May 12, 2014 2:00pm by David Farrar

Maybe Australia needs some welfare reform also

The Adelaide Advertiser reports:

The Advertiser revealed on Thursday that there are a whopping 7313 Australians who receive the disabled pension but don’t live in Australia.

Many of them live in holiday destinations such as Bali and Thailand, where the $813 dollars they receive from the taxpayer every fortnight goes much further in the form of rupiah or baht.

More than 1200 of them are in Greece, nursing the kind of injuries which are so permanently debilitating that they apparently prevent them from ever re-entering the workforce, yet not from jumping on a 30-hour economy class flight to Europe and a ferry ride to the island of their choice.

Almost 1000 of them are over the ditch in New Zealand, just a stone’s throw from the country which is kindly subsidising their existence. …

The purse for this largesse is sizeable, coming in at $99.9 million a year. And at a time when the nation has been put on notice that the age of entitlement is over, it is a stellar example of how witless governments are when it comes to reining in unjustifiable drains on revenue, yet so adept at creating new streams of revenue by launching another assault on the people who are actually working.

The way it works now is an insult to people with genuine and permanent disabilities, exploding as it has from 500,000 to 800,000 recipients in less than two decades, its annual bill careening towards $15 billion.

The rule of thumb for government should be to provide generous support for those who genuinely cannot work.

It should also involve the ruthless denial of assistance to those who simply choose not to work, and who hide behind confected conditions to opt out of a contributive life, even heading overseas to bludge in a more agreeable climate where the beers are cheaper.