Wizofaust, my membership of the disadvantaged class gave me a realistic impression of the culture of that class. The reason why I oppose your humanistic attitudes is because they are contradicted by the evidence of my own eyes and ears.

I do not know what proportion of “Australians” are professional welfare recipients, but my opinion is that almost all long term unemployed are pretenders, and an significant proportion of the 600,000 people on Permanent Disability Pensions are frauds.

Obtaining a permanent Disability Pension is the Holy Grail of dole bludgers because it excuses them of any need to seek work, and governments like it as well because such people do not them embarrass the government by adding to unemployment statistics.

When well meaning people such as you claim that welfare fraud is only a minor matter, it is as credible to me as claiming that HAMAS really wants peace with Israel. I just know that you and your friends do not have a clue about what you are talking about. Didn’t you see that notorious 60 Minutes show with the Paxton kids?

I understand the Paxton's mentality because I had friends just like them. But you don’t, because you appear to have some sort of Christian/humanitarian belief that just about everybody is good at heart. What you don't understand is that people with low intelligence my not be lazy, what this is all about is self image.

Get it through your head that self image is a powerful human emotional need, and most people with low intelligence are hyper sensitive about their self image. Such people consider welfare fraud to be “smart” and infinitely preferable to working in low status jobs for low money.

Your correct observation that governments are already gearing welfare payments to direct purchases of rent, food and clothing simply confirms what I said all along about poverty being primarily a product of low intelligence.

I never said welfare fraud was a "minor problem", but I don't believe it's the most critical problem we face.
As I've said before, if a certain percentage of my taxes go towards ensuring people that either can't or won't work have food on the table and a roof over their heads, that's infinitely preferable to the alternative of them being homeless and/or turning to begging or stealing. If there is good evidence that reducing welfare (or making it conditional and/or better directed) can help inspire otherwise unproductive citizens to get out there and do something with their lives, I'm all for it...but I've yet to see such evidence.

Indeed, I'd like to see evidence for virtually every one of your generalisations.

I actually have a good friend who is on a disability pension (he has a mild but genuine psychological disorder). Personally, I (and others that know him) believe he is perfectly capable of getting a job, and it would be the best thing for him. The fact that he can obtain his pension without any responsibility of having to demonstrate a genuine attempt to find work or training does, on the surface, seem indicative of a problem in a system. However his problem is not that he enjoys bludging off welfare and thinks it would be silly to work when he doesn't have to - he knows he doesn't want to spent the rest of his life in his current condition, but mainly lacks the self-confidence and the motivation to find himself a job that he would find genuinely fulfilling. Perhaps making the payments conditional would jolt him out of this state of mind, but it could just as easily cause him, given his condition, to turn suicidal or become so mentally unstable that he would simply move from being a welfare cost to a healthcare cost (he's already been in and out of psychiatric hospitals many times). So if disability pension payments are made conditional, then you need someone with genuine expertise to make a reasoned assessment about each individual case – which costs money, naturally.

In Australia's attempt to ensure that only the deserving poor receive government assistance we waste a lot more money policing a punitive, mean welfare system rather than getting on with funding adequate low income housing, schools and adequate accessible medical / health care.

Wizofaust, you claimed that dole bludgers were only “tens of thousands” out of a population of 21 million, which implied that you considered dole bludging to be only a minor matter. If you now say that it is not a minor matter, do you now admit that it is a serious matter?

The biggest problem for your humanitarian view is that within the disadvantaged class there are people who do the right thing and who do work in lousy jobs with low pay, because they consider it the right thing to do. Such people are the biggest critics of your silly attitudes, because you are sanctioning the behaviour of the people who live among them and who openly laugh at them for working. Any society which permits large numbers of people to blatantly commit fraud against the state can hardly be surprised if the example set then begins to spread until the whole thing becomes an economic black hole.

I love your demand that I must prove my generalisations, the inference being that you need not do the same. I see this quite a lot from people with your viewpoint. Your position then becomes that unless I can prove that you are wrong, then this proves that you are right. Sorry mate, if you demand that I provide positive proof for everything I say, then the onus is upon you to do exactly the same thing. Where is your proof that there are only “tens of thousands” of dole bludgers?

And thank you for submitting that you also know a person who chooses to feast at the public table while complaining about the service, thereby proving me correct when I stated earlier that the scale of the problem can be gauged by the fact that there is hardly an Australian who can not personally recount an example of blatant dole bludging which they have personally witnessed.

I am not used to my opponents providing me with examples supporting my position, so I appreciate your help.

If there are only 10,000 genuine dole-bludgers in the whole of Australia, and the number is not increasing, then there is probably little reason to worry about it. OTOH, if there are 90,000, and the number has been increasing by several 1000 every year, then it is definitely worthy of attention. But to honest, nobody really knows how many genuine dole-bludgers there are, because there's no objective way of measuring it.

I am most certainly not sanctioning the behaviour of anyone who laughs at others that work, much as I do not sanction the behaviour of people who smoke - despite the fact that I believe it would highly counter-productive to outlaw smoking. If it can be shown that a particular change in welfare payment legislation has succeeded in reducing dole-bludging (and had no significant downsides), I'm fully supportive of it. You, on the other hand, are *assuming* that reducing welfare payments is the "correct" response, that will necessarily cause a net benefit for the population who are reliant on such payments.

Please tell...what generalisations have I made that you feel need proving?

As far as my friend goes, the purpose of relating his case was to demonstrate that simply cutting welfare isn't necessarily a productive response. Yes, he may be a "dole bludger" of sorts, but if his payments were cut tomorrow, he might well end up spending the rest of his life in a psychiatric ward, costing far more in taxpayer dollars than if he was simply allowed the time to finally build up his own self-esteem to the point he was ready to find himself a job. This isn’t a “humanitarian” position by the way – it’s one based purely on economic grounds.

OTOH, your implication that paying out large amounts of unconditional welfare to a significant percentage of the population is damaging to our overall economic prosperity is one that you have to prove, as if anything, the nations with the highest welfare spending are some of the most prosperous and successful economies in the world.

The objective way which I measure the degree of dole bludging Wizofaust, is with the evidence of my own eyes and ears. Quite simply, I lived within a Housing Commission area where dole bludging among young people was common, and I had friends (including a former girlfriend) who joined the legions of professional social welfare recipients on the sunny North Coast of NSW. As late as 15 years ago, I visited these friends and was appalled at the scale of the problem. It was obvious to me that some young people were deliberately immigrating to Australia just to become “hippies” and live an indolent lifestyle, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer.

That governments realise the scale of the problem is indicated by the fact that the Howard government has considerably tightened up the eligibility criteria for welfare, one being the prevention of the popular tactic of moving to desirable beachside areas with very high unemployment rates. This was probably caused by the objective statistical analysis of figures citing that the Queensland town of Airlie Beach had more people registered on unemployment benefits and disability pensions than existed as the total population of the town, according to the previous census. It was also objectively noted that shopkeepers in the town had trouble finding staff.

Your friend could not end up in a psychiatric hospital because we no longer have the money to pay for such services because there are too many dole bludgers stealing from our welfare budget. Today we chuck psychiatric patients out on the street. This fact contradicts your previous claim that dole bludging is no big deal.

The fact that wealthy countries pay out enormous amounts in welfare hardly supports the idea that it is not damaging to our economy. You ask me what generalisations you have made; well there is a big one, right there. Once again we see that you demand that I must prove my premise that too liberal welfare is very damaging to the economy, while you see no need to prove your premise that it is not.