Opinion
As woeful a PM as he was, Scott Morrison proved, by losing to Anthony Albanese, that Australia could always elect someone worse. Morrison also had one good political line in him, during an otherwise pathetic election campaign. When Albanese bragged that Labor came up with big ideas, Morrison snapped back that, “And the Liberals always have to figure out how to pay for them”.
Nowhere is that truer than in the millstone Julia Gillard hung around Australians’ necks in perpetuity: the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Anyone with half a brain could see what a fiscal monster the harebrained scheme would become. Sadly, Labor governments can’t boast even half a brain.
Consequently, Gillard claimed, unconvincingly, that it would cost $13.6bn, and support about 460,000 participants with serious and lifelong disabilities. In fact, it now costs $42bn and is growing fast. It’s already the single most expensive program on the government books: more than Medicare and the Age Pension. And it barely got started. The government’s own actuaries estimated that the scheme will cost $125bn within a decade, servicing more than a million leaners.
Including a whole bunch of rapists and paedophiles.
Serial sexual abusers, rapists and paedophiles are receiving substantial support from the National Disability Insurance Scheme, sometimes worth more than $1 million, to live under supervision in the community after their release from detention.
Court records show these potentially dangerous sex offenders, diagnosed with “mild to medium” intellectual disabilities and certain serious mental illnesses, have qualified for top-level NDIS funding support worth hundreds of thousands of dollars and in one case $1.4 million.
These offenders, some of whom are deemed too vulnerable or dangerous to be housed in state-based specialised sex offender facilities after completing prison sentences, are instead receiving some of the NDIS’ most expensive packages.
The Sydney Morning Herald
If they’re too dangerous to be in the community, then why are they even released? It would be far cheaper to keep them in prison.
Where they wouldn’t be able to prey on vulnerable care workers.
Labor has ordered the National Disability Insurance Agency to consider changing protocols to ban participants with a history of violent crimes from self-managing their plans.
The move follows revelations that convicted rapist and NDIS participant Thomas Hofer had been using his taxpayer-funded NDIS plan to seek out “fit” female support workers between the age of 18 and 35, the same demographic he targeted before being jailed.
The Australian
Just how many rapists and pedos are living large on the taxpayer dime is a closely guarded secret.
The National Disability Insurance Agency, which manages the decade-old scheme now worth $42 billion a year, said it did not know how many sex offenders with disabilities received support […]
Many details of how sex offenders are managed are kept from public disclosure due to suppression orders designed to protect the safety and rehabilitation prospects of the criminals involved.
Who cares about the safety of not just the Australian public, but the care workers who have to look after these creeps?
Available court records though, often anonymised and heavily redacted, show high-risk, repeat sex offenders are accessing the disability scheme as part of post-prison supervision plans ordered by judges or implemented by state authorities.
The Sydney Morning Herald
Including some of the very, very, very worst.
One of the country’s worst serial sex offenders, who was involved in the brutal 1980s abduction, rape and murder of Janine Balding, is set to be released from custody with the help of an NDIS support package.
Wayne Wilmot, a remorseless criminal with psychopathic traits who poses a “significant risk” of carrying out further attacks on women, will be freed under tight supervision and electronic monitoring.
The NSW Supreme Court heard he had obtained NDIS support including eight hours of help each week with daily life, and 16 hours of weekly assistance with “economic and community participation” along with access to behaviour and health support professionals.
This is despite past treatment and rehabilitation efforts in prison that had resulted in “no meaningful gains’’ because Wilmot, now aged in his early 50s, has been resistant to help.
Which again begs the question: why is he even being let out?
In the Wilmot case, Justice Helen Wilson noted a forensic psychologist’s report that found he had little or no capacity to regulate his own conduct and had no concern or empathy for others. He felt entitled to “simply take whatever he wants’’ and was “supportive of sexual violence towards women, deeming them to deserve sexual violence depending upon their clothing, level of intoxication, or perceived permissiveness”, the court heard.
The psychologist concluded he was at high risk of committing further violent offences and posed a “well above average” risk of sexual reoffending.
The Australian
And yet, they’re turning him loose on the Australian community.
Wilmot has been in jail for most of his adult life — and he should probably stay there. In the less than two years he was previously set loose, in the late 90s, he committed a string of brutal sexual assaults on women.
Perhaps if judges and bureaucrats who ordered the release of these creeps were forced to share a cell with them after they inevitably re-offend, they wouldn’t be so “compassionate”.