the bean counters really have Australian society by the short and curlies: instead of fearfully trying to work out the cost and how to fund it, why don't we think big and anticipate future unexpected gains and surprises? If more Australians stopped living in an atmosphere of scarcity and instead try to live in an atmosphere of abundance, creativity could be better used and inventions developed that could revolutionise the way the world lives. wasn't that some of the rationale for medibank originally? a shame it didn't go all the way to include dental, optical, psychological, and disability. Just remember the achievements of our wonderful paralympians - we could all do with their winning attitudes.

I’m not sure a NDIS will help. It’s not clear that we’re asking the right questions.

People with a disability aren’t typically dysfunctional. They’re often ‘below average’ in productivity, but not inherently helpless. As someone with a fair few years experience in Disability Services, I know that most of the people I worked with didn’t define themselves as ‘disabled’. Like the rest of us, they have skills, ambitions, goals, hopes. There’s room for them in our society ... if we’re willing to accommodate difference. By and large, we’re not.

If you’re capable of work, but owing to disability you can only produce widgets 60% as fast as an able-bodied teenager, there’s no room for you on the widget assembly line. Hard-pressed small businessmen can’t pay you less because you’re less productive. Government will pay you to stay at home, but they won’t help make it economical for private industry to employ you. OHS may be an issue, but while government will hammer an employer if there’s an accident, they won’t help at all with workplace modifications. Unions and bureaucrats won’t countenance job modifications to accommodate people with a disability.

NGOs exist to support people with a disability in open employment, and they do so efficiently. The government bureaucracies which award and manage NGOs under contract, however, are vastly better funded than the people actually doing the work. ‘Public servants’ earn three times what disability support specialists can expect. Government ‘overheads’ cost many times what’s spent on people with a disability.

NGOs also provide so-called ‘sheltered’ workshops for people with a disability, but these have to compete with private enterprise. They tender for contracts on the same basis as any other business, despite their much higher overheads and lower employee productivity. No special deal for the disabled.

There’s a ‘Supported Wage System’ for people with a disability, but it’s inflexible, costly, and far too complex to be effective in most cases.

People with a disability need to be valued for what the CAN do, not compensated for what they CAN’T do. A NDIS will fund bureaucracy, not establish equity.

“A NDIS will fund bureaucracy, not establish equity.”

A point partly well made by donkeydog but completely ignored by Jessica Malnersic ... who studies at the University of New South Wales, is a member of the New South Wales Young Labor Executive yet cannot even provide accurate statistics of the number of people with various levels of disability across Australia nor the number of unpaid family carers who provide 93% of their accommodation and personal support needs on poverty-level government ‘benefits’.

Many of these selfless individuals and those for whom they care form part of the socially and economically marginalised Underclass in this, our ‘Rich Country’!

Citing the fate of a proposed Flood Levy to assist victims of the Queensland Floods, Ms Malnersic presumptuously asserts that “ ... if Australians weren't willing to pay one dollar more a week to help flood victims it seems unlikely that they would be inclined to pull out another 15 dollars to support the NDIS”, concluding, mischievously, that “Funding the NDIS through a tax in this current climate might have an adverse effect on those who seek to benefit from it.”

This is a cynical attempt to manipulate the Australian public ... typical of the power-hungry and callous millionaire ‘leaders’ of the Labor Party and its behind-the-scenes Fabian Society (all part of the ruling Capitalist Class) and the affluent Middle Class Party apparatichiks and would-be future leaders, not to mention their ‘think tank’ spinmeisters cited by Ms Malnersic.

Ms Malnersic has a great deal to learn about the REAL nature of our alleged Christian Democracy.