Making Rights Count: Services for People with a Disability (ALRC Report 79)

ALRC Report 79 (tabled October 1996) was the third report in a series of inquiries into Acts administered by the Department of Health and Family Services.

This report provides a detailed analysis of the Disability Services Act 1986 (Cth). The Commission identified a number of flaws in the existing system and concluded that the Disability Services Act failed to provide a comprehensive legal framework for disability services. The report identified a lack of national coordination in the administration of disability services. Important aspects of disability services were scattered across various regulations, meaning that the Act itself did not state what rights disabled people had, what quality of service they were entitled to expect, the conditions on which funding was given or how the provisions of the Act could be enforced. As a result, the Act only provided a way of distributing funding to agencies.

View ALRC Report 79 in HTML on the AustLII website.

This publication is available for purchase in book format.