Equality without punishment or penalty
JO HARRISON
Imagine you are a gay man in your 80s. You have lived through the era when shock treatment, lobotomy, blackmail, sacking from your job, criminal conviction and potentially prison, were all part and parcel of being attracted to the same sex.
You are now living with your same-sex partner at home. He is also in his 80s and is frail and needing community aged care package-related services. You both live on the age pension.
You are not out to anyone, not to your relatives, or to your service providers, who are nice enough, but you are not about to take the risk. After all, the aged care industry has not been forced to protect you, so why would you take the risk when you are more vulnerable than ever.
You attend Mature Age Gays meetings, and that’s just about the only place you can really be yourself. Plenty of others there are just like you.
The Government finally passes the same-sex relationships reforms, including amendments to the Aged Care Act. You don’t list yourself on any register and you do nothing to declare your relationship. You never have and you can’t take the risk of losing the support of family members you know to be very judgmental.
Flash forward five years. Your partner is assessed as needing to go into residential care, a devastating decision, but one you have felt was coming for some time.
You have to fill in the five steps to residential care kit, and be assessed by Centrelink for residential care payments and fees.
The aged care industry is still largely exempt from anti-discrimination legislation and there is research showing that gays in residential care are afraid to assert their rights. There is no GLBT aged care advocacy officer you can call.
Centrelink tell you that if you are not in one of a very tight list of defined relationships to the person going into residential care, your house will be counted in to the assets test, meaning you will have to pay much more in fees and charges, and may even have to sell your home to afford these.
You are between a rock and a hard place. Disclose now and have Centrelink come for five years’ back payment of benefits to two singles rather than a couple, or don’t disclose and lose your house, or at least pay more than others with the same assets and income.
As a community we appear to see these guys as weak, getting their just desserts, appropriately punished or even wanting it both ways as I have been told.
When the time comes and the boomers need nursing homes, what steps will we have taken to ensure that no one is afraid or forced back in the closet?
As members of the group GRAI in Western Australia have suggested, the solution to the problem is not difficult, given the political will. It would involve doing two things:
(1) In regard to aged care accommodation bonds and related financial matters, the family home should be an exempt asset if it remains occupied by any person who has used that home as their principal residence (for a qualifying period) while also being the home of the person going into aged care. This should not depend on the relationship status of the two people but simply reflect the fact of sharing a house and the implicit interdependency.
(2) Anyone of pension age at the time the bills become law should be free to choose if and when they declare a same-sex relationship to Centrelink. In other words, pensioners in same-sex relationships should be allowed to opt in to the new arrangements at any time without penalty or retrospective adjustment of entitlements.
Simple isn’t it.
info: Email the Attorney-General: [email protected]
Minister for Ageing: [email protected] and anyone else you want to and let them know what you think.
info: Jo Harrison is an adjunct lecturer at the University of South Australia. She completed a PhD on GLBTI ageing and aged care in the US and Australia in 2004. She has worked in aged care for over 30 years in Sydney, central Australia and Adelaide.
In your example, you have set the scenario in 2014 (hence the 5yrs backpayments from 2014 back to July 2009 when the couple payments can begin).
Well, who knows what the aged care industry will be like in 2014… by then we could have a bill of rights that gives us equal protection both in aged care, and in private superannuation post-retirement superannuation pensions.
Also, in 2014 maybe poeple might be more comfortable coming out.
Your article also mentions the horror of the choice of “coming out” to Centrelink… well Centrelink keep all information you disclose to them confidential. Nursing homes should also keep thier patients’ information confidential. The couple could disclose, and still remain in the closet to family & friends. Any other suggestion is over-dramatising.
Anyway- defacto recognition should never have been what we got first… for the very reason of the issue of “coming out”. We should have gone after Marriage FIRST, then de-facto recognition MUCH later down the track. That way those who are comfortable coming out could get married, and no de-facto would be forced into recognition.
What we have now is first-class de-facto recognition, and second class (zero) civil marriage recognition.
The (General Law Reform) Bill, 2008 did not include SSCs in the definition of marital status in section (f) under the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, which says de facto spouse (de facto spouse means a member of the opposite sex. This should include SSCs as well – All jurisdictions include SSCs in marital status in section (f) de facto partner or domestic partner (except for South Australia which also says opposite sex as well).
Certainly makes a lot of sense to me. I have always said, ‘No way I’m ever going into a nursing home. I’ll die in my own home thanks.” Come to think of it, how can I be so certain? I have no family in the traditional sense, they disowned me years ago. My mother went to the trouble of declaring in her will that I was “unfit for any for any further consideration”, thus cutting me right down to size.
So, my family is my partner’s family who have for nearly 30 years accepted me as I am warts and all. What if my partner dies before I do and I am unable to care for myself? Sounds like a nursing home scenario to me.
My partner and I made our life decisions all those years ago on the basis of the law as it then stood. That is, our relationship did not exist in law. Now the law has changed, but our circumstances have not. I am not asking for special consideration. All I am asking is to be left alone to live out what years I have left they way we planned.
Well the Equal Treatment (General Law Reform) Bill, 2008 got passed and the government ignored everything conveyed to them about elderly gay and lesbian couples, and for the first time in 15 years they did not protect a vulnerable group from new DSS arrangments by grandfathering those already on the age pension, no they brought in a system that forces gay old people out of the closet – and imposes DSS guidelines about what constitutes a couple, to be assessed by an individual centrelink officer who could be as homophobic as anything, and who gets to decide – and don’t forget sexual relationship is on their list.
Unacceptable, mean and not in the xmas spirit.
Do not OUT gay age pensions, it is reprehensible and breaches human rights charters and privacy regulations.
Tell the Attorney General and Kevin Rudd what you think.