I have a friend who owned a house with a mortgage and her defacto partner came home on day and said I am leaving you. She had to find somewhere else to live. This requires her to pay rent which she cannot afford as she was re-trenched from her job and has a young boy under 4 years of age. So she goes to centrelink and says she needs assistance. Centrelink says to her we can't pay you unless you have left your defacto. She says I can't leave my defacto unless you pay me so I can pay rent. Later on this mind numbing bureacratic bullying of course gets her stressed and she ends up on life support for 3 months fighting pneumonia luckily her employer keeps her recently acquired part time job open for her. She still can't get payments as her defacto has trouble selling their house and she owns half of it so she has assets according to Centrelink.
As a house Dad I could get about $60 a week in parenting payments but I reached my tolerance point of bureacratic bullying when the health care card form reached 17 pages that I had to fill in every 6 months; having a negative geared property deemed as income; having complicated financial affairs that makes the filling out of Centrelink forms a nightmare every 12 months and being told I would have to fill out another form for my old non profit business.
That was about 3 years ago I can't cope with dealing with Centrelink and have been running a part time business that brings in about $60 a week for the last six months now that my twin daughters have reached kindergarden. I also do not get Family B payments each week as that is another nightmare I rather avoid my getting my tax return to work out the payment rather than having to report my income every six weeks to Centrelink.If you have no assets, are single and have no income filling out the forms and getting full payment is a breeze.
Tell me about it. Self employed, with two business structures (one is primary production) and an investment property, filling in any sort of Centrelink form is an absolute nightmare. And what if you underestimate your income, they over pay you and you have to pay it back. We collect FTB A and B in our income tax return, which is a good way of offsetting any income tax that we might actually have to pay them (Our main business structure is a company which employs us as employees, so we pay PAYG Withholding there, meaning most of our income is already taxed before doing the tax return. Even Child Care Benefit is too hard to work out, so i claim that at the end of the year too, and pay full fees a couple of days a week so i can run the office. Sad thing is though that old Kruddy's bonus pyaments won't find their way to us until we do this year's income tax return. I don't actually agree that we should be at all eligble for any sort of welfare, but if they are handing it out I'll have it. Not going to turn it down on principle. People as well off as us shouldn't be eligible though, as a matter of policy. People alot better off than us get alot of money from the govt too, and that sucks too. Sometimes I think I should go into politics. Then I never could start working with idiots (which is what cut short my fruit picking career, thank God!).
S
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