Jin
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Jin is in her late 60s and has an acquired brain injury from an accident in the early 2000s. She was not at fault in the accident and didn’t immediately file a claim for an insurance payout.
‘I just tried to get myself well. I got myself a special chair and a mattress and all the rest of it … At the time I wasn’t aware of all of the injuries that I had.’
Eventually Jin did seek compensation, in what became a 10-year argument with the insurance company. The matter was finally settled in court for an amount Jin was not happy with and felt she did not agree to.
‘My lawyers settled against my instructions,’ she said. ‘They hadn’t done the work and I didn’t know they hadn’t done the work and – yeah … I spent, you know, over a hundred grand, just myself out of my own savings, and ended up with virtually nothing.’
She now has ‘a lot of distrust in the legal profession’ and said her experience with the justice system has been ‘really bad’.
After a fire in her home in the early 2010s, Jin moved to private rental accommodation which she was able to afford because of the subsidy she received from a state government housing agency. In the mid-2010s, the owners ended her lease and she had to move out.
At this time rental accommodation in her city was increasingly hard to find and rents were going up. ‘I was in a very bad situation,’ Jin said.
The housing subsidy scheme required her to find her own accommodation.
‘So they were saying, “You find a place in the private market and we will subsidise it according to the way that we would subside you if you were a housing client.”’
But when she found somewhere and moved into it, it turned out the agency had changed the way it calculated the subsidy. Jin had to pay much more of her Disability Support Pension on rent than she’d anticipated, leaving her with nearly nothing to live on.
Jin felt powerless and bullied in her negotiations with the housing agency.
‘They were just saying, “Well, if you don’t like it we’ll make you homeless,” basically. “We’ll make you responsible for the whole of the rent. You won’t get any subsidy at all if you don’t like our figure.” It was horrible. You know, I – I’d wake up every morning with a pile of bricks on my chest … But there was nothing that I could do.’
Jin could not understand how the agency calculated the subsidy, and it could not or would not explain it to her.
Jin enlisted the support of her local MP and pursued other processes, including a freedom of information application.
At the end of it all she still has no answers, and has further depleted her savings. There is no way for her to appeal the agency’s decision.
‘It’s a pretty serious thing that they’re getting away with,’ Jin told the Royal Commission.
‘Yes. I think that they’ve, sort of, in a way – they’ve sort of robbed me of my savings and of my time. I could have been using all this time that I’ve had to invest in trying to keep a roof over my head … I can’t afford to do anything really, because I know [my savings] will run out soon and I don’t know what I’m going to do then.’
Disclaimer: This is the story of a person who shared their personal experience with the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability through a submission or private session. The names in this story are pseudonyms. The person who shared this experience was not a witness and their account is not evidence. They did not take an oath or affirmation before providing the story. Nothing in this story constitutes a finding of the Royal Commission. Any views expressed are those of the person who shared their experience, not of the Royal Commission.