Gay pension threat
Two elderly gay men were told their Centrelink pensions would be cut as part of the new same-sex reforms because they can’t prove they aren’t in a relationship.
The pair, who were once in a relationship, now don’t know what to do because there is no legal means for gay divorce.
Mike, 65, has been caring for his former partner Russ, 63, since a surgical procedure went wrong four years ago, and has acted on his behalf when dealing with his Centrelink disability pension.
I told them we were going to be leaving the country for three weeks and Centrelink was asking me if we were legally married and said we’re going to lose the single person rate, Mike told Sydney Star Observer.
Do I have to prove I’m not in a relationship? If you can’t legally marry, you can’t legally divorce.
Eight years ago Mike sponsored Russ as his interdependent partner to immigrate to Australia from the US, but said the relationship ended after two years.
We were go to the States to see his mother, who isn’t well. He has to tell Centrelink whenever he intends to leave the country.
When I called Centrelink, she said even if you are married overseas or in a de facto relationship with another same-sex person you are now going to lose your single person rate and put on the married couple rate.
A Centrelink spokeswoman told Sydney Star Observer that questions about a possible same-sex relationship were not generally asked of customers, but questions about carer benefits could involve relationship status.
Centrelink has not started registering the relationship status of people in same sex relationships. As with all changes to Social Security Law, we rely on policy details to be provided by the relevant Federal Government Department on whose behalf we deliver payments, she said.
Although the equality reforms recognising same-sex couples has not yet passed the parliament, this year’s federal budget authorised agencies to update their computer systems in preparation.
Mike said it was the first time he’d ever been asked about the nature of his relationship by Centrelink and didn’t know how to prove they were only in a carer relationship.
I sponsored him many years ago, that’s on our record. But the romance is gone. We’re just friends now. There’s no such thing as gay divorce, he said.
We’ve got friends who are little old ladies who moved together for economic reasons. Are they going to have to prove they aren’t in a relationship too?
Mike said he was never told he needed to tell Centrelink or Immigration officials about his relationship break-up because Russ’s citizenship was granted and Centrelink had not previously recognised them as a couple.
On pension forms, Mike had written the pair were carer and friend.
Attempts to clarify how Centrelink will recognise same-sex separations were unsuccessful this week. Further clarification has been sought from Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin.
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Anyone who really wants to know what Centrelink does can read the evidence of the welfare rights centre to the same sex Bill Senate Inquiry, 23/9/08 at
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/legcon_ctte/same_sex_general_law_reform/hearings/index.htm
It ain’t pretty.
‘Marriage’ is one of the last powers that the church has over the state; (education is another.) That is why the Battle of the Bridal Registry is so unlikely to succeed.
Marriage is very much about discrimination is all the other areas we have mentioned; it is about how our relationships are considered by the state.
That is why I say that the other equities could have been won without an insistence on our relationships also being considered in terms of the traditional marriage.
And that in doing so, thousands of welfare dependent glbqti couples that are now in peril might have been spared.
shayne, you’ve erroneously conflated marriage equality with the removal of discrimination from tax, welfare and other such laws. You know this. The latter have been through the federal parliament this year and have more or less passed into law whereas the former is currently not lawful and not supported by either major party.
You claim that “we could have had equal rights without -˜gay marriage.’ Well, yes and no, depending on emphasis.
Yes, because non-marital discrimination can be, is being, and partly has been removed without regard to marriage.
No, because genuine equality includes equal marriage: the free choice of marriage equivalent to that of our hetero counterparts. Your personal disinclination toward same-sex marriage does not magically make the absence of that right any less of an unwarranted deprivation. Taking the mickey out of people who believe or aspire to that right, just because you don’t personally want it, is plain dumb.
At various times in the past I’ve been in receipt of centrelink/ social security payments. I’ve also lived in share houses at the same time. In the past I’ve only had to explain household relationships in regard to female flatmates. This change does at least bring in consistency.
I have also worked for DSS. A de facto relationship in regards to unemployment payments or pensions has never been defined by sexual relationship, but by the interconnectedness of the lives, shared accounts,shared housekeeping costs, shared purchases being the sort of factors looked at. Centrelink do not sniff sheets.
What characterises this case is the way the carer’s pension is now being subsumed by the married pension. After all most adults carers of adults are living together and probably have shared finances and even possessions. It would appear that Centrelink is trying to do away with a separate pension for adult carers of adults. What’s next the married rate for parents of the adult disabled?
Well put Shayne – despite requests from members to join pensioners in the fight for increases, the glitterati ACON executives were the last to act – too busy redecorating their offices, flying off to Mexico and buying new cars! Oh, but they did commence a Thursday soup kitchen in Crown Street! Wankers!
Shayne 7th Nov. You are missing the point. You have the right to have an opinion on marriage by all means though I did find your response distasteful. Beating up on everyone else achieves nothing except resentment. What you don’t and the rest of the community don’t have is the right to have a choice. Hopefully you now see the difference. Please wait till the icing is on the cake before getting started on the crumbs. My apologies, I promise no more on that metaphor. And way to go Jason we do need a set of standardized criteria for everyone from Centrelink. As far as I am aware it is on the way. Lets hope it’s fair. If its not I will be the first one reaching for my local members neck.
Special treatment – that’s what they said about Aboriginal people getting any acknowledgment of the terrible wrongs done to them. About time gays got an apology from the government, the medical system and the church.
Equality has not been fully achieved to date, in that same sex relationships are not recognised in any official government register in most states ie: Civil Unions.
I quite agree Peter. And beyond being able to live more cheaply together, HIV+ couples provide all kinds of support for each other, emotional, practical and otherwise. The consequences of such welfare recipients having to separate to keep their income will be much more significant than many correspondents here have bothered to consider.
Oh, and acon, don’t get me started, LOL, they represent the ineffable arcanum of incompetent nympholepsy, benignly encapsulated within an inchoate autarchy. Can’t put it more kindly than that.
That’s the thing about equality – it means we get to be treated equally to the way heterosexuals are treated.
I’m surprised that there a few people are unable to see the hypocrisy of campaigning for equality when it comes to hospitals, wills, taxes and immigration; yet want special treatment when it comes to pensions.
17 comments wow, surely we can equal gay porn gang! Only 3 more to go.
Show me an opposite sex elderly couple who have spent their lives hiding in terror at the consequences of being themselves when all around them hets have been marrying, and I will start to agree that it is fair to treat elderly people who mostly don’t use words like gay and lesbian about themselves, the same as hets.
If we were having this conversation about Indigenous gays getting some compensation for shit lives no one would disagree, maybe I am wrong, lawd.
Read My People at
http://www.matrixguildvic.org.au
and look at
http://www.asaging.org/lain
and then get back to me.
Not Concerned / Paul – There is a way around gaining legal same-sex marriage without a referendum and thats getting each of the states and territories here in Australia to legalise same-sex marriage like what has happened in Massachusetts in the USA.
worst will be the hiv partnerships where to live together saves money but they will be penalised! just watch ACON run a mile and fail to assist as usual!
Dear Friends
Well we got what we wanted. You have to take the good with the inconvenient. Opposite sex couples cannot get 2 single pensions so why should we. You either want total inclusion in Australian life or not. I agree that with this new legislation changes to the Marriage Act is not only warranted but now legally essential. The problem is that the Marriage Act can only be changed by referendum so I am informed and that means putting it to the Australian Public. Yer well good luck…
Paul
Centrelink needs to set up a system where you sign a statement stating you are not in a sexual relationship, and if you lie to centrelink just to recieve two seperate single pensions when your actually in a relationship then you will be fined and sent to court, maybe even a jail term depending on the circumstances. Centrelink could do regular checks on same-sex couples they suspect are robbing the system as they currently do now with opposite sex couples recieving a pension. I suggest Mike and Russ get some legal advice.
Show me an elderly same sex couple who have been terrified to come out all their lives, have enjoyed no tax breaks or financial advantage connected to being together, have no intention of registering their relationship whatever the blood laws and I will show you ‘equality’ for the farce that it is.
The Federal government has dollars flashing in its eyes and despite expressing ‘concerns’ note that the Ministers are all hiding under their desks when the incompetence of Centrelink staff (supposed to be being ‘trained’ before July, to know how to show some cultural competence with us) is revealed.
Gay couples afraid to register will lose their houses, law or no law – and I thought the laws were eliminating discrimination, clearly not.
The wall that separates the GL generations is mighty big and these laws serve to harden the concrete forever. Our loss. In the US gay advocates work for invisible gay old people being abused every day, here no one does a thing.
Um James, the tissue issues that most of us have had for years involve the basic rights of members of long-term same-sex relationships to visit their partners in hospital – or prison, or to inherit what had been shared for years, or to be included in the same breaks that heterosexual couples enjoy regarding superannuation, taxation, etc etc. Somehow, the marriage thing got stirred into the mix, doubtless through simplistic and popular mainstream media (like the Ellen saga) and the faddist self indulgence of the more well-off glbqti who don’t give a flying fuck about the struggles of the unlucky few…until it all turned sour.
Also, some of us have been saying for years that adding the straighty-potatie ritual of marriage to the list of demands would mean disadvantage for an awful lot of our marginalised. The reponse (ironically from the same people who were so quick to put shit on NMG for taking back the Glamstand from BGF [“what about the poor HIV people”] was as you suggest, ‘you can’t have it both ways,’ and ‘why should glbqti on welfare have it any better than their hetero counterparts?’)
Personally, I think we’re being hung by our own petards, we could have had equal rights without ‘gay marriage.’ For a number of reasons, queers are different to straights; that should not exclude us being equal and nor should it mean we need to act like them.
This is hilarious! People were crying in their Kleenexes for yeras wanting their relationships recognised, and now that they have they are crying even more because they will be treated differently for tax and other purposes. Um, what did you expect?
Yes I agree with David.
I have also heard a story of where a gay man and a straight woman were platonic housemates, and they had to prove to Centrelink that they weren’t in a relationship together.
So this is not a necessary a gay issue, it is an issue surrounding Centrelink procedures.
Now Centrelink may try to discover whether you are in a relationship with any of your housemates, regardless of their gender.
In the past, they only tried to do this when your housemates were of the opposite sex.
Divorce is not the test to prove a defacto relationship doesn’t exist. Heterosexual defacto relationships don’t undergo formal legal divorce when they break up. As other people have pointed out above, there are other tests to show that a defacto relationship no longer exists.
Overall though I do think it perhaps premature of the Centrelink staff to say this to the above elderly men even before legislation has been formally passed and implemented. I would ask them where it is on the Centrelink website – where is the webpage or information sheet – can they send SSO a copy of the directive or email?
They are only leaving the country for 3 weeks – so does Centrelink know something that we don’t know – will we be fully equal in 3 weeks (marriage aside)?
Is this when all the equality measures will be passed and implemented (within 3 weeks time)? Yippee!! :)
AMP: “…and Centrelink was asking me if we were legally married and said we’re going to lose the single person rate…If you can’t legally marry, you can’t legally divorce.
It’s about gay marriage, which is all I hear a lot of gay guys talk about, especially since the results of the Proposition 8 referendum in the States. Two wars, a planet in peril, the worst financial crisis in a century…and all we can obssess about is whether Eleen’s marriage is valid.
But I digress…and I do agree, it is much more complex than appears at face value. For example, I wonder if two straight men living together will have to prove they are “unmarried”? It all becomes a little ridiculous, but I suspect that our welfare agancies are champing at the bit to use these reforms to cut a lot of payments.
Already, there seems to be an ‘ersatz’ review of the the SAS/S special rental subsidy for HIV+. Centrelink is to now base their rental subsidy not on how much the weekly rental is, but how much the recipient’s share is after SAS/S -“ which in turn will affect how much of it the DOH will pay, and so on and so forth with both government departments declaring -˜total independence of each other’s beneficiary system’. This is an entirely new approach and means that if the DOH bases a SAS/S claim on how much Centrelink pays towards rental, but Centrelink bases their rental subsidy on how much a tenant pays after the DOH subsidy …well, you can see that, like the ‘interdependants’ situation, the whole thing becomes totally confused, unreasonable…and the losers are those that are struggling right now to keep their heads above water.
I am beginning to seriously wonder whether pensioners and those over 65 are part of the GLBT community – it is not until we are facing the prospect of having to sell our home to pay for nursing home care because we do not have a ‘relative’ living in the house, that we begin to wonder where our advocates, our GLBT ageing aged care workers and our wide array of community controlled aged care services are – non existent. We are 20 years behind the US and the UK on this, a National shame. Led the way on HIV and now drag the chain on aged care and aged consumer rights.
Shayne- how is this about marriage? These people are being counted as de facto. The whole problem here is that they are being caught in a system which you don’t voluntarily opt in and declare your relationship as in marriage. Or are you saying any state recognition of relationships is anachronistic and misogynist?
Personally I think de facto needs to be revisited for ALL couples and shouldn’t come into effect until there’s a child in the relationship, with opt in civil partnerships available for couples both straight and gay who want to receive government benefits as a couple but don’t want to get married. That of course means baring the responsibilities of having your relationship recognised as well.
“…realize that this is equality and what we want”? Not all of us, David. Personally I think marriage is an anachronistic and mysogenist ritual of homophobic churches, and it seems to me that ‘we’ are seeking acceptance by assimilation. I think we could have sought equity in those areas of law where we were discriminated against without the simplistic need to join the bridal registry at Myers.
I have just had a straight girlfriend moaning about having her sickness pension reduced because she moved in with her boyfriend and no proof required here and no front page story in our local rag. I have also just gone through the process applying for sickness benefits and was surprised when they did not take into account my partners income as I was told Centrelink was not required to recognize same sex couples as yet but would be soon and the process was underway. Incidentally my partner and I went through the process of independent partner immigration. Your partner was recognized as permanent resident and no couple straight or gay needs to notify anyone of a demise in their relationship unless the relationship comes undone before the granting of permanent residency. Sorry boys this is not an issue about being straight or gay but one of equality and good on the two little old ladies, the pension sucks.
I am no legal expert but I would suggest that the process of proving you are not in a relationship is the reverse of the process of what you went through proving your relationship for immigration. If the relationship is genuinely that of a caring one then you can prove this by showing where you divided up your combined assets, moved your money into separate accounts, get stat decs from your friends etc., and present these to Centrelink. I have always found the Centrelink staff really helpful so start by asking them. Also you might like to seek legal advice. But let’s stop moaning about when we can’t have our cake and eat it too and realize that this is equality and what we want.
This is exactly what many GLBTI people worried about in the mad “love right” rush to make same sex relationships legal and/or the same as straight relationships. Many of us warned about this, but no one listened. Well now we have more work to do to get it right.
What we need to do is lobby our government to:
(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] whilst 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 co-sharing a house and the implicit interdependency.
(2) Anyone of pension age at the time the bills become law be free to choose if and when they declare a same sex relationship to Centrelink. In other words, pensioners in same sex relationships be allowed to opt in to the new arrangements at any time without penalty or retrospective adjustment of entitlements.
This is definitely NOT the time to celebrate any wins at all, it is the time to continue the fight to get a fair and equal deal for GLBTI folks. Now – before we grow much older.
As the welfare rights centre says, it is going to be up to elderly couples to prove they are NOT in a relationship so yes the little old ladies can now expect to be hounded, have centrelink conducting third party investigations behind their back into their relationship, and seek to get their stats up by determining that they are a couple.
This is scandalous and deserves exactly the headline it got. Well done SSO, proud to be a subscriber.
The question to ask is how would an opposite sex couple be treated in the exact same situation… where they sponsored an immigrant into the country on a defacto relationship status, then 2 years later broke up but still lived together, and entered into a “carer” relationship… alot of straight couples stay together even when they stop loving each other, both in marriages, and defacto relationships & are also in the same boat. (btw I don’t recall any form of “defacto divorce” for opposite sex couples who break up but stay living together as carers either). It really is a stretch to use a sensationalist headline to describe a complex situation like this that includes immigration issues, that would be tricky for both opposite sex and same sex couples.
Just wait until one needs residential care, then they will want money back AND be taking the family home.
Updating their computer systems – well what a phrase that is.
The nightmare has begun and the Feds are not interested in doing anything but collecting our money as fast as they can.
This should be TOP of the agenda of every organisation and we should be swamping them with angry emails.
The aged care stuff is disgraceful, people who NEVER got one bloody special extra all their lives.
This is where the legislation and “civil unions” will really be tested. Currently for heterosexual de facto relationships Centrelink will put people on the couples rate if they are considered to be living in a “marriage-like relationship”.
From:
http://www.facs.gov.au/guides_acts/ssg/ssguide-2/ssguide-2.2/ssguide-2.2.5/ssguide-2.2.5.10.html
“2.2.5.10 Determining a Marriage-Like Relationship
Factors to consider for investigating marriage-like relationships
The 5 factors to be considered in establishing whether a marriage-like relationship exists are:
financial aspects of the relationship,
nature of the household,
social aspects of the relationship,
presence or absence of a sexual relationship, and
nature of the commitment. ”
Quite clearly in this legislation if you fulfil the above criteria you are in a “marriage-like” relationship.
But the legislation that covers marriages in a separate act expressly forbid same sex couples from having their relationship as being recongnised in any way that is “marriage-like”.
Seems like the government and “civil union”-ists have got themselves into abit of a quandry with this one. They can’t have it both ways in that a gay relationship is “marriage like” in one piece of legislation and not “marriage-like” in another.
Tick tick tick tock. The clock is ticking and our time will come too….