As I pointed out recently, to much outraged huffing and puffing from some readers, the so-called ‘autism epidemic’ is mostly a chimaera. While actual autism is a very real and debilitating condition, a great many ‘on the spectrum’ are either very mildly affected to the point of being perfectly functional, while others are simply bandwagon-jumpers (think of the ‘neurodiverse’ celebrities and TikTok thots fishing for attention). Worse, some are outright frauds.
The modern welfare state has created a perverse incentive where a spurious ‘on the spectrum’ diagnosis is a ticket to a lifetime of taxpayer-funded benefits. The scale of the fraud can be estimated from one US state alone, Minnesota, where Somali immigrants have defrauded taxpayers of at least a billion dollars in social services fraud.
In Australia, conspicuously non-Anglo-Saxon names keep cropping up, too, in welfare fraud cases in childcare and most especially the National Disability Insurance Scheme. In some communities, doctors openly tout an ‘autism’ diagnosis, a golden ticket to massive NDIS funding, for as little as $5000.
This is not just a disgusting ripoff of the taxpayer, it’s a slap in the face and blatant theft of much-needed funds from the people who need it most. People whose severe autism is a crippling lifelong disability, not just ‘quirky’.
When Julia Gillard announced the NDIS in 2013, the most obvious fact was that almost all of its funding was pushed out beyond Forward Estimates: meaning that Gillard didn’t have to account for how much it would cost at all. We see the results, over a decade down the track: a debt monster that’s well on the way to becoming the single most costly programme on the government books. With no sign of stopping.
From a modest $8 billion across all governments in 2014–15, spending hit $44 billion in 2023-24 and is on a locked-in double-digit growth path. More than 600,000 workers have been pulled into the sector in just a few years. The program is now unrecognisable from the tightly targeted scheme originally envisaged by Bob McMullen and his Labor colleagues for a relatively small cohort with severe, permanent disability.
Has it actually benefitted the people who need it most? Ask anyone with a serious disability and you’ll hear the same stories of waiting months or longer for packages, and desperately scrabbling for funding for a new wheelchair, and so on. Meanwhile, contractors report entire social housing blocks that are serviced by more staff – from cooks to cleaners to gardeners – than an 19th century country mansion. NDIS funding pays for cruise holidays and even prostitutes.
Costs have exploded, waste and rorting are rife, and the benefits to participants – let alone to the wider economy – do not appear commensurate with policy expectation or the incurred expenditure […]
The government has acknowledged the current system has “catastrophically weak prevention controls” and massive blind spots. Much of this wastage can be avoided if the digital payments scheme is fully implemented. It also permits the necessary evidentiary database to allow improved resource allocation decisions to enhance market stewardship across the scheme.
Meanwhile, we’re going to almost certainly see an endless litany of stuff like this:
Three people from New South Wales have been sentenced to a combined 12 years and 10 months’ imprisonment for their roles in a multimillion-dollar fraud against the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and Australian Taxation Office (ATO).
The two men and a woman have also been ordered to repay the Commonwealth a combined total of more than $575,700.
The AFP coyly doesn’t name the convicted fraudsters, and photos and videos are carefully blurred, but the crims are obviously of the dusky persuasion and the woman is in full hijab.
And in another case:
Large sums of taxpayer money meant for some of the most vulnerable Australians have been flowing through companies linked to a man named Khawaja Moeen Haroon.
While his network has been under investigation for suspected fraud on the NDIS, some of those in his care have been left living in squalor.
While these criminals are living high on the taxpayer-funded hog – items seized by the AFP included a literal bag full of gold bars, luxury cars, and jewellery – their ‘clients’ were living in Dickensian conditions. Workers describe prison-like conditions in flats with no phone and no television, and disability clients begging them to get them out. Whistleblowers are monstered by thugs employed by the NDIS ‘providers’.
Tell us again how mass immigration is ‘enriching’ us?
