was also found that the highest pay rate was $23.85 an hour, while the average rate at that ADE was $6.28 an hour. 

However, the commission heard the low rates of pay are legal, with wages calculated by using an assessment tool to measure the “productivity” of employees. People working in ADEs are also known to be on the disability support pension, which is $987 a fortnight for a single person.

But despite this, Disability advocacy organisations argue that ADEs where workers are paid such low wages amount to exploitation and segregation, and hark back to the “sheltered workshops” in which they arose. Most ADE workers have an intellectual disability, though this is not always the case.

Simultaneously, National Disability Services, which represents some ADEs, has told the inquiry all ADEs would need to shut down if they needed to pay award rates, which it claimed would see a “large number” of those people “marginalised from the labour force”.

Catherine McAlpine, Chief Executive of Inclusion Australia, representing people with intellectual disabilities, acknowledged that some people had positive experiences working at ADEs and often felt “valued”.

“One of the issues is if you have an intellectual disability and people … say to you, ‘this is what everyone else does,’ but it’s not made clear that no one else goes and does it for $2.50 an hour, it’s actually not the same,” she further added.

What’s clear is that there is a $9,000 gap between the disability support pension and the minimum wage. “We think that … governments should top that up and then over a period of a transition period … the wages paid by employers actually pick up appropriately and in a structured manner. And the amount that needs to be subsidised by the government would decrease,” McAlpine said.