A friend once told me a story overheard in the Burnie Centrelink office. Now, if you know anything about Tasmania, I won’t have to explain Burnie to you. If you don’t, well… imagine Hamilton-by-the-Sea. Now, imagine the local equivalent of the Work and Income office.
As the story goes, one dreary afternoon, a local shuffles into the Burnie Centrelink office, hitches up his tracky-daks, and fronts up to the counter. “Urh, yeah, um, I’d like to see about gettin’ one o’ them, uh, Fucked-in-the-Head pensions.”
One assumes he qualified.
But this incident does raise a serious question: how many people on “disability” benefits have just been conveniently shuffled across from the unemployment benefits queue?
It’s a question New Zealanders might well ponder.
A new Ministry for Disabled People will improve the “broken” disability system and the lives of the one in four New Zealanders who have a disability, the Government says.
Really? One in four New Zealanders are disabled? Odd, last time I looked, you mostly seemed a fairly robust, healthy lot… well, ok… robust, anyway. But, obviously appearances are deceptive: New Zealand is clearly a land of dribbling, shuffling, twitching cripples. Which might explain Jacinda Ardern’s otherwise inexplicable popularity.
Or have we just lowered the bar for “disability” so low that even a land-whale rolling from Pak’n’Save to KFC in a mobility scooter isn’t really a fat bastard, they’re “disabled”?
After all, it no doubt makes life easier for Work and Income drones, if they no longer have to deal with a bunch of unemployed layabouts: just bung ‘em on a disability pension, and, presto! Unemployment is solved!
Even better, it gives the Ardern government a new and creative excuse to waste even more of the money they hoover off the rapidly-diminishing pool of taxpayers.
The new ministry, which will come into existence in July next year, will pull policy together from various ministries. Strengthening the mandate and resourcing of public leadership for the disability community was a Labour 2020 election manifesto commitment.
Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni said on Friday the disability system was “broken and puts too many barriers in place for disabled people and whanau”.
“It [the new ministry] will join up all the supports and services available to disabled people and replace a fragmented system where there is no single agency responsible for driving improved overall outcomes for disabled people,” she said.
Stuff
In other words, gird yourselves for New Zealand’s very own NDIS.
The NDIS — National Disability Insurance Scheme — was the brain-fart of former Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. It’s worked out just about as well as you’d expect a socialist, female Labor PM’s hare-brained scheme would.
Gillard promised that the NDIS would be fully funded by a 0.5% rise in the existing Medicare Levy. Yet, that amounted to less than half of the NDIS’ initial costs. Costs rose from an optimistically-projected $15 billion a year, to $22 billion in 2018. The NDIS is now threatening to cost more than even Medicare, in a few years.
At the same time, the actual operation of the scheme is so dire that it spends $10m a year just on lawyers fighting claims against it. The scheme pays out $4.5m to people whose only “disability” is that they’re fatties.
Still, at least they’re not unemployed anymore.
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