Disability Support Pension - Overview
Who is this Payment for?
Disability Support Pension (DSP) is paid to people who are unable to work for at least 30 hours per week, or be re-skilled for such work, for more than two years because of a disability. DSP is intended to ensure that people with disabilities have adequate levels of income and maximum opportunities to participate in society.
Eligibility Requirements
To qualify for DSP a person must:
- be over 16 and be under Age Pension age (currently 62 for women and 65 for men); and
- be permanently blind; or
- have a physical, intellectual or psychiatric impairment (assessed at 20 points or more under the Impairment Tables); and be unable to do any work, or be re-skilled for any work, for a period of at least two years; and
- have become unable to work while in Australia, or have 10 years qualifying Australian residence.
Trends
As at June 2002, there were 658,915 people receiving DSP. Two thirds of these customers were aged over 45 years; 62% were male; 72% were born in Australia; only 9.7% had income from employment though 16% were on reduced rates due to their or their partner's income or assets; and, on average, they had been in continuous receipt of DSP for 7 years. The three main medical conditions are musculo-skeletal or connective tissue conditions, representing 33% of the total DSP population, psychological/psychiatric conditions, representing 24%, and intellectual/learning difficulties, representing 10%.
Since 1972 the DSP customer population has been steadily increasing, with the greatest growth, of 13%, occurring in the 1991-92 financial year following the introduction of the Disability Reform Package. In recent years, this growth slowed to a rate of around 4% each year but has increased again in 2001-02 to 5.6%. The proportion of females is also increasing and females now represent 38% of the total DSP population.
Over 88,000 claims for DSP were granted in the 2001-02 financial year and over 42,000 claims were rejected (32.5% of total claims processed). Lack of medical eligibility was the main reason for rejecting a claim for DSP.
Over half of people coming onto Disability Support Pension are coming from other income support payments with the main payments being Newstart of Youth Allowance (37%), Parenting Payments (5%) and Sickness Allowance (4%). 44% were not previously in receipt of another Centrelink payment.
This report was prepared by the Disability Payments Section, Office of Disability.