Source: The Australian [Patricia Karvelas]

THE nation's 730,000 disability support pensioners are set to receive a boost to their welfare payments, after the Rudd Government admitted yesterday they deserved an increase alongside aged pensioners.

The shift by Family and Community Services Minister Jenny Macklin came as comedian Wendy Harmer, a member of the new National Disability Council, said policy in the sector needed "a kick up the arse".

While the 28-member council's National Disability Strategy is due next year, Ms Macklin said DSP recipients and carers would receive more generous pensions after the Government's review on welfare payments was complete.

Until now, the Government has only talked about aged care pensioners and carers deserving an increase, pending a review being conducted by senior public servant Jeff Harmer.

"This whole area of income support, aged pensioners, people with a disability and carers ... all these issues of income support are critical and are part of the Harmer review," Ms Macklin said.

"There's no question that all of these people, particularly people who are wholly dependent on the single rate of either the aged pension or the disability support pension, are finding it very hard to make ends meet."

The DSP is worth about $546.80 for a single person and $445.88 a head for a couple a fortnight. A record of 731,461 DSP recipients was set last month, up by 8037 since last December.

Speaking in Canberra after the council's first meeting, Ms Harmer said while the issues around mental illness had come a long way, perceptions of disabilities had not. "There is all this sort of terror and fright around the place about disabled people and I would just love to break that down in the same way it's been done in the mental health area," she said.

Ms Macklin said policy would be overhauled and called for "some serious public policy to really put disability and carer issues on the national stage".

Council chairwoman Rhonda Galbally said disability policy needed dramatic change.

"The policy that allows people to live in homes, to live in the community, to get jobs, to be educated fully, to get on transport systems to meet friends out in the community, none of that's there," she said. "This council's job is to really get a whole strategy for Australia for the future that can make having a disability just part of ordinary life."

Council members will meet again in Canberra in October.

The Government's review of the aged pension has so far found that more than half the nation's pensioners earn less than $20 a week in private income, and almost one-third have bank balances of less than $1000. It found that the average duration of the aged pension was 13.1 years and 13per cent of pensioners have no other income to draw on.

A paper by Dr Harmer, secretary of the Department of Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs, confirmed the rate for single pensions was low by international standards.

It found that the pension for singles was 60 per cent of the pension for couples, lower than the average for major OECD countries of 63 per cent.

New funding measures are unlikely to be announced before next year's May budget because Dr Harmer's review will not be completed before February.

Copyright News Limited – used with permission