Disability Support Pension - Overview
Who is this Payment for?
From June 2006 Centrelink Disability Support Pension (DSP) is paid to people who are unable to work for at least 15 hours per week, or be re-skilled for such work, within two years because of their 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 16 or over and be under Age Pension age (currently 63.5 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 of at least 15 hours a week, 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 2007, there were 714 156 people receiving DSP, an increase of 0.3 per cent over the June 2006 population of 712 163.
Of the total DSP population 57.8 per cent were male and 42.2 per cent female. The proportion of male recipients numbers have steadily been declining since June 2003; 73.8 per cent of DSP recipients were born in Australia; and, on average, they had been in receipt of an income support payment for 10.2 years.
The DSP population is primarily represented by four main medical conditions which are musculo-skeletal and connective tissue conditions 31.9 per cent, psychological/psychiatric conditions 27.3 per cent, intellectual/learning difficulties, 11.2 per cent and circulatory systems 5.0 per cent.
Since 1982 the DSP population has been steadily increasing, with the greatest growth, of 13.3 per cent, occurring in 1992 following the introduction of the Disability Reform Package (DSP replaced the Invalid Pension and Sheltered Employment Allowance in November 1991). Between 1996 and 2001 the growth rate reduced gradually from 7.5 per cent to 3.6 per cent. It increased to 5.6 per cent in 2002, dropped to 2.2 per cent in 2003 (with the introduction of the AWT Better Assessment and Early Intervention initiative) and increased again in 2004 to 3.5 per cent and 1.4 per cent in 2005. In 2006 the DSP population increased by 0.8 per cent and the growth in the DSP population from June 2006 to June 2007 was 0.3 per cent.
There were 101 642 claims for DSP in 2006-07, with 62 608 grants (61.6 per cent) and 39 034 rejections (38.4 per cent). The main rejection reason was disability short term which accounted for 28.5 per cent of total rejections.
Comparing June 2006 to June 2007 over half of the new DSP recipients came from other income support payments (32.8 per cent from Newstart, 7.3 per cent from Parenting Payments, 2.5 per cent from Youth Allowance and 1.7 per cent from Sickness Allowance), while 45.9 per cent had not been in receipt of an income support payment.
Of the people who were on DSP at June 2006, and had left the payment by June 2007, 53.3 per cent went to Age Pension, 24.1 per cent went off income support payment.
Source of Data
The information contained in this report has been sourced from Centrelink administration data using the Bluebook dataset as at 29 June 2007. If an alternate source for data has been used it will be noted with the relevant table.