With the Government making it difficult for disability pensioners to leave the country for over 28 days, family reunions and other important affairs become difficult. Julie McNeill writes.
THE THRICE ELECTED Member for Blair in our Federal Parliament agreed to meet me. Shayne Neumann knew me for being a former foot soldier of Queensland Labor.
Those heady Kevin 07/NDIS/ALP campaigning weekend market stalls won hearts and minds. It didn’t occur to me people with chronic and disabling mental illnesses like bipolar mood affective disorder were staying on the disability support pension (DSP) and not switching to a National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) plan.
Unless somebody is experiencing mania, we have an invisible illness. It’s been 30 years since I was diagnosed and a long medication experiment before we got it right for me to go on a big emotional and creative jaunt.
I wouldn’t have got to 61 years if I wasn’t conscientious in medication compliance.
I booked my ticket, my Airbnb near the Tower of London. Then my sister phoned from Melbourne. She informed me of the rules to stop disability pensioners being out of the country for more than 28 days or you would be cut off your income!
The rebel in me wanted to kick the Commonwealth or graffiti the MP’s wall a la Banksy. I have not regressed enough. My hand tremor only encourages squiggles.
DSP recipients who remain outside Australia on a temporary absence for more than four weeks in a rolling 12-month period will have their payment stopped.
One consequence of slow adaptation to global warming is no alternative fuel for aeroplanes. In the next five years, global warming will continue to wreak havoc.
Those regular air transports for politicians and their staff will trap them in their home offices planting trees, not logging them.
The insane priorities spur me on to leave now; see Dad at 81 years before he or I die.
I booked my return trip for 12 weeks because I had a special cause; finishing Love in an English Republic or Redcoats. I’ve spent ten years researching my family tree and a 17th-century story I came across in the London parish registers.
Thankfully, I have gleaned the best of the sharing of academic research and writings of the English Civil War.
Something I never thought would capture my interest was military history. School ignored Oliver Cromwell and his parliamentary role in the British Commonwealth.
I found my working-class heroes — great grandparents x 11. There were a few more research sites I wanted to go to and write about. It would aid the imagination, especially when grounded with lithium.
I was looking forward to recording Dad’s old stories for the first and second-generation Queenslanders. Even podcast them.
This trip will most probably be my last chance to visit my aunts, uncles and cousins who I used to babysit. How much had growing up in Australia changed me, too?
Summer in the UK is a feast of re-enacting groups. My goal was to catch the ferry to Dublin from Milford Haven in Wales as did my sexy couple wearing their new Redcoats in 1649.
It’s a scientific fact I have bipolar. I hardly think the Australian taxpayer would even notice that I have borrowed money to take this working holiday, but I know about the extra time and money some politicians have got away with, such as Angus Taylor and his brother's environmental project.
For me, going for longer and Centrelink keep paying into my account would be no change, money-wise. Why did they pick on the poorest and sickest? The beat-up about the disabled living it up in Fiji belies the real story of waste and rip-offs by consultants, Robodebt, nuclear submarines and so on.
It reminds me of the principal at school assembly with a handful of boys who “spoiled it for everybody else”.
Fuming, I cancel my whole dream trip. I know I can’t do it in 28 days. I am on a shorter life-line having bipolar, 67 years the experts say.
- The Disability Pension is my survival and dignity, equal to my aged pensioner husband. What about my health care card to cover the medications I need?
- The regulation of portability has gone from 13 weeks to under four weeks. If I go on my trip of a scholarly lifetime, I will lose my autonomy (the quality or state of being self-governing; especially the right of self-government, self-directing freedom and especially moral independence).
- Back to Shayne, I am attempting to be respectful and listening to what the debate was, their excuses and how I may be excused. I feel wronged. Growing inarticulate.
- He reads me the rule book from his smartphone. He advises me to go and see Dad and come straight back. He doesn’t understand; my old comrade from party meetings has disowned the one thing that kept me sane — my writing handicap.
- The last time I felt stripped of self-worth and so dishonoured by honourable gentlemen, was in a public hospital run by a Roman Catholic board that refused to grant me a Medicare abortion. One novice doctor suggested I didn’t have a conscience!
- How could I connive to get around this patriarchal rule? Its purpose to punish for having a mental illness. Let me loose to poverty and insecurity, and become a charity case?
- If the taxpayers don’t mind the cheating of taxes by corporate and consultant tax cheats, why are they bothered by me going to my birth country before I die?
- Citizen Julie has to account but not the Robodebt conspirators. So I can’t go, it’s sabotage. This is not Advance Australia Fair!
The voice of another Member of Parliament, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough of Wapping, rises from the 1647 Putney Debates on behalf of the Levellers, a radical group that proposed one man, one vote in contrast to only men with property with voting rights. Only they had the most intelligent, literate stake in the country’s interests.
Rainsborough argued:
“The poorest hee... in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee.”
The Puritans of 17th-century Calvinism were big on divine providence. As it was in the first Commonwealth so it shall be to the last, welfare reliance is shameful. I am a failure. Two VIP school friends from years 11 and 12 Facebooked me when I announced an upcoming journey. They would be in London, too, and we must meet up!
Synchronicity excited me; we could meet at the bar of Wombat's Hostel. Two Australians turned an old sailor’s home into a very cool hostel. We are 61 years old now but we feel 21!
And it’s on the very same street as my ancestor!
Thomasine Clark lived and died in 1690, a former soldier in the New Model Army, a drummer for the orders of Lord General Oliver Cromwell who cut off the King’s head and enabled an English Republic. We didn’t learn that at school.
King and Queen visiting is a perk and trigger to my sense of rejection and rebellion, even though I know there are those worse off than me at the Disability Royal Commission.
Do they want us to be or not to be? That is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of bipolar troubles.
The rules for travel were perfect in 2004. Only 13 weeks to manage my affairs of walking the path of cultural heroes and transposing to a book of great inspiration. I had to have the 13 weeks it used to be in 2004.
The best-laid schemes of mice and men
Go oft awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
Shayne could not offer an exemption unless I had to dash over to see Dad buried, not having a lovely time together and catching up on all the missing years and his great-grandchildren.
I suppose commuting to Canberra for 28 days isn’t such a big deal. Australian taxpayers did not want welfare recipients to have recreation at their expense. So can they say the same for all paid employees of the Commonwealth?
Do I have to explain? Didn’t the public service gather the knowledge for the Portability Bill amendment? This indeed was the curse of having a psychiatric condition. As my prescriptions and doctors have improved over time, so have I.
The major insight is how easy it is to lose your mind. For some reason, age brings confidence in managing bipolar so I was going to be able to go back before I got much older and less cognitively strong.
From experience, I know what my limits are when working in the mainstream and the fringe. For years I have had limited stamina, resilience, an uncontrollable need to close my eyes, freeze like the old personal computers. To switch off and recharge.
My itinerary reflects the wisdom of a senior. I couldn’t make Mum’s dying days two years ago being on the poverty line, so I prepared myself to visit Dad before he died.
I’ve spent much time writing about the generational impact of government and church policy as Mum was among the child migrants being shipped by Labor’s Arthur Calwell, the first Minister of Emigration with a mission to breed Catholic families in New South Wales.
The LNP Government didn’t think she was worth compensation for the torture and lack of love she endured. And now I have no autonomy to decide when and how I decide to go outside of Australia and back again. My fate is dependent on rules of containment in my beloved country! I can’t do without it.
Every day I think about where I had planned to be for my epic novel based on the English Republic. Based on a true story.
Warning: some places might trigger epigenetic episodes for which you may need the NHS.
I’ll be armed with Webster-paks in my suitcase. The crippling nature of the disease required a careful experiment over years of anti-depressants and mood stabilisers.
At the time of the travel, I had booked and paid to visit family in their Motherland (England) and ancestral DNA Irish Republic. So my income from my Disability Pension wasn’t cut off. My 60-year life managing bipolar mood disorder depended on stability and security, including the Webster-paks full of keep-me-sane pills. My sister works for whatever they call it now; she said you can’t go, they won’t let you. They’ll dock you at the airports.
I’m only going to see Dad for his 81st birthday. It will be the first time since 1999 and now he’s blind and I’d rather spend quality time with him now because I’m not spending a stack of credit for his funeral.
Shayne was not going to bend the rules no matter the merit of my mission: “I know the majority of taxpayers wouldn't approve.”
Like Indigenous history in Australia, conspicuous facts of this story were mostly absent. My primary school’s motto was ‘Knowledge is power’, in Birmingham’s red brick.
The fact that I grew up surrounded by the battlefield sites where Royalists versus Parliamentarians murdered and maimed each other for ten years was a bolt to my instinctive right for a proper education.
Australian scientists enabled me to track a personal family tree to the parish records of the Tower Hamlets. My DNA had reached Oliver Cromwell’s formation of England’s first national army and both my great-grandparents were participant roundheads.
For want of a bit of flexibility and assurance, I was not going to have fun in Fiji on the way home the legislature for my destiny ruled.
“You have to stick to the rules,” said Shayne. “I advise you to see your Dad and then come back.”
Having an invisible disability is frustrating. I have to explain that every hour of the day I am dealing with a psychiatric condition that requires careful and intuitive management, hence the self-care.
Going to visit my birth family after many years may set off the emotional triggers that could fuel psychosis. It’s not just a visiting-for-Christmas-Day crisis and taking a week or two to recover!
I wear rose-tinted glasses but it is no guarantee for maintaining equilibrium. The long road to recovery from the first psychotic episode was in 1997.
I was admitted to the Barrett B at Wolston Park where the medical staff were kind and understanding. I never want to lose my marbles again, especially in another country (if you have seen the late John Pilger’s documentary, The Dirty War on the NHS, my childhood ally, the NHS has been privatised by stealth and now stalks the corridors of Canberra).
No matter how my plea had merit, Shayne Neumann was sure as a third term MP could be, and a “social conservative” to boot, and said:
‘People on a disability pension with not much chance of finding suitable work... even then, I can tell you the majority of taxpayers would not approve of what you want to do.’
If you take an overseas trip, you can only be paid the disability support pension for up to four weeks in a 12-month period. It doesn’t matter if you make a single trip or multiple trips — if you exceed 28 days overseas in total, you will be cut off.
Prior to January 2015, travellers on the disability support pension could stay overseas for six weeks. That was in line with the rest of the country's citizens who would commonly use long service leave to see family or find a birth mother the Government had kidnapped to keep Australia White.
Before that it was 13 weeks, taking into account we are so far away from anywhere else where we came from. Why this discrimination? It’s the privilege of being in work, isn’t it? Your value is your paid labour.
These social and physical burdens should not make you trapped for life. My working-class family have more than compensated for the mismatched efforts I have tried.
It’s a long way to the UK and it harms my psyche that I have been made a second-class citizen. Where is the parliamentary honourable who will speak sense not spite and self-interest? My internet study of the evolution of Westminster power came to the forefront of my mind in Shayne Neumann’s office.
If ever my book gets published he won’t be launching it. Yes, my revenge, keeping me from my autonomy, breaking my vision.
Julie McNeill has been researching 17th Century Britain and writing a Civil War and Commonwealth story on discovering her great grandparents were Roundheads.
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