It is nine at night and you are standing in the kitchen googling whether the new tablets can be taken with the old ones. You have already done the shower, the dinner, the washing, and the phone call to the pharmacy that took twenty minutes of hold music. Tomorrow you will do all of it again, and on Thursday you will take a day off work you cannot really afford so you can sit in on an appointment. Somewhere in a drawer there is a form you started filling in eight months ago.
Nobody has ever called you a carer. You are just the daughter, or the husband, or the one who lives closest.
Here is the honest answer up front, including the part you might not want to hear. National Carers Week runs from 11 to 17 October this year, the theme is “Care for a carer: Making carers visible”, and none of that will change anything in your kitchen on Monday. There is no payment attached to the week. Recognition is not respite, and a social media post is not a night off. If an awareness week is all that happens, it was just a week.
The good news is that there are three concrete things sitting unclaimed by a very large number of the more than three million Australians doing unpaid care, and all three are available today, not in October. Let's walk through them plainly.
The payments, and why so many carers never claim them
There are two separate Centrelink payments for carers. They do different jobs, the names are confusingly similar, and this is the step that catches people out.
Carer Allowance is a supplement, and it is not means tested against your wage in the way people assume. It is $162.60 each fortnight, paid at a set rate on top of whatever else you receive. Your work income does not affect it at all unless you and your partner together earn $250,000 a year or more. It is not counted as taxable income. The rate is adjusted every 1 January.
Carer Payment is an income support payment, and it is a different thing entirely. It is for people who cannot work much because of the care they provide, and it is paid at pension rates. For a single person that is currently $1,237.70 a fortnight: $1,135.40 basic, plus $88.20 pension supplement, plus $14.10 energy supplement. Services Australia adjusts these every 20 March and 20 September. Unlike Carer Allowance, this one is income and asset tested, and if you or the person you care for are Age Pension age it is taxable.
One thing to be clear on. These are not alternatives. If you qualify for both, you can receive both, and a great many people who are eligible for Carer Allowance never apply because they assume the payment they already looked at and did not qualify for was the only one. If you ruled yourself out once, you may have ruled yourself out of the wrong payment.
There is also a Carer Supplement, paid automatically once a year to people receiving Carer Payment over a period that includes 1 July. You do not claim it separately.
Carer Gateway, and the number most carers have never called
Carer Gateway is the national service for unpaid carers, and the number is 1800 422 737. It is free. It is not a referral into aged care, and you do not need the person you care for to agree to anything before you ring it.
What is actually behind that number:
- Tailored support packages. Practical help organised around your situation rather than a fixed menu.
- Counselling, in person, by phone or online. For you. Not for the person you care for.
- Planned and emergency respite. Including the version that matters most, which is cover for when something happens to you.
- Coaching and online skills courses. Free, and built for people who learned this job by being handed it.
- Peer support groups. Other people doing the same thing, which is worth more than most carers expect.
- Help to make an Emergency Care Plan. A written plan for who steps in if you are hit by a car tomorrow.
When you ring, the thing that gets you help is specifics. Compare what most people say with what actually works.
Weak: “I'm just a bit tired and I thought I'd see what's available.”
Strong: “I haven't had a night off in fourteen months. I'm the only person who knows his medication schedule. I've started taking sick days to cover appointments and I'm running out of them.”
You are not complaining when you say the second one. You are giving an assessor the information they need to classify your situation properly. Nobody is doing you a favour by writing it down.
Respite is not a failure of love
This is the one carers refuse most often, and the refusal is almost always moral rather than practical. Booking respite care feels like admitting you cannot cope, so people hold out until something breaks, and then it is not respite any more, it is a crisis placement made in a hospital corridor by someone who has not slept.
Book it before you need it. Respite that is planned in advance is a different experience, for both of you, from respite arranged in forty-eight hours under duress. The person you care for gets to visit first, meet people, and come home again, which makes the next stay far easier.
Know the difference between the two routes. Respite organised through Carer Gateway is arranged around you, the carer. Respite through the aged care system is arranged around the person you care for, and it is means tested differently. They are not the same door, and ringing the wrong one is why people conclude there is nothing available.
Find out what it costs before you decide you cannot afford it. We have set out what respite actually costs, who pays for which part, and how long you can use it. Most people guess high.
Use the emergency plan even if the emergency is small. A planned four nights so you can go to a wedding counts. It does not have to be a catastrophe to be legitimate.
You don't have to work this out alone
It is a lot. You are doing a job that was never offered to you, that has no hours and no handover, usually alongside paid work and your own family, and you are expected to learn an unfamiliar system in the gaps. If you have been putting off the paperwork for eight months, that is not disorganisation. It is what happens when every spare half hour already has something in it.
So if this week prompts one thing, make it a phone call rather than a sentiment. Ring 1800 422 737 and find out what you are entitled to. It costs nothing and it is not a commitment to anything.
And when the question turns to care at home or respite for the person you look after, having a chat with our team is free to you. It is one-on-one, a real conversation rather than a script, and there is no pressure to decide anything on the spot. We can match you with vetted providers that fit your situation and your area, based on what is actually needed, and never a ranking of who is “best”.
What matters at the end of all this is the person you are doing it for, properly supported, and you with enough left over to be their daughter or their husband again instead of their roster.
This week is called Care for a Carer. You are allowed to be the carer somebody cares for.
Whenever you are ready, today, next week or three months from now, we are here.
