Who cares about carers? Kevin Rudd?

The cries of anguish coming from carers are really about how poorly we are resourced to do the irreplaceable job of family caring. The cries of anguish are about the fact that government should at the very least:

• make the Carer Payment available to all full time carers “means test free and tax free;
• make the Carer Payment what its name says it is: “a payment for caring” by removing the barrier for eligibility for recipients of welfare payments such as age/disability pension etc;
• double the Carer Allowance to $100 a week and insure it grows with the CPI; and
• review the eligibility criteria to ensure that all who care for a person with a severe or profound dependent disability are able to be assisted financially to care.

The right to recognition as family carers and the right to support to carry out that role are as fundamental as the rights voluntary Foster Carers and Kinship Carers have to reasonable recompense for caring. It is so wrong that a kinship or foster-carer can receive up to $30,000 per year “means test free” but parent carers and other home-based carers cannot.

We are paid a pittance for doing the same, or similar, work as foster carers or kinship carers. Often our work includes a lifetime of care for a child, up to and including care until our own death or incapacity. Most of these family carers have never even received the carer’s allowance, let alone a carer payment. If natural parents were given the same level of funding support as foster carers many children with disabilities would remain at home who otherwise go into care when the family breaks under the strain.

The purists in our society will tell you that people with disabilities have a right to supported accommodation in their own homes and you get no argument from this carer on that score.

My question is though; why are carers still providing more than 92 per cent of all the cared accommodation in this nation? Why are more than 706,000 people with a severe or profound disability still languishing on lists of data as potential populations for supported living services? Why are parent carers still caring until they get carted off to a nursing home or die?

Why are we still waiting for disability advocates and others to stand up and say that the exploitation of unpaid family carers is wrong and must be stopped?

I fervently hope that the community will be as outraged as we are at the threat to our miserly carer’s bonuses and raise their voices in protest over such an unfair, uneconomic and precipitous suggestion to penalise family carers. There is no “social vision” in such a callous proposal.