Disability pensioners are turning to lawyers to fight for access to the JobSeeker payment, as recipients reveal they have had to skip meals and even stop taking medication during the pandemic.
A coalition of advocacy groups are demanding the government include people receiving the disability support pension on the fortnightly $550 COVID-19 supplement following the exclusion of disabled people and their carers, despite welfare recipients such as those on JobSeeker, Youth Allowance and Austudy being eligible.
The growing number of Newstart recipients who are sick or have disabilities face “unrealistic” mutual obligations to find work and sometimes have their impairments exacerbated while struggling on welfare payments, a new research paper says.
Disability support pension recipients were increasingly forced to pay back alleged welfare overpayments as the government’s botched robodebt scheme progressed, despite repeated claims that the program did not target the vulnerable.
New figures show 40% of people on unemployment benefit have an illness or disability that prevents them from working full-time
The mother of an intellectually disabled man who initially received a $15,000 “robodebt” has described the Department of Human Services’ conduct in seeking to recover the debt as a form of “disability bullying”.
The Senate’s community affairs committee is on Thursday hearing from social service experts, who are continuing their calls for the scheme to be scrapped.
People with disabilities who are considered capable of working receive Newstart, the welfare allowance for the unemployed, rather than the disability support pension which needs an extra 343 AUD (235 U.S. dollar) per week.
Successive Governments have made meeting the eligibility threshold so burdensome and difficult that many people with disability, who may have been eligible in the past, can no longer access the Disability Support Pension (DSP). The Australian Federation of Disability organisations (AFDO) has commissioned three new studies by various Australian universities to highlight the economic and health impacts of disability, particularly for Indigenous Australians.
Two in five Indigenous households relying on the Disability Support Pension ran out of money for basic items such as food and fuel in the last year, new research shows, prompting calls from disability advocates for the government to urgently review the scheme.
Those with a mild disability would need an extra $87 per week at least to have the same standard of living as other Australians, while those with a profound or severe disability required $173 per week more. But the gap in standard of living became even more stark for people with disabilities who were deemed to have some capacity to work and placed on Newstart.
Disability Advocacy Network Australia CEO Mary Mallett said the shift towards Newstart is a “huge concern” because there is a significant financial difference between the DSP and Newstart.
Automated Centrelink debts, described by critics as robodebts, have been criticised by legal groups because they require welfare recipients to prove they do not owe any money.
The 23-year-old had been trying to get on the Disability Support Pension since late 2015, but it took her 22 months before she was even able to complete an application.
The Disability Support Pension is important in the lives of the Australians who receive it. Yet a huge proportion of claims for it are rejected. The largest non-medical reason given for rejection is failure to supply the requested information, accounting for one in eight rejections which means that people are being rejected due to an inability to complete the form which is 33 pages long.