So what is really necessary for Australia’s bottom line? What is ‘unavoidable and urgent’ to ensure our budget bottom line?
Taxing gas companies who, as the Australian ATO have put it, are ‘systemic non-payers of tax’?
David Lowe pointed out in The Echo online, ‘The Japanese government, which has no gas of its own, is currently raising more revenue from taxing Australian gas than Australia itself’. Or perhaps, as eminent economist and long-time Secretary of the Treasury, Dr Ken Henry put it to last week’s Senate hearings on the taxation of gas resources, ‘Just do it. In the national interest, just do it, and stop the crap that the Australian public have put up with for decades now, in respect of the taxation of Australia’s finite natural resources’?
God no! It is all those damn people who are on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Those people who need some kind of assistance to live their lives, those people whose families would be unable to work and pay taxes if they didn’t have the support of the NDIS. Those people who were previously stuck with a ‘broken system’ that the Productivity Commission in 2011 described as ‘underfunded, unfair, fragmented, and inefficient’.
There is no doubt that within any system there are those that rort it – look at the current gas lobby and what is paid in tax to the Australian people! The Australia Institute which is running very effective ads about the gas industry getting 56 per cent of their gas for free online (www.youtube.com/shorts/7lbOjhRlabI ). Or perhaps take a look at the case where the ‘Financial crimes squad detectives have charged a senior partner of a Sydney CBD law firm with facilitating more than $25 million worth of fraud for a criminal syndicate accused of fleecing Australia’s major banks of hundreds of millions of dollars,’ as reported in the SMH.
These are people and organisations who have resources, who have opportunity, and motive. For people on the NDIS and their families they are seeking some level of equality, security, inclusion and control over their lives.
As a person with a family member on the NDIS my worst nightmare is that the person I love and care for might be exploited in any way. And there is an absolute need to ensure that the system has built in safety guards to ensure that they are safe, that they are not being exploited, that the system isn’t being taken advantage of by bad actors, as there needs to be in childcare and aged care.
But 160,000 people were not accepted onto the NDIS (which is in no way an easy task) because they don’t need help.
They absolutely need help, their families, carers, friends, and supporters need that help. So while the Thriving Kids program is one step in the right direction, the Australian government must ensure that there is the right assistance for the people they are transitioning off the NDIS that gives them the right support at the right time, otherwise the results will be devastating.
Aslan Shand, editor
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