The rhetoric around the disability support pension at the moment has suggested there are thousands of people receiving it who do not deserve the funds.
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In the lead up to the budget, the federal government talked about a "perverse incentive" for people to get on the disability pension rather than the Newstart payment.
More than 800,000 Australians currently receive the pension, which is about $250 more a fortnight than Newstart.
In the budget itself, the government introduced measures to curb disability pension spending, arguing that the pension already costs more than $16 billion a year and is projected to grow by 27 per cent at the end of the decade.
This included re-assessments for disability pension recipients under 35 - who were assessed under an old regime between 2008 and 2011.
Then there has been recent media reporting about disability support pension "slackers".
But a leading disability advocate argues the problem with the disability pension is not an "explosion" in the number of people on the payment, but the low levels of employment of people with a disability.
National Disability Services chief executive Ken Baker says the disability pension had only grown by 116 people between the end of 2011 and the end of 2013.
Indeed, the government's own graph in the budget papers last week shows that the number of people on DSP fell slightly between 2012 and 2013
"There is no explosion of numbers. There's no need to panic about this problem," Mr Baker says.
Mr Baker argues that attention should be turned to the "real problem" of unemployment rates for people with disabilities.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, as of 2009, about 200,000 people with a disability who were not in the labour force said they could and would work but could not fight an employer willing to give them a job.
About 45 per cent of Australians with a disability live in poverty, compared with the OECD average - as of 2010 - of 22 per cent. And according to the Human Rights Commission, 37 per cent of discrimination complaints in Australia last year related to disability.
Mr Baker says a "concerted" effort is needed to tackle what has been a longstanding problem about the underemployment of people with disability.
He explains that more work is needed to look at employers' resistance to employing people with disability.
"Quite often, they see employing someone with a disability as a risk."
Mr Baker adds that extra focus is needed on the transition from school to work.
"Getting a person into work at that key step in their life can be the difference between decades of employment ... or decades of income support," he said.
"There's such a strong argument to really high investment at that stage because it will really pay off."
On Thursday, Social Services Minister Kevin Andrews told Fairfax Media that the "problem with the DSP" was that it had been a "set and forget payment".
"People have just gone on to the DSP we generally haven't gone back and looked at them again."
He pointed out that in the budget, the government had introduced a new requirements for disability support pension recipients under 35 to have and follow up on a "labour market participation plan".
When asked what the government's role was in creating job opportunities for people with disability, he noted that "governments don't by themselves create jobs".
But he said the government could alert employers of "the changing demographics".
"Businesses are going to have to be much more flexible in terms of the employers they take in the future," he said.
