Leftists love to promote policies that make them feel good and preen their virtue in their lefty echo-chamber. The actual results of their policies – which are almost uniformly disastrous? They couldn’t care less.
The virtue has been signalled. That’s all that matters.
Case in point: Julia Gillard and the NDIS. Gillard preened and promoted herself as the virtuous queen of kindness when she announced the NDIS. How much it was going to cost and who was going to pay for it was anyone’s guess. In fact, it’s obvious that even Gillard knew it was going to be a fiscal disaster, given that she deliberately pushed most of the costs off the balance sheets and years into the future – when she would be nothing but an unpleasant memory to Australian voters.
Lo and behold, the NDIS has turned into one of the most disastrous fiscal black holes this country has ever seen. And, as always happens with socialist fantasies, someone else has to try and pick up the pieces.
I work in a public mental health facility […]
It’s striking that the NDIS has helped transform many of my bleeding-heart co-workers into anti-welfare ideologues.
Because they’re seeing the gold-plated grift at the coalface.
Now costing 30 billion dollars a year, growing at over 10 per cent and destined to overtake Medicare within a decade, the entire initiative is a vampire squid sucking from the country’s budgetary future.
To really add insult to taxpayer’s injury, it’s completely failed at what it was supposed to do. Who could have foreseen that?
It has completely failed one of its core aims, which was to enable more people with a disability to move into the workforce.
When Julia Gillard launched the program, disability advocates went so far as claiming it would pay for itself by promoting improved economic participation.
Such claims, in spite of their appropriate aspiration, have proven to be entirely bogus. Instead it skews incentives for people to be labelled as sick and remain sick.
A friend who worked in a welfare office in Tasmania’s hick north-west used to tell the story of the bloke who fronted the counter, demanding “one of them fucked-in-the-head pensions”. That’s basically the NDIS in a nutshell.
Now, every unemployable grifter is “disabled”.
The nature of the term disability is […] shifting away from physical injuries and towards intellectual disability, behavioural disorder and chronic mental illness […]
Now they can be called disabled and live on the public purse.
And they don’t even have to fill out a list of pretend job applications every fortnight. It’s the sweetest gig imaginable.
Yet the NDIS shamelessly perpetuates the lies: all of its marketing material features people with obvious and severe physical disabilities. Yet, a third of NDIS clients are “on the spectrum”, a diagnosis that has become so broad that it has quadrupled in the past 20 years.
And like in any market, if you pay people to be disabled, more people will be disabled.
In terms of monetary costs of identity politics, the NDIS ranks as one of the most expensive in the world.
The huge dollars sucked up by the NDIS are shifting the rest of the economy to cater for those labelled as sick.
Within a few years, the vanishing pool of working taxpayers will be outnumbered by the “disabled”, or those parasitising off them via the NDIS river of gold.
When I make home visits I see the sheer scale of the worker outlay.
Modest housing commission homes are flooded with staff worthy of a palace, with three and four workers coming in a few times a week mowing the lawn, cooking meals and cleaning the bathroom […]Many kids with autism receive weekly horse-riding and piano lessons in parallel with speech therapy. A portion of this is appropriate, but a great deal is excessive.
Spectator Australia
Bill Shorten, the Igor to Gillard’s Frankenstein, is in charge of the lab, now. He’s pretending to tidy up some of the smashed glassware by launching an “inquiry”, but no one is fooled.
The monster is out of the castle and rampaging through the village, stuffing as much of the villagers’ hard-earned savings into its maw as it can get its cold, dead hands on. And there’s not a torch or pitchfork to be had.
All we peasants can do is knuckle under.