The Welfare Standard

There are signs that Australia is pursuing a path that will inevitably lead to rack and ruin.

And no, it's not because there isn't enough collected in taxes, although that heavy burden falls on too few.

It's because we have all manner of schemes that waste the taxes collected.

Add that to our overly generous and unaccountable welfare scheme, and we're entrenching a spending problem with little to show for it.

Consider some of the recent research by the Institute of Public Affairs.

Approximately 2.1 million Australians (aged 15+) are currently receiving welfare through either the NDIS, Disability Support Pension (DSP), Jobseeker, or Youth Allowance.

This is approximately 425,000 higher than in 2018, before the NDIS was implemented in full and before the Covid lockdowns.

Approximately 86 per cent of the growth to the total number of people on welfare since 2018 is from the NDIS.

The also noted that from 2013-2018, the total number on welfare declined by around 115,000. If this trend had continued until 2023, there would have been around 1.5 million (of those aged 15+) on welfare instead of 2.1 million, a difference of 600,000.

Something happened to halt the decline in welfare recipients.

You can sum it up with two 'programs' - COVID and the NDIS.

Daniel Wild from the IPA said:

“It is clear the federal and state governments’ response to Covid has normalised a welfare culture, severing the link between income and work. The failed Covid legacy continues to harm our society, including, in particular, younger Australians.

“Exponential and uncontrolled growth in the NDIS, and overly generous Covid programs, has shifted the mindset of too many Australians into a welfare-first, ask questions later culture, where work and earning your own living way is becoming a thing of the past.

This is not simply an economic problem alone; curbing the ‘welfare-first’ mentality is vitally important for the prosperity of Australians currently falling into the trap of unnecessary welfare dependency.”