Government Money Scams

There’s so much going on in this country right now. Not much of it is actually any good.

The Labor government look like they are floundering in their lack of attempts to deal with any of the critical issues facing Aussie families.

Ask yourself, what are they doing about the cost of living? Electricity prices will go even higher as a result of their irrational pursuit of Green policies.Interest rates will keep rising for a while yet. Fuel costs are about to jump again with the return of the levy.

Job participation is down which makes the employment figures look better than they really are.

And the PM, he looked petty and petulant this week in his snide remarks about former PM Scott Morrison.

Not that Morrison doesn’t deserve the questions (and criticisms) of his secretive centralisation of power. He needs to be held to account but the childlike ‘secretive bulldozer’ quips used by the PM aren’t very becoming.

I’ll have more to say about that in a moment.

But before I do, I really think we all need to understand just how big a role the government plays in our economy. Frankly, it’s dangerously large and that means they have a dangerous amount of power over all of us.

Think about this.

Australian governments spend around $1 trillion every single year in this country.

The bulk of that is the commonwealth which, when you add in all the stuff they try to hide as ‘investments’ - like NBN, inland rail and the like, accounts for around 65% - or 650 billion dollars.

Then you have the states. They make up at least another $350 billion.

That all adds up to around $40,000 per person in this country.

That’s a lot of money but as a proportion of Gross Domestic P product its a staggering amount of cash.

According to countryeconomy.com our entire GDP for last year was around 2.3 trillion. That's about $85,000 for each of us.

Now consider that various governments are accounting for close to half of that amount - 47 per cent.

That’s not a healthy picture and its made even worse when you realise a hefty chunk of it is borrowed money.

Let me make the economic horror show even clearer for you.

A huge amount of that money is just wasted. There are the little rorts like Dan Andrews red shirts or boondoggles that never achieve anything. Then we’ve got the spending insanity of the NBN - it started as a $4 billion project and has ballooned into the $80 billion range.

Plenty of people would have been enriched by that spending. Then there are the school hall scams, pink batts policies and the billions pumped into fake free energy.

And then we have next level scams.

They are the ones that can’t really be stopped because the policy ethos underlying them is too sensitive.

One such area is the NDIS.

Earlier this week it was estimated that between $2 and $6 billion was being rorted from the NDIS every year in organised criminal activity. While the government will pay lip service to fixing the problem, they know any cut in funding or any tightening of criteria sets up an unwinnable argument.

They'd be accused of not caring about those living with a disability, or complaints of why isn’t this impairment receiving the funding it deserves.

It’s perfectly understandable why no politicians wants to pick that fight.

But if up to 10 percent of a $60 billion scheme is being rorted, it’s probably much the same across all government expenditure.

When I was a politician, a doctor's union representative from the AMA suggested that a similar figure was inappropriately claimed within the medicare budget.

And what about social security? How many stories of scammers getting money they weren’t entitled to have emerged in that space. And organised child care rorts are legion?

I could go on.

Wherever there is a pot of money being pushed by government you’ll find the plunderers.

So let’s be err on the side of caution and estimate $100 billion of government cash is being inappropriately spent every year. It’s probably a lot more than that but just imagine that’s the figure. It’s a huge number.

It’s about 5 percent of our entire GDP. That’s a disgrace and no government seems they want to tackle it.

Nor do they seem to want to tackle just how unhealthy our economy is when government spending accounts for nearly half of it.

Instead, the current government wants to make a mountain out of a bloke already panned as one of our worst PMs in recent history.

As I said earlier, what Morrison did by secretly concentrating power in his hands is tin pot dictator stuff.

He should be panned for it and we should never let it happen again. But some of the rhetoric coming from some sections of the government, and outside it doesn’t pass muster.

Time for them to concentrate on the things that really matter to this country’s future.