Guardian Australia’s Fair Go? spokespeople pose a question and policy researchers from the Sydney Policy Lab find the answer
Tue 7 May 2019 03.02 BST
Last modified on Tue 7 May 2019 03.50 BST
Fair Go? spokeswoman: Nijole Naujokas of Adelaide, 34, on Newstart.
Wants to know: Why she couldn’t access the disability support pension despite having disabling medical conditions that often prevent her from working.
Sydney Policy Lab says: We looked into it and discovered that changes to the system over two decades had tightened the DSP eligibility and assessment conditions to such a degree that the system is now severely restricting eligibility requirements. Below we set out how Australia has reached this point and what it means for those people in Nijole’s position.
The DSP is an Australian government payment for people assessed as having a permanent disability preventing them from working more than 15 hours a week for at least two years. As of 20 March 2019, the maximum fortnightly payment for a single adult without children was $843.60. This is higher than Newstart payments, which stand at $555.70 a fortnight for a single adult without children. Crucially, though, both are below the 2015-16 estimated poverty line of $433 a week. The DSP can give people a sense of security and reduces stress related to living with their disability and finding employment. It helps pay for bills, housing and groceries, including extra costs resulting from their disability, including medication and transport.
The DSP replaced the invalid pension in 1991, with the aim of increasing the number of people with disability in the workforce. Government policy for more than 20 years has actively reduced the number of people receiving the DSP, through tighter eligibility assessments and increased employment-related requirements.
In 2005 the Howard government’s welfare to work changes stopped people from receiving the DSP if they were assessed as being able to work 15 hours or more, halving it from the previous 30 hours.
From 2009 to 2012, the Rudd and Gillard governments both tightened assessment criteria and processes further, creating a “structural shift” in the DSP. Since then the DSP has been based on a judgment of whether claimants are able to perform certain activities, as opposed to a medical diagnosis of their disability. Applicants have also had to complete an employment support program with a registered provider for at least 18 months before getting the DSP.
Further changes in 2012 and 2014 mean that DSP recipients under 35 assessed as being able to work at least eight hours need to participate in a variety of compulsory employment-related activities, including regular Centrelink interviews.
Changes introduced by the Abbott government in 2015 and unchallenged since then mean that new applicants must now be assessed by a government-contracted doctor, rather than their own.
While successive Labor and Liberal-National governments have significantly reduced the number of people receiving the payment, this has not translated into increased employment and economic security for people with disability.
The significant fall in people receiving the DSP since the “structural shift” has been accompanied by a corresponding dramatic increase in the number of people with disabilities and medical illnesses receiving the significantly lower Newstart, as Nijole does. Essentially, people with disability have been moved from the higher-paying DSP to the lower-paying Newstart – the outcome from changes to DSP requirements has been to push people already in poverty further into poverty.
One of the most serious consequences of this is in relation to housing. Under the DSP people can financially access assisted living, boarding house accommodation and community housing. The same does not hold for the much lower Newstart. Housing insecurity can push people into homelessness and prison, particularly people with intellectual disabilities. It’s estimated that half of the adults in prison have been diagnosed or treated for a mental health problem.
Moreover, heavy “conditionality” – that is, if those on the DSP or Newstart do not behave how the government says they must, they risk losing their payments – has a range of negative impacts. Nijole has experienced the debilitating stress of this risk multiple times. Despite strong recommendations from medical professionals for Nijole to have a break from “mutual obligations”, government assessors have rejected her medical certificates.
Government policy is essentially that people with disability need to be coerced into work, which doesn’t match the facts. Research suggests that compulsory interactions with Centrelink and mandated use of subpar services can create obstacles, be counterproductive and, in the worst cases, cause extreme harm. As the researcher Dr May Lam states, “compulsion distorts and demeans the capacity for self-help” that people “clearly show they possess”.
The punishment of vulnerable people through mandated conditionality is not isolated to people with disability. For more than two decades governments have pursued conditions for social security payments – such as the heavily criticised mandatory income management and ParentsNext schemes – which attempt to change both behaviour and the broader perception of people who receive income support.
The Australian social security system has always had a degree of conditionality. For example, the age pension is only available to people above a certain age. But successive Labor and Liberal-National governments have transformed the system from a focus on enabling the right of people to full participation in society towards a control-based system based on behavioural conditions. At base, if people do not act as the government demands, their welfare payments can be reduced.
The dominant problem is not the individual aspects of the system. It’s the government placing strong work demands on people and then punishing people who do not comply. People with disability may need training or support to find employment; they may not. People with low incomes might require support managing their finances; they may not. The issue is choice. Instead of genuinely supporting people who are unemployed by centring their experiences and setting them up to succeed, successive governments have used language of “support” and “working with communities” while adopting a far more rigid approach. Governments have based their policies and treatments of people on the belief that they know best how vulnerable people should behave and therefore have a mandate to force people to do it.
Reversing the trend requires a shift from a narrowly prescriptive approach back to a genuinely supportive one. In different contexts, governments have worked directly with communities, on equal footing, to understand their experience and find solutions that enable them to thrive. For example, in response to the government’s punitive community development program in the Northern Territory, the Aboriginal Peak Organisations Northern Territory alliance has proposed the community-driven Remote Development and Employment Scheme. Similar levels of autonomy can be seen in the Maranguka justice reinvestment project in Bourke, a community-led initiative that has reduced levels of crime and violence and had a positive economic impact on the justice system and the broader region.
• People can find a local advocate to help apply for or challenge DSP assessments via the online National Disability Advocacy Program Finder. Community legal centres in the National Social Security Rights Network provide free legal help to people with Centrelink-related issues
