Here's Why

Centrelink Mathematics

In late 1998, I was accepted for the Disability Support Pension by Centrelink because of Epstein-Barr Virus on top of Myalgic Encephalomyalitis on top of a permanent back injury.

In July 1999, due to a massive Centrelink mistake, my pension payments were cut off altogether.

In December 2002, Centrelink admitted the mistake and restored my payments.

In October 2003, I was paid arrears for the four years of no payments. Due to a massive Centrelink mistake, the calculations were made with the wrong assumption that I pay zero rent. The insulting consequence of this was to zero out the previous four years entitlements of rent assistance:

assuming rent assistance > $10 per fortnight on average,
1999 to 2002 = 4 x 26 fortnights x rent assistance
= 104 x rent assistance
= some multiple of $1000,

The injury was that zero rent assistance also meant I had to PAY BACK the rent assistance I had already been paid in 2003 and would be paid until the end of that year. I was forced to pay a debt of $2350 to Centrelink.

one year of rent assistance = 26 fortnights x $90 = $2350

I contacted them in writing, by phone, in person, and with the assistance of the offices of Welfare Rights Australia, The Minister for Family and Community Services, and the Federal Ombudsman.

A re-calculation was requested, and I was told the numbers came out the same way when they corrected for my rent assistance to be above zero.

rent assistance > 0
5 x 26 fortnights x rent assistance = 0 !!????

I explained to Centrelink that this was arithmetically impossible unless the rent was still counted as zero. They laughed at me. I appealed, did the rounds of assistance from the Offices of Welfare Rights Australia, Centrelink Customer Relations, and the Federal Ombudsman, and nothing happened for six months. I appealed to the Social Security Appeals Tribunal, who passed it back to Centrelink, who passed it back to the same data entry guy who was repsonsible for the previous mistakes.

I received a phone call in April 2004, that the new recalculations of the mistaken rent assistance are in, and now that they are taking into consideration that I have been entitled to maximum rent assistance from 1999 up to the present day, the repayment to me is calculated to be almost $1700.

I can’t wait to see how they managed to work this one out, and tell me what happened to the rest of 2003’s rent assistance, and all of the previous four years of non-payments!

About the author: Ian Woolf lives in Sydney, has a degree in Applied Physics, worked as a solar astronomer, software engineer, systems programmer, webmaster, Cisco CCNA tutor, Computational Theory lecturer, and subject coordinator; while changing his career to professional writing and broadcasting. Listen to Ian on the Discovery science show on radio 2SER 107.3Fm Mondays at 9am in Sydney or streaming audio on www.2ser.com, or listen to the Discovery sound archives.