Sophie Reid-Singer has a doctorate in visual arts, but pursuing this passion is no longer her life goal.
"I can make as many empowering artworks as I want for the rest of my life, but until the law is changed, I'm going to continue to be discriminated against," the 26-year-old said.
Dr Reid-Singer was diagnosed with a congenital bone disease called spondylometaphseal dysplasia, Kozlowski type, at two years old.
"My main barriers are chronic pain and fatigue," she said.
It took her seven years to access the Disability Support Pension (DSP) through what she described as a "dehumanising" and "degrading" process.
Her experience spurred her to write a human rights complaint to Centrelink, branding it a "barrier affecting disabled people".
Disability advocate and lawyer Natalie Wade says Australia's Social Security Act must be changed "to reflect the human rights of people with disability".
"The process in which they must go through to be able to access the Disability Support Pension, albeit quite often unsuccessfully, is quite a severe and not inclusive approach," she said.
Leaving home, starting study and work
Dr Reid-Singer grew up in Emerald in central Queensland and moved to Brisbane in 2014 to complete a fine arts degree, majoring in interdisciplinary drawing.
She sought welfare to study and live independently, but Dr Reid-Singer said she was ineligible for the DSP and rejected by the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) twice.
"When I was 18, I applied to the DSP and they rejected me. They said, 'No, it's not severe enough' and I just thought, 'Stop telling me about my capacity like I'm not in the room'," she said.
"The NDIS made me prove I could not be cured to access it."
Dr Reid-Singer received a partial payment of Youth Allowance until she took up part-time animation work.
She left the job to pursue her Doctor of Visual Arts and lived on a scholarship and family support.
"Fittingly, I wrote my doctorate on why these barriers to welfare are inappropriate," Dr Reid-Singer said.
People with disability on JobSeeker
The latest Department of Social Services statistics, released in June, showed 831,601 Australians were on JobSeeker and of those 43.1 per cent were sick or had disability.
In 2012, the Gillard government introduced impairment tables to remove people from the DSP based on perceived work capacity.
September 2013 data showed 825,238 people on the DSP compared to 764,967 this year.
A department spokesperson said the DSP was "not designed to be a basic income for all people with disability".
"Many people with disability are able to work", the spokesperson says, and may be able to access JobSeeker.
Ms Reid-Singer retrieved her DSP assessment outcomes through a Freedom of Information request.
"I was excluded because I can stand up from a seated position," she said.
Ms Reid-Singer said the job capacity assessments were "a hate crime".
"The impairment tables used to grade my body 35 points are dehumanising," she said.
"I'm depressed because of these assessments. It's too much."
The department spokesperson said it was reviewing the tables, due to expire in April next year, in consultation "with disability peak bodies, advocacy groups, medical professionals and people with lived experience of the DSP process".
Public consultation is open on proposed changes to the impairment tables and will close on November 11.
Ms Reid-Singer's application for the DSP was approved in August after an initial rejection and more than 30 complaints to Centrelink.
"These systems are just in place to get people off the Disability Support Pension," she said.
"It should be supporting me and it should have been supporting me since I was 18, and I'm 26 now."
A human rights complaint
A senate Community Affairs Reference Committee looked at the "purpose, intent and adequacy of the Disability Support Pension" and released its report in February.
It has made 30 recommendations including that the government "undertakes consultation and evaluation" of the DSP "to align it more closely with the social model of disability".
Last month, committee chair Senator Janet Rice read Dr Reid-Singer's complaint to the senate and called for the implementation of the recommendations.
The DSS spokesperson said it was "considering" the report and would "provide a response in due course".
Natalie Wade, Equality Lawyers' principal lawyer, said the government had not discussed reform enough to make her confident that it was a priority.
"That needs to change," she said.
Ms Wade says for people with disability, the current system and inaccessibility of the DSP is "a violation of their fundamental human rights", blocking their "access to food, water, shelter, clothing and housing".
"It leaves people with disability behind in a way that is not consistent with our expectations of how people, in 2022, should be treated or should be living," she said.
Studying law
Ms Reid-Singer has put her experimental animation career on hold and has moved to Melbourne to pursue a law degree.
"My lifetime goal is to amend the Disability Discrimination Act to say that disability is an interaction between personal environmental factors because that's how the UN defines it," she said.
"At present, Australia does not define disability in any other way than loss or damage or incapacity."
