The Centre · Research · Dr Peter Smith
Dr Peter Smith
Director, Centre for Disability Employment Research and Practice
Peter Smith works on the design and governance of employment systems. His subject is the conditions under which employment systems produce durable outcomes, not the technique of individual placement practice, and his research addresses why systems that meet their compliance obligations and sustain legitimate service activity nonetheless settle into modest and self-reproducing results.
He came to this work from the front line rather than the academy. He began as a support worker, moved into the Disability Employment Services system, and worked for the sector’s provider peak body before entering research. His doctorate, completed at the University of Sydney under Emeritus Professor Trevor Parmenter, was a systems analysis of the factors leading to the successful employment of people with disability, and that orientation has governed everything since.
Over fifteen years he has built the Centre for Disability Employment Research and Practice into a research and standards organisation with an integrated body of instrumentation. The Equilibrium Systems Model of Employment provides the organising theory, published in Labour and Industry in 2026. The Integrative Employment Function Framework establishes the conditions under which integrative work becomes governable within transactional systems. Beneath these sit the applied instruments: the Psychologically Informed Employment Counselling Framework, fidelity and quality assurance tools for provider organisations, instruments that establish whether practice was experienced as intended by the people receiving it, and frameworks for evaluating employer engagement.
His university relationships are working collaborations rather than titular appointments. He has held a Visiting Fellowship at Cornell University’s Yang-Tan Institute on Employment and Disability and, earlier, a research association at Deakin University, and he is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Melbourne. He collaborates with universities in Australia, the United States, Singapore and Saudi Arabia, and advises governments and provider organisations across Australia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Singapore. He is a registered Clinical Counsellor with the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia, and he trained and certified in Customised Employment practice in the United States in order to hold Australian practice to international standards.
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