Zoë Wundenberg | Disability support pension system is way more convoluted than it needs to be

I distinctly remember the answer was 6.7 and me, being me, sat there overthinking it (some things never change). Was it a trick question? I mean, if there was 0.7 of a seal could it be called a "whole" seal? Which bit was missing? If it was the head, then clearly that didn't count as a "whole" seal, right? So, I rounded down to six "whole" seals, even though mathematically I should have rounded it up to seven. And it was marked wrong.

As a person living with disability, I've been thinking about this seal conundrum a lot lately, particularly in relation to Workforce Australia and the struggle to get onto the disability support pension. Am I "whole"? What determines a person's percentage capacity to work? Who decides what that percentage capacity is?

So, being a law student, I looked up the legislation. The Social Security Act 1991 defines "partial capacity to work" as a person who "has a physical, intellectual or psychiatric impairment" that the secretary is satisfied prevents them from doing training activities or 30 hours of work a week without a program of support.

So, how is this figured out?

Centrelink have job capacity assessors on staff - usually with health or allied health backgrounds - that act as the secretary's delegates to assess claims against established criteria.

For example, to qualify for disability support pension, a person's impairment must be attributed a rating of 20 or more, and for an impairment to be rated at all, their condition must be permanent. Furthermore, the impairment resulting from that condition must "more likely than not, in light of available evidence," persist for more than two years, and for a condition to be considered permanent, it must also be fully diagnosed, treated and stabilised.

Tables for the assessment of work-related impairment for disability support pension applicants are legislated in the social security legislation suite (Determination 2011). Rating points are attributed to functional impairment impact stemming from the diagnosed condition. The accrual of 20 or more points is required for a successful pension application. However, that's not all.

A person must also meet the requirements of "continuing inability to work," criteria and must not have attained this status solely with a view to apply for the pension, or they must be participating in the supported wage system (the system where employers pay workers with disabilities based on their productivity, not their time. Don't get me started on that).

Assessors cannot take into account the labour market in the applicant's area, availability of work the person could be trained for, the availability of training to the person, transportation availability, a person's preferences, a person's potential attractiveness to an employer, or literacy and numeracy issues.

So, if you have lived in a predominantly manufacturing town for 20 years, can't do heavy lifting or move freely anymore because of a permanent spinal condition, and have poor computer skills, but you could theoretically be trained to do data entry through a training provider that isn't accessible, for a job that doesn't exist in your area and even if it did, you'd have no confidence to do it and no employer would foreseeably hire you to try, tough biscuits. Literally - this scenario is provided as an example on the social security guide.

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I honestly don't think the system could be more convoluted and confusing. I can absolutely see how a cancer diagnosis can fail to meet pension criteria given it's not necessarily a "permanent condition" and the impairment may fluctuate with treatment courses, even though continuing work could be damaging to their recovery, and frustrating to a employer who doesn't have a reliable staff member anymore.

We need to rethink this process. Where are the questions, "can a person reasonably be expected to work through this experience?" and, "can a person reasonably be expected to successfully find work that will support them through this experience?" Viewing the problem this way doesn't mean a person can't work with the impairment, but it means they are supported if they can't.

We are too tied up in tables and numbers to remember we are dealing with people here.

Sometimes, you have to round down, even when the maths tells you to round up.