Welfare should not be a deadly weight

THE Coalition should not need reminding that consistency of policy and certainty of outcome are essential to good government. The damaging record of the incompetent Gillard Labor-Green-independent government and the dysfunctional ego-driven Rudd government are still fresh in the memory of most adult Australians.

Hypocritically, Opposition Leader Bill Shorten continues to run a massive scare campaign about the Abbott government’s first Budget, and Greens leader Christine Milne and her juvenile sidekick Sarah Hanson-Young are still barracking for the restoration of lethal border protection policies. That’s the sort of consistency the lazy Left likes from its politicians. Those who appreciate the appalling magnitude of the debt legacy of the past six years of wilful ineptitude don’t want to see any repetition of the sort of atrocious policy decisions that slammed the live cattle trade and killed work prospects for Aboriginal Australians across northern Australia. They don’t want to see the same sort of knee-jerk responses to issues, responses that unfailingly crippled prospects for the most vulnerable in our society. Yet the Coalition’s embrace of former prime minister Julia Gillard’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) thought-bubble, which had its first anniversary this week, has the potential to damage those it was intended to help. Despite Shorten’s false claims, the May Budget restored $44.9 million to the NDIS which the previous government ripped out when they incorrectly applied an increased efficiency dividend to funded support under the NDIS. As well-intentioned as the Coalition may be with its embrace of the NDIS, there is a very real risk the creation of a big new government department to help the disabled will kill off current private sector initiatives and stifle the desire of those being cared for under existing schemes to remain as independent of government as they can be. Surely that should be the goal of all those who are capable of making decisions affecting their ongoing welfare? The big driver of the NDIS was the August 2011 Productivity Commission report into Disability Care and Support. Its two principal recommendations were for the establishment of the NDIS and (largely overlooked now) for a National Injury Insurance Scheme (NIIS) with a review in 2020 to look at the possibility of a merger of the two schemes. The commission’s end game was something looking remarkably similar to the New Zealand Accident Compensation Scheme. However the commission paid woefully scant attention to the egregious failures of the New Zealand scheme over four decades. That scheme has been commercially bankrupt for most of its life, with massive funding rescues required from New Zealand taxpayers, all in lock step with multiple reductions in benefits to scheme participants. Self-determination and dignity are gutted by a heaving bureaucratic, parsimonious and paternalistic scheme in which all rights to recover damages at common law are excluded. When Gillard announced the roll-out of the NDIS, she linked it to the NIIS and told the states they needed to implement such a scheme. NSW moved to make its workers compensation scheme narrower, South Australia made changes to its compulsory third party motor vehicle insurance scheme and other states have also looked to make changes to their motor vehicle and workers compensation schemes. The dangerous unintended consequence of the drive toward the NDIS, however, has been the drop-off in the number of people who have renewed their personal insurance or not taken out insurance, trusting big government to pick up the bill. This is not unlike people in bushfire-prone areas not taking out insurance on the assumption government will always be there to help them should they suffer catastrophic loss. Under the current three-pillar system catering for the disabled there is a social safety net (Medicare, Centrelink), a compensation scheme (negligence law, common law lump sums or statutory periodic payments) and personal insurance (totally and permanently disabled, income protection). The system provides a safety net — not a safety couch. Labor and the Greens are the parties which in office make extravagant promises of safety couches — always unfunded — not the Coalition. The Coalition’s supporters believe in more personal responsibility, not less. They believe individuals have obligations, not that their obligations are hand-balled to big government. The Coalition shouldn’t be treating all potential NDIS participants as if they are incapable of knowing their own minds. Most want to retain control of their lives, not let a new government department take over. Few people, disabled or not, want to be on the government drip, placing control of their lives in the hands of anonymous bureaucrats and functionaries. The New Zealand experience demonstrates brilliantly the folly of fundamentally shifting responsibility for some forms of conduct from those who have a capacity to privately insure to the public purse. We should sustainably level up by improving the quality of the safety net for those with disabilities, but such a fundamental shift to the public purse is unaffordable now, and that will very quickly become more pronounced as the demographic tsunami of baby boomers hits our health and aged care sectors. They want to make their own choices in a competitive market, not to be consumed by a massive and impersonal bureaucracy. They want to retain the dignity that comes with a semblance of personal responsibility. As the Coalition often boasts that the private sector is best-placed to deliver services, not government, why is it not applying that principle to the disabled along with all other Australians? LAMBIE'S BOGAN VIEW OF WOMEN SOME Tasmanians are the “most bogan of bogans”, according to Bertrand Cadart, mayor of Tasmanian community of Glamorgan-Spring Bay, which covers the east coast town of Triabunna. He has been lambasted for his harsh critique, in which he said the extremes in Tasmania’s population extend “from the most bogan of bogans to green pains in the arse”. He need not have apologised. He accurately summed up one of the problems which burdens the mendicant state. New PUP senator Jacqui Lambie probably sits at the most bogan end of the spectrum. Yesterday, the former Australian Army corporal told the ABC that Prime Minister Tony Abbott (who she has never met) was a “political psychopath”. She said Abbott exposed his daughters to danger by permitting them to be photographed before the 2013 election. What finished it off with him was how in the last election he was parading his daughters around,” Ms Lambie said. “I’ll be honest with that because it’s a security issue. That really bothers me that you’ve got those pretty young girls running around in front of the camera, and I just thought, is your political career more important than your own daughters’ security?” Whether she considered that the three Abbott women are all vibrant and independent-minded individuals perfectly capable of making their own decisions about whether they wished to show their support for their father — and was aware how fiercely Abbott shielded his family from the sort of self-serving publicity manipulated by both former Labor prime ministers Rudd and Gillard — is worth pondering. Or does Lambie think young women should be dictated to by their parents or hidden away from public view. Lambie was in Canberra attending the so-called senate school, the induction classes to help new senators understand how parliament functions before they are officially sworn in on Monday. If she pays close attention, she may learn that young women on mainland Australia are encouraged to exercise freedoms that may not be yet apparent to their bogan sisters in Tasmania.