I would just love to have genuine people on disability pensions given a lot more money, Peter. Unfortunately, we seem to be sqaundering a lot of our treasure on incoming waves of "refugees" instead of spending it on our own people. I notice that this is a subject which you studiously avoided. One presumes that the reason for that, is that all social workers and their mouthpieces are united in always asking the state for more and more money, without ever asking the hard questions about whether or not the welfare of our own people should take primacy over the welfare of imported foreigners.

Another aspect which you did not mention, Peter, is the degree to which the Australian welfare system is being systematically rorted by armies of professional welfare recipients. The tone of your article demands that the public must simply accept that almost every person on disability pensions deserves it. Sorry Peter old mate. As a person who originally hailed from the wrong side of the tracks, I know that that is not true.

I consider your silence on this matter to be indicative of a person who wishes to ignore the unpleasant truth about what is really happening in social security land, in order to grandstand and moralise to the rest of us. With some 800,000 people on disability pensions out of a country of 21 million, it doesn;t take a Mensa to figure out that something is rotten in the state of the antipodes, even a Densa could figure that out.

So spare me the sermon, Peter. Instead of preaching about how taxpayers to keep shovelling more and more money into the welfare black hole, preach to all of those who are rorting the system to go and get a job. And then you can preach a sermon to the incoming waves of country shopping illegal immigrants. You can tell them that we are short changing our own poor people in order to pay for their unwelcome importation. Then you can tell them to bugger off, because in this country, the welfare of Australians comes first.

Well spotted LEGO, something IS rotten in the state of the antipodes; there ARE far too many bludgers with their greedy snouts in the public feeding trough.

Our already overburdened executive officials in Treasury and Finance, the overworked Productivity Commission and the like are these days beside themselves worrying about just where they are going to find sufficient money to fund the billions of dollars handed over, each and every year, to the over-paid executive employees and wealthy shareholders/owners of huge national and foreign corporations ... (its called corporate welfare!)

The politico-economic power of these same executives is such that they can greedily take millions of dollars of common-wealth money (a raft of taxes extracted from millions of pensioner, working class and middle class families) handed over to them by our executive public servants and collaborative Ministers, in numerous forms of Tax breaks or ‘holidays’, Industry assistance grants and other ‘incentives’ and, days, weeks or months later, shut down their business activities in Australia and transfer operations to low-wage Special Economic Zones in ‘cheap labor’ countries, throwing hundreds of thousands of Australian workers and their families onto the scrapheap of un- and under-employment.

And then there is the largely sacrosanct annual budget for ‘defence spending’... in order to protect Australia or ‘Australian Interests’ against peoples in far-off lands who, prior to our military invasion of their homes and country (in league with our allies from other ‘rich countries’) had most probably never even heard of Australia and would definitely not know where it was!

Your “incoming waves of country shopping illegal immigrants” are former citizens of some of the countries invaded by Australian military forces (and our allies) seeking refuge from the wanton destruction and carnage rained down upon them, in order to keep the oil and other key resources flowing to maintain our wasteful Western lifestyles.