Was This Part of the Plan?

I’m on a sixty-five year holiday
Oh sleepy day, ungrateful night
Kissing the bricks in the afternoon
Go go go, go dead slow
So we'll never never work again
– Hunters and Collectors, “Drinking Bomb”

One thing we know about the left is that they never, ever, take ‘No’ for an answer. Every time their latest socialist brain-fart is rejected at the ballot box, they scream and stamp their feet like so many toddlers, until they get their way. If tantrums don’t work, they simply sneak behind the adults’ backs and do it anyway.

Case in point: the ‘Voice’. Few proposals have been so brutally rejected at the ballot box in Australian history. Yet, at least three state Labor governments have sailed and legislated an ‘Aboriginal Voice’, or are in the process of doing so. The socialist Allan government in Victoria has gone even further, enacting the constitutional absurdity of a ‘treaty’.

Another socialist brain-fart of recent years is ‘Universal Basic Income’, the idea that everyone gets a guaranteed ‘living wage’ welfare payment, no questions asked. It’s such an obviously ridiculous idea, which has failed everywhere it’s been tried, that no one but a leftist could take it seriously.

This begs the question: was Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme only ever UBI-by-stealth? Because that’s exactly what it’s working out to be.

The number of 25- to 34-year-olds who say they are “permanently unable” to work has increased fivefold in the past 20 years, tracking with the global rise of young men “drifting around” and not in school, work, or training, in what one expert says is “one of the most severe social ­issues we’re facing”.

It might be expected that permanent inability to work would increase with age. In fact, almost the reverse is happening.

For the first time, the number of 25- to 34-year-old men who – self-reported – say they are “permanently unable” to work now exceeds the number of 35- to 44-year-old men who say the same, according to an analysis of official labour force data.

This milestone data point comes amid concern about over-diagnosis driving a cost blowout in the National Disability Insurance Scheme, largely because of mental health diagnoses, especially among boys.

At the turn of the millennium, 0.3 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds told the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ labour force survey that they were did not have a job because they were “permanently unable to work”.

At the ­latest count in February this year, this had risen to 1.6 per cent.

Who couldn’t have seen this coming? Certainly not anyone like the person who worked in the Burnie Centrelink office (for Good Oil readers, think of the Hamilton Work and Income office), who told me of an incident a decade or so ago. A typical Burnie bogan shuffled up to the counter and mumbled, ‘Er, yeah, I’m, uh… here to find out about gettin’ one of them… fucked-in-the-head pensions…?’

As funny as it is, this anecdote shows that even the most weed-numbed product of the modern ‘education’ system is going to figure out how to game the welfare system. The NDIS was a golden gift to such people – but, like so many leftist nostrums, the golden gift is only so much honeyed poison.

Australian National University public policy economist Robert Breunig said society needed to worry about the “striking” trend.

“The number of young men who are what we call NEET – not in education, employment or training – has gone up quite a bit in the last 10 years,” he said.

“These are 18- to 30-year-old men. And they’re not enrolling in universities. Women are 60 per cent – now – of entering university students in Australia. Men are only 40 per cent. They’re enrolling a bit more in VET training, but there’s a lot of them that just seem to not be doing anything.

“What are they doing? They’re hanging out at their parents’ house playing computer games – that’s one story that we hear. Or they’re kind of drifting around and not really finding their place in life.”

I’m not the only one to suspect that the NDIS is in no small part to blame.

Opposition Treasury spokesman Tim Wilson said the figures were “distressing”.

“It seems more than a coincidence that there’s been an exponential increase after the estab­lishment of the NDIS,” he said.

“This is the economy Labor has built to feed its cartel of idleness and dependence” […]

[Professor Breunig] also noted the over-representation of boys on the NDIS.

“There may be a kind of NDIS effect here, too … to get on the NDIS, you actually have to have a permanent condition,” he said.

Which, with the over-expansion of ‘diagnosis’ of the ‘autism spectrum’, is easier than ever. Indeed, the NDIS is an active incentive, with some doctors blatantly advertising an autism diagnosis, for a flat fee, as a ticket to a lifetime of guaranteed welfare. And the NDIS, far from actually helping genuinely disabled people, has become an ever-more-bloated debt monster.

In 2012-13 disability services cost the federal government $1.2bn. This year the NDIS will cost $49bn. By 2028-29 it’s forecast to cost $64bn. That figure itself is dubious and relies on keeping growth of the NDIS to 8 per cent a year, a heroic prediction.

And far from helping disabled people enter the workforce, Julia Gillard’s self-serving original claim, it’s actually shifting a generation of young men out of the workforce for life.

Can anyone escape the impression that that was the point, all along?