Changes to welfare impacting the disabled are forcing those who genuinely need disability benefits onto Newstart, even though many of them are legitimately disabled to the point where they cannot satisfy the jobsearch requirements and are thus subjected to poverty through no fault of their own. In addition, job capacity assessments conducted by Centrelink are designed to set recipients up to fail by incorrectly assessing them as fit for work, denying them a secondary review and forcing them to seek redress from the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Even if Australia truly is in a budget crisis, cutting off welfare to those who genuinely depend on it is not a viable solution, and can actually damage the economy by reducing the overall purchasing power of the general population. Stop welfare-shaming and restore the Disability Support Pension to those who were denied it!

A similar welfare policy in the UK has resulted in people actually starving to death because they were kicked off the Incapacity Benefit and subsequently unable to satisfy jobsearch requirements. Read about it here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/dec/08/starve-benefit-sanctions-unemployed-hungry-government

It is unacceptably cruel and a violation of the human rights of disabled Australians to force them to a) undergo a gruelling jobsearch process they cannot physically tolerate to find jobs that are either unsuitable or nonexistent, and b) take away money they need to survive simply to satisfy conservative prejudice.

We, the citizen electors of Australia, demand that the Turnbull government rescind this monstrous policy and look for other ways to ameliorate the nation's financial troubles.