Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is report No. 57, the Performance Audit Qualifying for the Disability Support Pension, the Department of Social Services and the Department of Human Services. This is a timely report; it comes very close to the time when the government was boasting about the number of people that it has forced off the Disability Support Pension—the number of people who were stopped from coming onto the DSP through the process of tightening the eligibility criteria as well as the number of young people under the age of 35 who were forced off DSP.

What the government does not talk about is what has happened to those people who have been forced off the disability support pension. These are people under the age of 35 who do have a disability. The government has supposedly required the carrying out of this review and then boasted in the media about the number of people who do not get DSP. It does not talk about the real life impact that that has on young people. I have been getting reports in my office about the devastating impact that it is having. It means that if people have not found work—and I will come back to that—they in fact must to try and survive on Newstart with, in some cases, very significant disabilities.

The idea was that the government said, 'Well these people can go and find work.' We do not have any data provided in the government's announcements on whether people have been able to find work. What has happened to these one in seven young people on DSP who have been kicked off? With that in mind, that is how I read this audit report. Interestingly enough, the audit report says that:

The 2013-14 report attributed the fall in DSP growth over the past five years to changes in the DSP assessment process. However, supporting evidence is limited and timing indicates that other factors are more likely to have impacted on the flows of DSP across this period;

For a start, one questions the fact that the government keeps saying that the tightening of the eligibility criteria is forcing people off. What that is doing is perhaps keeping people off DSP who should actually be on DSP. The conclusion that ANAO came to was that

…to date, DSS has not undertaken any formal review or evaluation of the eligibility changes. A focus on the evaluation of the efficiency and effectiveness of the changes would provide assurance of whether the current results are in keeping with the legislation.

More importantly, it should also look at what impact these changes have had on the real lives of people with disability. Instead of the government pursuing their 'let's cut so-called welfare spending', I call income support and social security very necessary and real supports for people who need them, such as people with disability.

The report also goes on to say that 'eligibility decisions could be better documented'. In other words, there has been a lack of documentation about decisions around eligibility, making it hard for those who are questioning the evaluation and hard to those who want to appeal the evaluation. We know that there is a high number of appeals and questioning of assessments for people on different disability support. In fact, a large number of those appeals are leading to the amendment or overturning of those decisions. I look forward to seeing much better documentation. The report says that each year Human Services receives a large number of requests for internal review of rejected DSP claims. I am not surprised, but I do question how people can properly appeal or request a review when the documentation has not occurred.

The most important thing here is that people with disability are seeking support while they find work. The evaluation has to go on to look at how people have gone in trying to find work when there have been dumped onto a lower income and are trying to survive with a disability and find work. Compare them with people who are maintained on DSP and their ability to find work, because we know that poverty is a barrier to employment and we know that Australia has an atrocious record when it comes to the number of people with disability who are trying to live in poverty. So the government, while they are trumpeting kicking these people off, have actually condemned people to poverty.

Question agreed to.