Yesterday it was announced that some 30,000 DSP recipients would have their fitness to work reassessed. “The days of easy welfare are over” Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews said in a recent press conference.
When were those days? When were days when the DSP was easy to get? Eligibility requirements were rigorous when I applied for it many moons ago and have since been tightened under Howard and then again under Gillard. It is a difficult process. And it should be. But it’s also a humiliating one - to have to repeatedly demonstrate your inability. And now we’re being told we must submit to this humiliation once more because we may have been lying the first time around. And we must be reassessed by government doctors because our own may be lying criminals. All of this to combat growth which isn’t really happening and a budget crisis that doesn’t exist.
And worse it’s being sold as concern. It’s about supporting people into work they tell us. Because nothing says support like calling people greedy faux-crips and dumping them on NewStart to search for non-existent jobs. If it were about employment why wouldn’t the focus be on making sure employers are actually set up to employ the disabled? Of course it’s not about employment. It’s about money. It’s about taking away money from a group of people that are seen to be lazy (couch potatoes as one rather cunty newspaper would have it). A group that can’t fight back.
$766 (the maximum payment) a fortnight sounds like a luxurious amount of money especially compared to the dole. The reason for the difference between the payments is obvious to all but the most unthinking person: Living with a disability is expensive. It costs more money to have a disability than to not. The fact this even needs to be said is ridiculous. Treatment and equipment and medicine and doctors' visits all cost money. And it’s constant. A $7 co-payment will sure make that easier too btw. And who’s paying for this reassessment? Oh that’s us again good-o. Many, if not most, disabled Australians live on or below the poverty line and moving them onto the dole is not just kicking them when they’re down, it’s kicking them when they’re down and then calling them lazy for being kicked.
Yesterday I tweeted somewhat angrily that I’d refuse to submit to this reassessment but the truth is I will. We all will. The government has found in the disabled a group that will always comply no matter how offensive or humiliatingly we’re treated because we are terrified of the alternative. They have us over a barrel and they know it.
Disability Pension rorters should be stopped but scaring an already scared group is not the way to do it.
