After the horrendous discrimination event that David endured some time back, it's been a long road of recovery for his mental health. He hasn't been able to work since, however he decided to take a HECS thingo and further qualify himself in nursing so as to be in a position of authority when and if he does return to work.
He was to start the middle of this year, but the books were about $1,000 for the course and so he had to put the start off until beginning of 2017. Didn't get around to getting the Pensioner Education Supplement for that reason. But when he does get paid it it's a small amount of money on top of his Carers Payment pension to help with expenses going to uni, like books for example.
Now I read that the Pensioner Education Supplement is one of the things in the Turnbull $6billion welfare chopping block. Whether these cuts get through the senate or not remains to be seen, but I don't understand why chopping to the bare bones of pensioners is an option at all. Particularly given the recent push for a near $200million plebiscite to fund the christian haters to tell us how fucked up David and I are.
The government, supported by One Nation, Day and Leyonhjelm, want to cut a further $6 billion from welfare payments including:
$2.9 billion in Family Tax Benefit end-of -year supplements the government still was to abolish; $1.3 billion carbon tax compensation for future welfare recipients; $1.2 billion by stopping the “double dipping” of paid parental leave; and $600 million in assorted measures including freezing eligibility thresholds, ending a pensioners education supplement and making dole recipients wait a period before receiving payments.
We must be in dire straits if you would choose this most vulnerable group of people to find savings.
Perhaps to deflect attention from this, the government reannounced $100 million in funding for a domestic violence package. We are apparently expected to ignore the fact that they have announced this same money before, and that it falls way short of the funding they have already stripped from this area.
As Rosie Batty mentioned on the Drum last night, it is amazing how the government could find a lazy $200 million for an unnecessary marriage equality plebiscite, but can only scrape together $100 million to address domestic violence which kills so many people and destroys the lives of so many more.
They seem to have plenty of money to waste when it suits them. The AIM
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