A subject that fills the air with butter flys and birds.
As the nice folk rush to protect the sad victims.
Haveing as I said many times done it hard as a child, been hungry often.
I think too we must protect the victims.
Some times those victims are the tax payers.
Looking at the unemployment numbers,some have been unemployed for? 5 years!
Some shifted in to the too hard basket are on shifty disability payments, or long term sickness benefits.
The birds and butterfly's are by now assaulting me.
BUT who amung them, has eaten pumpkin and spuds for tea,ONLY, and the skins for breakfast ONLY.
I will and have gone hungry to help the true needy.
And will oppose forever the red neck blindness behind pay them in food stamps.
But we have many who never intend to work feeding on our good will.
Many sitting at home this morning unable to keep warm, because we seem to fear stopping the fraud so we can give more to those who truly need.

Belly, my lady works for one of the large national charity employment agencies. She has done for a few years now. She was so successful with our P & C association efforts at organising in school apprenticeships for the less academic students at our local high school, they came looking for her.

She is a bit of a bleeding heart, which has sometimes caused a little friction between us, always seeing "hardship" before laziness.

They thus gave her the dead head case load, all the very long term unemployed. She has been remarkably successful at getting some quite talented folk, who had just given up, back into the work force, some in quite good jobs, & many others self supporting again. In fact she just won an award for getting the highest percentage of such folk back in work.

However she now admits that something over 30% of her cases are either work shy, or working cash in hand, part or even full time, & collecting benefits on the side. There have been more than a few threats when she has "breached" I think it is, some who don't turn up for courses or job interviews. They don't like loosing part of the benefit, although they won't comply with the requirements.

Perhaps not food stamps, but how about a card that could not be used to withdraw cash, or pay for tobacco, grog, gambling & such. Things we should not have to fund from taxpayers who often can't afford these things themselves. Such restrictions would not have to be obvious, until such purchases were attempted.

Yes I know, I'm a red neck, but names won't hurt me.

I agree hasbeen, with your wifes views and that you are a red neck.
On every occasion we have talked about this subject I get swamped by the *nice folk* flogged by the butterfly's and colorful birds.
But we just must understand, in my view, 20% minimum of that 4.5% never wish to work.
And that we are complacent, in ignoring that fact/those fraudsters.
I target too the few employees of social security who are harsh, needlessly so,with honest unemployed,and by being so build fences around true investigation of welfare fraud.
Privatization, even at the costs, often,of higher price for worse results has taken life time jobs we could have placed some unemployed in, some need help to get started.
Tough love is often best.
I got jobs as a union official for even some who could not write their name.
But had to confront a fact,some wanted only to go surfing or drinking, some, face it, need a hand,to get the very courage to go to work.
We frail everyone by not investigating new ways to help.
PS your feeble childish parliamentarians are building, half hour into question time for yet another motion, this time Gina's workers, it may not win but motions are being passed as a result allover Australia.

Should this restriction on taxpayer generosity and largess be extended to those other idle non-productive burdens on our economy - the disabled and the elderly?

Some of those pensioners may have gone from a lifetime on the dole straight into the aged pension and I often see them feeding our hard-earned taxes into the pokies every Pension day - or am I just generalising?

What about those professional corporate fraudsters who scam people out of their savings, leave swathes of unpaid bills behind for their victims and enjoy their ill-gotten gains because of some legal technicality - or are we only going for the easy targets here?

Wobbles a bit naughty, we are talking about welfare, if you want to include pensions ok.
But aged pensions are hardly the home of fraud.
And fools play pokies broke or rich.
Am I being cruel in demanding we pay the true needy?

Dear Belly,

Of course there are people who abuse the
system. What I find disturbing though is that
there seems to be a common entrenched belief
in this country that the poor are in poverty
because they are idle and prefer to live on
"handouts."

This view is fervently held, even by
heaps of Australians who don't know poor people,
have never tried to raise a family on welfare
payments, and haven't the vaguest idea what
poverty is really like.

Opinion polls repeatedly show large sec tions of the
population favouring cuts in welfare spending, or
favouring plans to "make welfare recipients go to work."

These attitudes bear little relationship to reality,
More than half of welfare recipients are
aged people, or disabled; most of the rest are mothers
with young children, and less than 5 percent are able-
bodied men, most of them unskilled workers in areas of
high unemployment.

There are many myths that abound
about welfare recipients. That they have many children
(most have two or fewer); that they are on welfare
indefinitely (most receive it for less than two years)
and that welfare is a terrible burden on the taxpayer
(welfare represents less than 2 percent of the federal
budget).

Why do these curious myths about welfare persist?
I guess it's the same ideology that believes that
those who get ahead can claim credit for their success,
those who fall behind must logically be blamed for their
failures. The poor are therefore supposed to need
incentives to work, rather than help at the expense of
the taxpayer.

There are few complaints, however, about
governments paying far more in "Handouts" to the
nonpoor than to the poor. This fact generally escapes
attention because these benefits take the indirect
form of hidden subsidies or tax deductions of all kinds,
rather than direct cash payments.

If we're going to look at welfare - lets look at all of it -
including middle-class welfare and tax cuts to the rich.
After all - it's only fair.