Human Rights, Disability, and Construction: How responsive are building regulations to changing community attitudes towards housing for people with a disability?

Responsibility for housing people with a disability has rested with government and the charity-medical model of disability encouraged institutionalized accommodation. However, since the mid-2000s, the introduction of a person-centred approach has seen government’s legislate programs that facilitate people with disabilities living in the community. This shifted supply of appropriate housing to the private-sector and placed a focus on whether current building regulations are capable of regulating in this space. This paper explores the history of building regulations in Australia, in parallel with the history of treatment of people with a disability. The normalization of institutionalizing people with a disability was reflected in early building codes in Australia, continuing from the 1840s until the 1980s when disability theory began to change – but not building practice in Australia. The decisive break between the approach to disability accommodation (person-centred) and the institutional model in building regulations occurred with the move to the National Construction Code (NCC) in the 1990s. The introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in 2014 highlighted the disconnect when a market-based housing model was proposed that proved difficult to implement with current NCC settings. This study highlighted the complex interaction between existing policy settings and identified the scope for individual interpretation of the code around key concepts. These include building classification, single-occupancy units, and fire safety. As a consequence of the institutional model for disability accommodation enshrined in the NCC, the NDIS is undermined in accommodating people in the community, due to uncertainty and confusion within the private-sector industry that has impacted the cost and quality of the housing produced.

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