Doing the 'hard yakka' : implications of Australia's workfare policies for disabled people

In Australia, almost 19% of the population has a disability (ABS, 2009) and its prevalence will steadily rise with the increase in life-sustaining interventions and an ageing population (AIHW, 2008). The number of Australians receiving the Disability Support Pension (DSP) has grown substantially. In 1990, there were around 316,000 DSP recipients (Yeend, 2011). By the beginning of 2014 there were about 825,000 (Maley, 2014). The proportion of the working-age population claiming the DSP grew from 4.3% to 5.5% between 1994 and 2012 (Maley, 2014). Increasingly, DSP recipients are women, at 43% in 2008, up from 26% in 1990 (ACOSS, 2011). The current cost of the DSP is around AU$15 billion per annum, representing about 21% of the welfare budget (Ireland, 2014).