Carers and people with disabilities have shared their experiences working with Centrelink to receive their support payments after a Geraldton mother spoke out about having to continuously provide proof her son “still had” Down Syndrome.
Disability advocates are deeply concerned by an almost 80 per cent increase in Disability Support Pension appeals, warning that vulnerable people are being incorrectly forced onto lower benefit payments like Newstart.
The objective of this audit was to examine if Social Services and Human Services drive improvements in the Disability Support Pension program using data and information from multiple sources.
A campaign to reverse the federal government’s reduction to the suspension time of the Disability Support Pension for people in prison has been successful, keeping it at two years rather than 13 weeks.
The federal government is ditching controversial plans to review the eligibility of 90,000 people on the Disability Support Pension after only a tiny fraction of recipients were found not to qualify for the payment.
The ordeal of a father battling bowel cancer and Centrelink at the same time is setting social media ablaze, prompting a crowdfunding appeal and an outpouring of rage on Facebook.
The government has dramatically cut access to the disability support pension in the past eight years, cutting the approval rate from 63% to about 30% this financial year.
rexplains the cruel cycle of poverty and devastation being inflicted on the mentally and physically ill by ongoing welfare cuts. THIS story is to explain to people who don’t live with mental illness, the security a home can bring.
With around 760,000 people on the payment, the DSP is one of the largest and most-expensive welfare payments, costing the Commonwealth $16.3 billion a year. But in the past decade, there has been a huge drop in the number of new recipients, down from a peak of 89,000 to less than 32,000 last financial year.
Tougher compliance measures have led to a sharp decline in people accessing the Disability Support Pension, with the Department of Human Services revealing almost 75 per cent of claims for the scheme were rejected in 2016-17.
Centrelink telephone wait times ballooned last financial year, amid horror stories of people waiting more than an hour for help.
A new study has confirmed that people living with disabilities are vulnerable to financial exploitation and abuse by unscrupulous service providers, and that access to financial education may be able to help disabled Australians and carers make more confident financial decisions.