NDIS – coulda, woulda, shoulda?

The Federal government has recently committed $1 billion to start up a National Disability Insurance Scheme for as many as 20,000 people with serious lifetime disabilities, and their carers and families. 

This certainly makes a nice change from cuddling up to a union that has plundered the wages of the very workforce that helps to care for these people. 

However, here are some of the ways in which the NDIS – a scheme which is supposed to help genuinely disadvantaged people who are doing it really, really tough – could have been funded from as far back as 2007, when this government was first elected.

• Estimated cost of the unnecessary pink batts scheme, whose graft and waste is well-documented: $2.45 billion, followed by another $424 million to fix the dangerous installations 
   
• Estimated cost of the Building the Education Revolution scheme, ditto: $16.2 billion 
   
• Estimated cost (so far) of the National Broadband Network, as WiFi conquers the known universe: at least $36 billion 

• Resources available to the Climate Change ministerial portfolio in 2010-2011, to fix a ‘problem’ whose tractability and indeed existence is questionable: $1.57 billion
   
• Labor’s ‘literacy and numeracy partnership’ (4 years) which has produced no measurable improvements in either: $540 million 
   
• The dramatically unsuccessful Productivity Places Program which was so badly administered that it is impossible to tell who benefited from it, if anyone: $2.1 billion 

Sadly, this catalogue of over-administered political bankruptcy tends to point to one conclusion: the NDIS will become just another unauditable and potentially tragic botch-up. Only time will tell. 

Philippa Martyr blogs at Transverse City