In Australia Carer Allowance is $144.80 each fortnight. There is no Health Care Card for the person you provide care for. If the care recipient is a child with high needs they do get a Health Care Card. This is the supplement payment if you work or study up to 25 hours/week. Its effectively means tested, if I understand it.
The maximum Carer Payment (for full time care) is $936.80 but with energy supplement and pension supplement that can reach the dizzy heights of $1026.50 per fortnight or $14.66/hr for 35 hours’ work.
If we were to pretend our government policies are an accurate reflection of the desires of the citizenry (which seems like a bold claim!), the term for the gap between saying we value the lives of the disabled and their caregivers while actually requiring them to experience extreme deprivation and treating them like criminals is preference falsification.
From Ribbon Farm: "When people do not express their true preferences, they are deprived of the opportunity to coordinate with each other to create a more preferable outcome for both. Preference falsification is not just a political phenomenon, but a product of our dual nature, experiencing ourselves on the one hand from the privileged first-person perspective, and on the other hand from the imagined perspective of others. Pretending to have different preferences than one really does may be necessary to maintain a sense of safety, social belonging, and status.
People’s expressed, public preferences are a function of both their interior preferences and the perceived acceptability of revealing them; other people’s expressed preferences serve as a guide for measuring acceptability. So people’s expressed preferences are in part a function of other people’s expressed preferences. Under certain circumstances, when the distribution of preferences is right, a domino effect may be begun by a single dissenter, toppling the status quo of preference falsification." https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/
In Australia Carer Allowance is $144.80 each fortnight. There is no Health Care Card for the person you provide care for. If the care recipient is a child with high needs they do get a Health Care Card. This is the supplement payment if you work or study up to 25 hours/week. Its effectively means tested, if I understand it.
The maximum Carer Payment (for full time care) is $936.80 but with energy supplement and pension supplement that can reach the dizzy heights of $1026.50 per fortnight or $14.66/hr for 35 hours’ work.
According to Indeed, the average hourly rate for a Disability Support Worker is $34.99/hr. (https://au.indeed.com/career/disability-support-worker/salaries/Victoria)
National minimum wage is $21.38/hr. (https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages)
Carers Australia commissioned a report guaranteed to provoke rage screaming while reading the executive summary
https://www.carersaustralia.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Final-Economic-impact-income-and-retirement-Evaluate-Report-March-2022.pdf
How many people get carer support? About 1.2% according to this: https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/australias-welfare/disability-support-pension-and-carer-payment
And that’s before you read up on Centrelink’s Robodebt scandal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme
If we were to pretend our government policies are an accurate reflection of the desires of the citizenry (which seems like a bold claim!), the term for the gap between saying we value the lives of the disabled and their caregivers while actually requiring them to experience extreme deprivation and treating them like criminals is preference falsification.
From Ribbon Farm: "When people do not express their true preferences, they are deprived of the opportunity to coordinate with each other to create a more preferable outcome for both. Preference falsification is not just a political phenomenon, but a product of our dual nature, experiencing ourselves on the one hand from the privileged first-person perspective, and on the other hand from the imagined perspective of others. Pretending to have different preferences than one really does may be necessary to maintain a sense of safety, social belonging, and status.
People’s expressed, public preferences are a function of both their interior preferences and the perceived acceptability of revealing them; other people’s expressed preferences serve as a guide for measuring acceptability. So people’s expressed preferences are in part a function of other people’s expressed preferences. Under certain circumstances, when the distribution of preferences is right, a domino effect may be begun by a single dissenter, toppling the status quo of preference falsification." https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/