DSP and Partners

Partner Income Test

Centrelink reduces your payment by 50c for every dollar you earn through work (with some asterisks which are out of scope). What a lot of people don't realise is that if you are in a "domestic partnership" (ie committed live-in relationship), they count your partner's income there too.

Socially, this made sense in the 1970s when the progenitors of these programs were conceived, but it has very little to do with the current reality of how finances in families work.

What is especially cruel is that after a certain amount of time receiving $0 payments, your eligibility is cut entirely, and you need to start from scratch with a new application.

Paying Partners

There are regularly activist efforts to specifically preclude the Disability Pension from the partner asset test, allowing recipients to continue to receive the full rate even when partnered. This is absolutely a straightforward and intuitive manifestation of natural justice and fairness, but it is not very likely to happen any time soon.

While these proposals would address a very real and impactful inequity in the social safety net, they are very unlikely to garner any meaningful traction with policy analysts; taking a mature and predictable system and permanently making it significantly more expensive in ways that can't be fully modelled is simply a difficult proposition at the best of times.

Combine that with the fact that the harms of the current policy are currently mostly silently diffused into the intersectionality of disadvantage and poverty, and you have a proposal that is basically dead in the water with the political class.

By excising one category of payment from the partner test, we now create a gigantic incentive for stay at home partners to prove that they are disabled. The notion of creating a very large class of people who might suddenly be driven to make high-value ongoing claims makes actuaries sweat. The cost of funding Centrelink is currently large but stable.

There is a straightforward compromise we can make which can protect against the worst excesses of our current arrangement with basically zero fiscal downside, though.

Maintain Eligibility

When your payment reaches $0, in part or in whole because of your partner's income, just keep it there. Maintain eligibility permanently but don't pay it out until your partner/financial situation changes.

In other words, the DSP is still there in the background as an insurance measure, ready to spring into action when the relationship ends without further assessment.

This is ultra-high-value for domestic violence cases in particular: it largely eliminates an entire class of coercion against the most vulnerable. Anyone with a lived experience of DV can tell you that having a safety net before it reaches the point of frank coercion and physical violence is absolutely critical.

It also, to be honest, would likely be a net decrease in the amount and cost of administrative work — it decreases the number of unnecessary assessments that happen, decreases the burden of the crises created by people exiting relationships without support, and would singlehandedly eliminate a very common reason for committing fraud in the name of survival.

Prisons

While it's not as politically expedient, the exact same logic applies to people coming out of prison — the payment currently goes to $0 and is similarly cancelled after 2 years. Your disability doesn't magically go away because you're locked up, and having to apply from scratch when you get out is simply making matters unnecessarily harder for this group.

People often come out of prison having lost their homes, with a bunch of defaulted debts, and generally in giant financial trouble. Having a severe and permanent disability on top of that puts someone at giant risk for reoffending and drastically scales the cost of reintegration. Reactivating their DSP in a quick and low-ceremony way would greatly reduce the damage and would be overwhelmingly likely to save money overall.

Quick Aside

The legislation states that DSP is not payable to someone in "psychiatric confinement". This is sometimes a source of confusion, as some will assume that means their payments stop as soon as they are hospitalised. That would be completely counter-productive and practically guarantee that hospitalisation caused more harm than good, given that, absent of family support, the patient would almost certainly mean having no home or possessions to come back to.

"Psychiatric confinement" means forensic or criminal custody under mental health law. There are some edge cases where someone in secure extended inpatient care can end up charged with a crime while inside, then lose their income without a material change of circumstances, but these cases are rare (albeit indefensible).

The Principle

The state should never use temporary circumstances as a justification for permanently destroying someone's support lifeline. The disability did not somehow vanish; in fact, by definition it has already been assessed as lifelong.

We can implement this principle without changing eligibility, rates, or means testing.

This is a powerful and completely painless way to protect our most vulnerable, and has basically no cost.

Checkin

Version: 1

Written: 2026-01-21

Written on: 7.5mg olanzapine since 2025-11-11

Mental health was: poor - estimate 25% brain