Round and round and round it goes, and who qualifies as 'needy' nobody quite knows

IT'S raining flood relief, but is the money getting to those who deserve it, and who cares anyway?

Human Services Minister Tanya Plibersek interviewed by Ray Hadley on Radio 2GB yesterday on who is eligible for flood relief:

HADLEY: I'm talking about specifically people who were on a property that doesn't get inundated, doesn't get flooded, and they are 3km from the shop, and 2 1/2km down the road the road is cut for a period of 24 hours. So please don't mix it up. If you're going to do cross checks and balances, those people should not be getting the same, it's insulting to give them the same, as some poor bugger who's climbed out his window to get on his roof, because that means his house has gone as well.

Plibersek: At the moment we've had around 400,000 people affected in Queensland and the vast majority of people really need this support.

Hadley: Out of the 400,000, how many do you know for sure simply were stranded in their principal place of residence and not their roof?

Plibersek: The vast majority have been really seriously affected.

Hadley: I'm asking the question. You still haven't answered it. Don't worry about the vast majority. How many of the 400,000 fall into the category of the people illustrated to me. Their only problem was they couldn't get to the shop for 24 hours. No water, no roof, no loss of furniture, no threat to their lives. How many out of the 400,000? If you don't know, tell me.

Plibersek: There'd be a lot of people who'd go into a lot of these criteria. So there'd be some people who were stranded for 24 hours and had no electricity for more than 48 hours and have had their principal place of residence destroyed. There's no way you can pick out just one [criterion]. A lot of people have suffered a range of the reasons that they're eligible for the grant.

Low-life. The Herald Sun newspaper yesterday:

AUSTRALIANS who claimed emergency aid for flood victims when all they suffered was a power outage are "low-lifes", Treasurer Wayne Swan has said. Centrelink payments of $1000 for adults and $400 for children were available to people without means testing, even if the only ill-effect the disaster had on them was 48 hours without power. Mr Swan told ABC radio this morning that such people disgusted him. "If there are people who have been eligible for the levy but haven't required it and have gone in and claimed it, I think they are simply low-life," he said. "People may face all sorts of extraordinary circumstances, they may not have personal identification. If we were to get really bureaucratic, with really rigid rules in the first 48 hours or so, then we would be having an entirely different discussion about how we were too rigid and weren't paying people who were in dire need."

No life. The Daily Telegraph, May 28, 2009:

THE Rudd government has wasted $40 million by paying the $900 tax bonus to 16,000 dead people and 27,000 expats living overseas. The revelations will rock the government's efforts to sell its $42 billion stimulus package as a nation-building scheme. And the Australian [Taxation] Office said the level of payments to the dead is likely to go beyond the $14m so far issued to deceased estates . . . Despite racking up more than $300bn in debt, the government is sending about $25m in bonus payments to people living overseas. Even non-Australians who worked here for at least six months -- but then disappeared offshore -- have received the cash.

Life's lessons. The Australian, June 12, 2009:

SCHOOLS slated for demolition are being showered with federal funding to spruce up their facilities through the Rudd government's education stimulus spending. At least 21 schools marked for closure have been handed a slice of the $14.7bn Building the Education Revolution program . . . The revelation of grants to schools set for closure shows the federal government is effectively handing millions of dollars in taxpayers' money to "dead" schools, in the same way it paid economic stimulus cheques to dead people's estates earlier this year.

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