Trish Geidel, who has one lung and cannot leave the house without a mobility scooter, was placed on the lower Newstart payment

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A severely ill woman in her 60s who cannot leave the house without a mobility scooter was wrongly judged as fit for work by Centrelink and denied the disability support pension.

Trish Geidel, of Adelaide, lives with osteoarthritis in her back and knees, a separate spinal problem, and struggles to physically exert herself due to a heart condition and the loss of one of her lungs about 20 years ago.

The 64-year-old has also lived with long-standing depression and said she could not walk much further than the “length of [the] passageway” of the unit she had shared with her husband.

“And I have walked up to the letter box,” she said. “So that’s a little bit further, that’s about 15 feet.”

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But Centrelink rejected her claim for the disability support pension, saying she was fit to work for 15 hours a week. She was instead placed on the lower jobseeker’s payment, Newstart, after the death of her husband in 2017.

“Considering it’s $255 lower that the disability pension, it was extremely hard,” Geidel told Guardian Australia. “I didn’t go anywhere. I didn’t do anything. I just stayed home. As far as food goes, I was eating baked beans, cheese, yoghurt. Just trying to survive really.

“I was getting behind on all these normal bills, which is something that’s never happened to me or my husband. We’ve always prided ourselves on being ahead. I’m glad he wasn’t here to see that happen.”

Disability pension applicants are judged against what are called “impairment tables” that rank whether a condition is mild (five points), moderate (10), severe (20) or extreme (30). A person must attract 20 points to be eligible for the pension.

Successive governments have sought to cut the welfare spend by making it harder for applicants to get onto the disability pension.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Trish Geidel at her home in Findon, Adelaide. Photograph: Kelly Barnes/The Guardian

Centrelink said Geidel’s conditions attracted a total of five points, arguing that some of her conditions were “not fully diagnosed, fully treated, and fully stabilised”.

“The first rejection letter practically destroyed me because I just had so much going on in my heart, in my head,” Geidel said. “It was a real kick in the face.”

Geidel appealed again to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which went on to rule that she attracted 45 points on the impairments table, including “severe” depression, and moderate impairments for her lung and heart conditions and her arthritis.

It noted Geidel had “never worked having been on a wife’s pension, and carer payment since 1984, had a multitude of medical problems, and is only mobile on a mobility scooter”.

“The tribunal considers it unrealistic to believe she has any genuine work capacity in any normal employment or could be trained up to achieve any genuine work capacity,” the tribunal said.

Until that decision, Geidel was among a growing cohort of sick or disabled Australians who receive Newstart because they are unable to get onto the disability support pension.

When Geidel’s disability pension claim was rejected, she was sent to a job service provider.

“They took a look at my health issue problems and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re doing here’,” Geidel told Guardian Australia.

“I said, ‘I don’t know either, but I was just told I had to come’. And she said, ‘You need to go back to Centrelink and talk to them as well’.”

But when she returned to Centrelink, they told her she had to “get on a training program, you have to have to be actively looking for work”, Geidel said.

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The job provider accepted medical certificates which exempted her from job search requirements, but she said the lengthy process was emotionally draining.

“It was pretty bad. It was just me and the three cats here,” she said. “I try to keep a positive attitude because I am a happy, bubbly person when I’m not dealing with [depression]. I thought, ‘I’m not going to go to the dark place, you know’.”

Hank Jongen, a spokesman for the Department of Human Services, said the department was “sorry for any distress caused to Ms Geidel as a result of this process, as this was not our intention”.

“We do not intend to appeal and we have implemented the AAT’s decision,” he said.

“It’s important to note that in roughly 80 per cent of cases in which the AAT has overturned a decision relating to DSP eligibility, the person has supplied additional medical evidence to the AAT or their condition has worsened.”