News

No one likes doing Life Admin (if you do, we want you to tell us your secrets). But for people with disabilities, Life Admin is next level.

One of the most troubling things Tenant Voice has heard from our Reference Groups members is the burden imposed on them to do the daily admin tasks necessary just to stay alive.

Members routinely say how emotionally and physically fatigued they are from completing these tasks. Well, we believe this speaks to an inherent inequality when it comes to how much admin people with disability are doing compared to others.

Intrigued and concerned, the team at Tenant Voice dug a little deeper and found limited academic research on the topic (we did find this interesting American article). Unsurprisingly for anyone that knows us, we decided to undertake a quantitative study to properly address the issue.

We created a small bureaucratic burden survey, featuring 10 of the most common types of admin tasks our Reference Group members flagged, and asked respondents to log how much time they spent per task, how they did those tasks, whether those tasks were resolved, and how it felt to do them. Respondents completed the survey each day for an entire month.

We also conducted a series of private interviews, where we tried to better understand what the day-to-day experience of administrative burden was like. We wanted the statistics, but we also wanted people’s stories.

The findings quantifiably demonstrate that people with disabilities complete a disproportionate number of administrative tasks. 

Before we share and unpack the findings, we want to express our immense thanks to the respondents. We sincerely appreciate their time and expertise.

What did we find?

We had over 278 responses, with 249 saying they performed an admin task that day (89.6%). Of these, 242 said the task was related to their disability (97.2%). 

• On average, each person completed nearly three distinct admin tasks each day. 
• On average, each task took approximately 38 minutes.

This means most respondents spent between 38 minutes and 1.8 hours a day on disability-related admin. This is on top of the life admin that everyone else also has to do.

In our private interviews, one of our respondents said,

‘It’s just the time sink that falls on us every single time. And then when you have the audacity to ask a contractor why it’s taking so long, they say, ‘oh, we’re really busy.’ And it’s like — well, you’re busy, I’m busy too, but this is my livelihood that’s at stake here.’

We also discovered that how often a task is resolved and how people feel about it don’t often correlate:

For example, for SDA tenancy group work and medical appointments, both resolved above 90% of the time, near the bottom on feeling (28 and 31). These tasks get done but aren’t pleasant to do.

We note the hidden time burden of tasks that take up 15 mins or less, with the psychological fatigue that respondents carry: no-one sits down and cleanly does these tasks in 15 minutes or less. Respondents spend time thinking about the task throughout the day while doing other things, on top of actually doing the task itself.

This somewhat explains the overall burden signal: across all 691 category-tagged tasks, the response-weighted average feeling score is about 43 out of 100. That’s less than a passing grade if this was a university assessment.

We also allowed respondents to also share other disability-related categories, with repairs and disability admin related to travel commonly mentioned.

‘Repairs are the bane of my existence. It takes an inordinate amount of time to have anything fixed.,, I had to have the backup generator fixed for my automatic door, so it opens in the event of a blackout — and it was three months before they actually had them.’

What does this mean for people with a disability?

Having a disability means that, on top of managing all the health issues that come with it, both physically and mentally, people with disabilities are burdened with extra admin. This is a systemic issue. If you are dealing with a disability, the system should ask less of you, not more.

Respondents often said that gaps in accountability are shifted on to them. If an OT, a super worker or contractor doesn’t do their job, does it poorly or is evasive in their response, more bureaucracy is shifted to the participant.

As another respondent put it,

‘the systems fail us… we feel like it’s our fault. And so there’s this internalized ableism that runs with it — that we are the problem, when it’s the furthest thing from the truth.’

The time imposed on people with disabilities to complete tasks is a symptom of the systemic ableism present in Australia. It denies people with disabilities the opportunities to work, study, and spend time with the people we love. It denies them the opportunity to live.

As a reminder, the disability admin tasks that we tracked are in addition to the other types of admin most people are required to do.

Even on a cold, economic level, this status quo is ridiculous. If people with disabilities were liberated from this burden, they could contribute more to the economy through work and engaging in other activities – even in buying goods.

Each service system delivery only sees their part of the system, not the whole, and cannot see the compounding impact of each little system failure – those that contribute to poor outcomes for people with disability.

Our simple ask is that everyone in the disability ecosystem thinks carefully about how their systems work, and how they can reduce the load for people with disabilities.

It might be returning calls when you say you will, developing a CRM flag system that identifies when an issue hasn’t been followed up, or not sending that daily group email, but sending them once a week.

Every little bit helps.