Tribunal rules AGAINST Centrelink
A tribunal has ruled against Centrelink’s decision to cancel an 80-year-old man’s pension and have labelled the move as “absurd and wrong”.
The Administrative Appeals Tribunal criticised Centrelink in a judgement published this week, after the agency cancelled the man’s age pension despite him not having “the capacity to comprehend … a decision to suspend his pension”.
David Fry has advanced dementia and lives in a nursing home, with the tribunal hearing that his son, John, was appointed his legal guardian after David was found driving on the wrong side of the road and deemed to be “mentally incapacitated”.
As a result, John Fry became responsible for liaising with Centrelink on his father’s behalf.
David had been receiving the pension from Centrelink since 2006.
But, his payment was cancelled in May 2018, after John failed to provide updated details for one of David’s superannuation accounts.
The tribunal heard that John was finding it hard to obtain the required information and was unfamiliar both with Centrelink’s processes and his dad’s finances. He called the agency and the pension was reinstated.
However, the payment was once again suspended in September for the same reason, and was totally cancelled in December.
Before the payment was cancelled, Centrelink sent a final letter regarding the issue with David’s super, but sent it to him rather than his son.
The tribunal found that this letter had no legal effect because Centrelink knew David “did not have the mental capacity to be aware of, let alone respond to, the requests”.
Centrelink later wrote to both men to advise them that the pension was cancelled because “we did not receive a reply to the income stream review letter we sent you”.
In his ruling against the agency, tribunal member Roger Maguire said it was “difficult to contemplate a person who might be more vulnerable than a hospitalised septuagenarian suffering from dementia”.
Maguire acknowledged that John failed to comply with the agency’s notices, but noted that it was partly because he had “no knowledge of his father’s financial affairs” and was made his father’s legal guardian “against his father’s will”.
“His father was not forthcoming with information, and this placed him in a situation of particular difficulty,” he said.
Though Centrelink is allowed to suspend or cancel payments if a person fails to comply with notices, the agency does have the ability to obtain information from a person’s financial institution.
In David’s case, Centrelink didn’t seek out that information, cancelling his payment instead.
The agency argued that the decision was “rational and proportionate”, but Maguire found it to be “absurd and wrong”.
Centrelink also argued against paying David for the months where his pension was cancelled - between December 2018 and approximately January 2020 - because the cancellation wasn’t appealed within 13 weeks.
However, the tribunal ruled against Centrelink after finding evidence that John had called the agency three times in October.
Though the reasons for his calls weren’t recorded, Maguire said it was “fairly obvious he wasn’t phoning up to try and organise a golf game”.
Image: Getty Images