The much talked-about NDIS - which stands for the National Disability Insurance Scheme - which puts a new definition on the word 'insurance' which is 'an arrangement by which a company or the state undertakes to provide compensation for specified loss, damage, illness, or death in return for payment of a specified premium' - "is now more expensive than Medicare and is set to overtake spending on defence next year" - click here for the ABC News article.
What really blew my socks off what the sentence "the scheme's 740,000 overall participants make up about 14 percent of the 5.5 million estimated people with disability in Australia", and whatever else I was wearing was blown off by the pie chart below which shows that of the 740,000 participants, 294,960 were on the scheme because of autism.
We already had autism before we gave it a name. There were a couple of boys in my class in the "Volksschule" who were kind of awkward. Now they would be called autistic and given "treatment" and "medicine" even though the condition is incurable - which is music to the ears of the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry who love "treating" untreatable things, even though autistic research bodies themselves accept autistic traits as a healthy variation of the human condition.
I mean, look at Greta Thunberg who is a nutter but officially diagnosed as being autistic, and even entrepreneur and co-founder of Microsoft, Bill Gates, has written, "If I were growing up today, I probably would be diagnosed on the autism spectrum". And when it comes to alexithymia - to use a fancy name - my emotional blindness is so bad, I reach for my white cane before I have an argument with my wife. Just ask her!
To summarise, 40% of all NDIS participants have autism; 56% are under 18; and to pay for them all will cost us more than our defence budget for the army, air force and navy. May I suggest we don't tell the Chinese?
As an interesting aside, of the 260,000 "providers" to the NDIS, only 16,000 are officially registered. For the rest, it's massive overcharging and fraud as far as the eye can see. It's pink batts on a massive scale! Will the public service ever get to the bottom of it? Of course not! They want to be home by four o'clock to mow their lawns, don't they? (I hope you're not autistic or else you may struggle to detect my sarcasm.)
And I haven't even dealt with that bit about the NDIS participants being just "14 percent of the 5.5 million estimated people with disability in Australia". What, 5.5 million out of a total population of 27 million are disabled? Surely, this must be a misprint! On second thought, do tell the Chinese! I mean, who would want us? This may stop them from coming!
