If Naomi Kilmany falls in love, she’s worried her income will be halved \u2014 or cut off completely.<\/p>\n
Like almost 800,000 Australians, the 24-year-old is on the Disability Support Pension.\u00a0<\/p>\n
She earns the maximum rate of just over $500 a week, which helps her cover things like groceries, medical expenses and rent in a Melbourne share house.<\/p>\n
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Naomi’s Disability Support Pension goes towards her health and living expenses. (Supplied)<\/p>\n
And like so many of her peers, she is also active on dating apps.<\/p>\n
“I really want the opportunity to be happy and find love and to have that be as joyous and light as it should be,” she told triple j Hack<\/a>.<\/p>\n “But I enjoy my independence, I enjoy my freedom and I never really want to be financially dependent on someone [and] risk being controlled \u2026 or have them resent me.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Naomi’s worried about the partner income test, which lowers the amount of welfare someone can receive if their partner earns too much.<\/p>\n She says it “makes disabled people feel really undesirable,” when her health means she “already feels like a burden”.<\/p>\n Now, there’s a campaign to scrap partner income testing altogether.<\/p>\n The calls for disability support pension changes<\/p>\n The Disability Support Pension (DSP) was introduced in 1991 to support people who have a physical, intellectual or psychiatric impairment that prevents them from working more than 15 hours a week.<\/p>\n To get the DSP, applicants have to meet a set of eligibility criteria.<\/p>\n DSP payments are then cut if a recipient’s income \u2014 or their income combined with a partner’s \u2014 goes over a set amount.<\/p>\n Those cuts are 50 cents for every dollar over $218 a fortnight for a single, or $380 combined a fortnight for someone in a couple.<\/p>\n Sophia Redjeb is leading a campaign to scrap partner income testing. (Supplied)<\/p>\n But advocates like Sophia Redjeb say the test is unfair.<\/p>\n Their petition, which has attracted almost 20,000 signatures, is calling for the partner income test to be scrapped altogether.<\/p>\n “Why is the government forcing some of Australia’s most vulnerable to be financially dependent on their partner?” Redjeb says.<\/p>\n “Disabled people are already more likely to experience<\/a> intimate partner violence and have a cost of living that’s higher<\/a> than those without disabilities,” they said.<\/p>\n The 20-year-old isn’t the first to call for change.<\/p>\n In 2021, there was a Senate committee inquiry into the DSP, where advocacy group People with Disability Australia requested the government<\/a> “immediately remove” the partner income test “to restore financial independence for people who rely on the DSP”.<\/p>\n While the committee didn’t include the partner test in its final inquiry report, it did recommend the government reconsider the income test as a whole, and suggested raising the threshold at which payments start being cut.<\/p>\n But the government never responded<\/a> to the inquiry’s 30 recommendations; it didn’t table its official response<\/a> until late last year, when it stated that a “substantive government response [was] no longer appropriate” due to “the passage of time since the report was tabled”.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n