House Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations, Skills and Training - Melbourne, VIC (part 2 of 2)
1 May 2026
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House Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations, Skills and Training Australian Parliament
00:00 - 01:20
Speaker 3
To face when trying to access the disability support pension. It relates to the eligibility requirements. We can provide a copy of that submission to the committee as part of supplementary information. There's also challenges with job job seeker in terms of the the mutual obligations requirements, which can be quite challenging for for people with with cancer who just aren't able to to meet those because they're they're inactive treatment or because of the side effects of their treatment. So that makes access to that quite difficult as well.
And we have undertaken some research within Victoria of people's experiences in in terms of legal challenges and financial challenges and in the workplace, and we found very low rates of of people being able to access government financial support. And the reasons are largely that the processes and eligibility are very rigid and complex and time consuming, and some people just don't have the time and energy to go through that rigmarole when they're dealing with something as serious and is impacting them in so many ways the way that cancer does.
01:20 - 01:48
And we heard through some discussions focused on parental leave and that there were some issues around no safe job leave, no safe job to return to. How does that affect people with chronic issues or acute issues with low immune systems and complex you've got a question we've the
01:48 - 02:57
Speaker 3
the Well, my understanding is that there there is no clear explicit requirement around employers having to have return to work programs in place. And certainly, our research in Victoria shows that that is not happening consistently. In fact, in our research, we found that only about ten percent of people who responded to our surveys that included people diagnosed with cancers as well as people caring for someone with cancer that only about ten percent of survey respondents reported that their employer had a structured return to work programs in place. And similarly, about ten to twelve percent of people reported having regular check ins with their managers and the HR team, which is very low. So we would we would strongly encourage that the NESB reform to have obligations around structured return to work.
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