3AW Morning Programme
E&OE
PRESENTER:
Good morning to you Kevin Andrews.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
Good morning.
PRESENTER:
So Mr Andrews the idea is to stop people going on permanent disability for the rest of their lives?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
What’s happened up to date is that when people go onto the DSP it’s become a set and forget payment. That is people are put on it, many of them are capable of doing some work, many with say some rehabilitation are capable of being in the workforce. So what we’re looking at is the possibility of restricting or confining the disability payment to people with no capacity to work but having a new tiered working age payment that would recognise the different abilities of various people.
PRESENTER:
Yeah so it’s for people that you know may have been injured briefly for a certain amount of time but somehow get on permanent disability pensions for the rest of their lives.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
There’s people in that category. The biggest group now going onto the DSP are people with psychological or psychologically related illnesses. Now some of those illnesses are episodic in nature, there are times when people obviously can’t work but there are also times when they can work. So the system should really try to take account of those different times.
PRESENTER:
Is the problem not though Minister that the regular dole is less than the disability support payment, I would argue, well I don’t know whether you’d agree, that I think the current dole is too low and so many people are trying to get onto the disability support pension because it’s higher?
MINISTER ANDREWS:
That’s true, there’s a perverse incentive for people to get onto the DSP because it pays more and that’s largely been brought about because the indexation rates of the two payments has been different and they’ve been growing apart over years and this is something that has been known for some time now, so we have to tackle that.
By the same token everybody on the Newstart, the unemployment benefit, are not in the same situation. About 50 per cent of people, who go onto Newstart use it on a temporary basis, are able to get off Newstart and get a job within about six months, but then there’s another group who are on it for a lot longer. So we need to find ways to differentiate between those two groups.
PRESENTER:
Well we do know people rort it, I mean (inaudible) it’s on television where people getting the disability pension are seen doing very heavy jobs. You know it’s (inaudible)
MINISTER ANDREWS:
That’s true there are people who rort whatever system you have in place but we need a system that the structure, the architecture of, lessens the opportunity for rorting it, takes away those perverse incentives that we’ve just been speaking about.
PRESENTER:
Okay so Mr Andrews part of the reason is to make it less complicated but it seems to me from what you’re saying is that it may become more complicated because you’re going to have to have degrees of who people who are on this support pension for you know partially or a for a certain period of time.
MINISTER ANDREWS:
No, we could make it less complicated than it is because at the moment we’ve got about 20 payments and about 50 supplements and allowances and if you look at a diagram of it, it looks like a birds nest. It’s hard to find your way through, it’s difficult to administer, there’s 4000 pages of social security legislation and frankly people who are in receipt of welfare must find it very confusing as well so it can be simplified from what it is.
PRESENTER:
Thank you very much, Kevin Andrews, the Federal Social Services Minister.