Hi Redneck,I know or know of a lot of dole bludgers.My son ,who has a job,used to tell me about his mates who filled in a section on the dole form straight from the yellow pages.This section asked where you had applied for a job in the previous fortnight.It is far to easy for them to band together, pay a pittance each in rent,get food from charities and spend the rest on drugs,nicotine and alcohol.How do we weed out the legitimatately unemployed from those sort of people.I do know of numerous legitimate cases as i live in a lower class area where their is a lot of govt housing.I must admit that most of the people near me are unemployed because they want to be.Some of the wives have a baby every year and i imagine they live quite well with seven or eight kiddies.The family allowance for that many kids could feed a small nation.Most of these people drive nice cars and own plasma tvs.I must admit their houses are a disgrace.I feel sorry for the aged and infirm because they are the legitimate ones doing it hard.How do we address this problem?

I am afraid, Redneck, that you're miquoting me. I wrote specifically "poor impulse control" not "poor self control". This was partly because I find it an amusing form of words, but mainly because the "self" consists of a lot more than "impulses". I think that "impulse control" is a more useful formulation as it actually describes the issue I was interested in.

As for your spray on "dole bludgers", well, I hope getting that off your chest makes you feel better. For what it's worth, I was a counter officer in the old Department of Social Security in the late-1980s, when the Socialist Government brought in the "Mobile Review Teams" (known by us counter staff derisively as the "Hit Squads") to root out welfare cheats. The teams worked hard, but their miserably poor haul of fraudsters hardly justified the effort (or expense) of the exercise. We used to laugh at the hit squad when the best they could do was find some pensioner who hadn't declared a few days work. Still the whole debacle went down a treat in voter-land, even if you don't remember it.

If all else fails, just blame the Socialists, eh?

Great social reform agenda and discussion here...

http://www.bangthetable.com/topic/focus-attention-on-the-poorest-in-society

worth a look.

Hi Johnj.

I am astonished that you could imply that as a counter officer with the CES, that you consider rampant welfare abuse to be an insignificant problem. I remember that during the 1980’s, an officer of the CES created a stink in the newspapers when he published a book recounting the blatant welfare fraud he saw in his office every day. I remember that he wrote about people routinely charging into the office submitting their dole forms while a truck loaded with ladders and tools sat double parked outside the office with the driver gunning the motor like a getaway car.

But the biggest problem with your story is that there is hardly an Australian anywhere who can not recount a personal experience with people bludging off welfare, and the primary reason why so many dole bludgers get caught is because of the information provided by outraged taxpayers. I see that “Haygirl” provided us with just such a personnel account, which I can relate to because I saw exactly the same behaviour myself.

I even worked as a contractor in a CES office, and I listened in on an interview between a CES officer and a chador clad Muslim girl (with face entirely covered) who claimed she wanted to be a receptionist, but was having no luck. Naturally, the culture sensitive CES officer pretended that her chador was not an issue.

If your “Mobile Review Teams” had little success in finding dole bludgers, I can only conclude that they were not looking very hard, and that they were a product of typical government bureaucratic ineptitude.

As for “blaming Socialists”, you bet I do, and why not? Today’s post Marxist blames all of the ills of the world on white people, and I just happen to be one of those. So I see nothing wrong with returning the compliment. What I see in this article by two female journalists is another attempt by Gucci Socialists to attack white Western society by blaming it for creating poverty while studiously avoiding the real issue (stupidity) of why some poverty is endemic.

Ok, redneck, just for argument's sake, let's say you're right and virtually all endemic poverty is due to "stupidity".
Surely then the *only* solution is effectively "socialism": if these people are not capable of competing against the "non-stupid" for jobs and making an honest living, then what choice do we have but to support them as "dole bludgers"?

I also have to ask exactly what percentage of people do you think are so inherent 'stupid' that no amount of education and support is capable of making them genuinely self-supporting, productive citizens?

Redneck, I hate to be a pedant (well, truthfully I actually enjoy it) but my post said I worked for Department of Social Security (DSS) not the Commonwealth Employment Service (CES). It undermines my faith in your thinking processes if you can't even get something that simple straight.

Funnily enough, I find stupid people are not very successful at fraud. When I worked in the Original and Dupicate Cheque Overpayment section of the DSS Debt Recovery Unit (no, I'm not making this up) in the 80's, the biggest frauds were well-organised scams run by intelligent people. One gang in Sydney's east used to follow the postman around on pension payday and stole hundreds of thousands of dollars woth of cheques out of letterboxes. They also dealt drugs and produced amateur porn videos. They were sleazy lowlife scum, but they weren't stupid, though they did end up in gaol.

When I worked at a regional office we used to get regular "dob-ins". Most of them gave so little information that they were useless. Or the person who was dobbed in was already declaring their part-time income, or that they weren't shacked up (or whatever), or the dob-in was just a lie to stir up trouble. I used to enjoy it when we got something we could actually use. But it didn't happen very often.

Anyway, feel free to revel in your ill-humour. You obviously enjoy it.