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This research aimed to understand the significance of supported decision-making to the lives of people with cognitive disabilities, identify its essential elements common to anyone with cognitive disabilities in any context, and locate key implementation issues. For this Report, we understand people with cognitive disabilities to include people with intellectual disabilities, acquired brain injury, dementia and mental health conditions. Synthesising the research findings, this Report articulates the benefits of supported decision-making, sets out nine principles and eight essential elements of a ‘Diversity, Dignity, Equity and Best Practice Framework for Supported Decision-making’ and recommends implementation strategies. For enquiries, please contact: Professor Christine Bigby, c.bigby@latrobe.edu.au Living with Disability Research Centre, La Trobe University, Vic, 3086, Australia.

Purpose: A rights perspective proposes supported decision-making as an alternative to substitute decision-making. However, evidence about supported decision-making practice is limited. Our aim was to build evidence about building the capacity of decision supporters.Methods: Eighteen parents of people with intellectual disabilities were trained in decision support usingthe La Trobe Support for Decision-making Practice Framework. Data from repeated semi-structured interviews and mentoring sessions were used to capture parental reflections on the value of training.Results: The training acted as a catalyst for parent self-reflection and the Framework prompted them to adopt a more deliberative approach to supporting decision-making. Some parents perceived increased confidence of their adult offspring in expressing preferences resulting from their own changed approach.Conclusions: This study demonstrates the efficacy of this Framework and evidence-based training in building the capacity of parental decision supporters to be consistent with the rights paradigm.

This thesis was scanned from the print manuscript for digital preservation and is copyright the author. Researchers can access this thesis by asking their local university, institution or public library to make a request on their behalf. Monash staff and postgraduate students can use the link in the Reference field.

Artificial intelligence in public administration is both inevitable and potentially quite beneficial. Its assistive form offers access, efficiency and convenience; while the gains potentially are even larger in its augmentive ���machine learning��� form. Offsetting risks include disadvantaging technology poor clients, and poor design which fails adequately to reflect social welfare principles or provide adequate accountability and redress for errors; a risk heightened for machine learning. This paper reviews some of the different forms and settings for AI in social security and argues that the Australian experience to date has been very mixed due to poor or rushed AI designs, poor understanding of client characteristics, and inadequate understanding of dynamics within contracted-out government services settings.

In many societies, people with cognitive disability have been pre- sumed to lack reasoned decision-making capacity. Consequently, substituted decision-making laws and practices have traditionally authorised some people such as parents, guardians or medical professionals, to make decisions on their behalf. Several countries are now moving towards an alternative supported decision-making paradigm whereby people with different cognitive abilities are supported to make decisions that reflect as much as possible their ‘will, preferences and rights’. In this paper we examine how geo- graphical thinking about temporalities might illuminate some of the legal, ethical and practical complexities of supported decision- making. The paper draws on qualitative data from interviews with people with intellectual disabilities or acquired brain injury, and those who support them in making decisions. We examine how temporal scales and boundaries shape the determination of deci- sion-making capacity; how decision-makers’ ‘will and preferences’ are interpreted by supporters; and how the labour of support for decision-making is organised. We argue that further geographical engagement with supported decision-making can help significantly advance this important disability rights agenda.

The 2009 H!Nl 'swine flu' pandemic was the first influenza pandemic of the twenty-first centmy. Unlike the first influenza pandemic of the twentieth century, the so-called 'Spanish flu' which killed millions of people worldwide, the 2009 pandemic was relatively mild. While the mildness of the 2009 pandemic meant that the 'Yorld was spared from the impact of a high-mortality event that would cause widespread social and economic disruption, the 2009 pandemic did provide an opportunity to road-test pandemic readiness. In other work we have assessed Australia's pandemic plans and emergency management legislation, finding that both provide flexible and adaptive forms of regulation that are capable of adapting to the scale and severity of a pandemic or other public health emergency. 1 In this chapter we consider whether pandemic planning adequately addresses the needs of vulnerable individuals and groups, both within countries and between them. Central to this is the question of whether vulnerability is itself a useful concept for both law and policy, and if so, the implications of expressly incorporating the concept of vulnerability into pandemic planning.

© 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. ‘Will, preferences and rights’ is the new guiding principle for all support for or exercise of decision-making under the Convention on Rights of Persons with Disabilities, but its meaning is disputed and practice implications are poorly understood. This article explores key debates across disciplines and draws on grounded theory fieldwork findings to bring greater clarity to the principle within law, policy and practice settings. It is argued that the principle calls for a nuanced understanding which cautions against expectations that mere enactment into law or adoption within programs of support will prove to be a panacea.