Purpose and function of unsustainable NDIS must be reassessed

It is evident to anyone with an ear to the ground that the range of supposed disabilities covered by the NDIS’s current activities grossly exceeds its original intended purpose.

Even on its reduced target of 8 per cent growth it is economically unsustainable.

In the most questionable area of NDIS activities, relating to learning difficulties and minor degrees of autism, one wonders why the numbers seem to have exploded over the past several decades and whether some old-fashioned, explicit, evidence- based teaching methods might not be the simple solution to the problem. The expectation that simply sidelining this area of the NDIS activity to a parallel organisation will ameliorate the problem and control expenditure is doomed to failure.

At a time when there is general agreement that defence expenditure needs to be increased, and the question is being frequently asked as to where the money will come from, a fundamental reassessment of the NDIS, its initially intended function and the obvious aberrations thereof that have since occurred is surely imperative at this juncture.

Bill Pannell, Dalkeith, WA

“Fixing” the NDIS will take much more than shifting children diagnosed with autism on to another program, which may not start immediately and which may be just as expensive.

The NDIS continues to be ripped off by some unscrupulous providers who must think they have found the goose that laid the golden egg.

Susan Dornan, Beecroft, NSW

Easy game for Putin

Of the recent Putin-Trump meeting, Greg Sheridan writes that Putin “has a bizarre ability to bewitch American presidents” (“Cunning Putin will wipe smiles off faces of the credulous”, 20/8).

Indeed, Putin has an armoured, Teflon-like quality, and an apparent charisma, of steely, ruthless and effective “diplomacy” that, no matter how abhorrent his actions, enable him to nimbly navigate political terrain and manoeuvre world leaders, in a furthering of his goals.

While Trump may, as Sheridan says, be “playing some version of four-dimensional chess”, for Putin – who successfully ascended the dangerous ranks of the KGB and then the treacherous hierarchy of Russia’s political and oligarch system, not merely surviving it, but thus far shaping it to work in his interests – playing “chess” with American presidents may be more akin to tiddlywinks. For the pieces being moved, the repercussions are far more grave than in any game.

Deborah Morrison, Malvern East, Vic

Energy cost ignored

Judith Sloan correctly describes the Albanese Labor government’s Economic Reform Roundtable as a pointless exercise (“No competition here: Day 1 of talkfest was less than productive”, 20/8).

If business investors were expecting attendees to raise the direct connection between the government’s massively subsidised green energy transition and the nation’s appallingly low productivity rate, they were mistaken. If manufacturers assumed alarm would be expressed over their industries having reached a tipping point with energy costs that are no longer just too high, but unsustainable, they assumed wrong.

If families and small businesses were hoping someone sitting at that roundtable would highlight the onerous electricity bills they are forced to bear as a direct result of Labor’s renewable energy rollout, their hopes were dashed. Cheap, secure, reliable energy underpins our productivity, our manufacturing industries, our jobs and our standard of living.

Energy isn’t part of the economy, it is the economy, and ought to be at the top of the agenda at the Economic Reform Roundtable.

Dale Ellis, Innisfail, Qld

The Australian Energy Market Operator seems to have conditionally endorsed the government’s target of 82 per cent renewables by 2030, claiming reliability can be met through a mix of renewables, storage, transmission, and consumer resources (“Energy pipeline fine if delivered on time”, 21/8).

But this must be questioned on a technical level. The plan assumes that storage facilities, mainly batteries, will keep the grid running when renewables are not producing electricity.

Yet if these batteries are charged by weather-dependent renewables, then they too become weather-dependent. This violates a basic engineering principle: a backup system that relies on the very system that failed can never be considered reliable.

Before chasing targets, policymakers must respect engineering realities. We would never step into an aircraft where the backup system was dependent on the same component that might fail. Why should we accept lower standards for our electricity grid, the backbone of modern life and industry?

Don McMillan, Paddington, Qld