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National Disability Insurance: a big idea whose time has come

By Don Allan - posted Wednesday, 25 November 2009


Not that the government does not spend money on disabilities. It does. It provides disability support pensions and other disability functions and infrastructure at an annual cost of $15 billion. Unfortunately that is billions short of what is needed to give people with a disability and their carers a life of modest comfort. They ask for no more.

In all probability, the public is not aware that at Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s 20/20 summit, one of the big ideas the Commonwealth Government’s Families Department thought worth considering was a NDIS. Where has the idea gone?

I am given to understand that The Hon. Bill Shorten, the Minister responsible, is working behind the scenes to change matters but, according to some people in the disability field, he is so far behind the scenes that he cannot be sighted and that the Big Idea of an NDIS has been abandoned.

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Cynically they say it is because investing in high profile infrastructure schemes that will boost the government’s wellbeing at the ballot box is more important than investing in an NDIS that will increase the wellbeing of the disabled and their carers not just today but in the future. They also say that the ageing of the population makes the scheme doubly necessary.

My final comment is also a question: what would Ghandi say?

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About the Author

Don Allan, politically unaligned, is a teenager in the youth of old age but young in spirit and mind. A disabled age pensioner, he writes a weekly column for The Chronicle, a free community newspaper in Canberra. Don blogs at: http://donallan.wordpress.com.

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