Diagnosis list for NDIS to be scrapped under five-year reboot plan

This sounds reasonable. "Autism" covers a wide spectum of disorders, with many manageable by the person afflicted. Taxpayer support should only be offered if the person's health is endangered

The list of medical diagnoses that guarantees access to the National Disability Insurance Scheme would be scrapped within five years under a set of reforms that seeks to ease pressure on the $42 billion scheme so that it does not buckle under its own weight.

It means a diagnosis of autism alone would no longer be enough for children to access individual support packages through the NDIS, which has become one of the scheme’s greatest pressure points.

More than 2.5 million Australians with a disability – including children with mild autism and developmental concerns – would instead receive services under a new system called “foundational supports” that will be established under a fresh agreement between state and federal governments so that the NDIS is no longer Australians’ only source of disability support.

That new layer of services will include home and community care supports, aids and equipment, early childhood support, psychosocial services, and help for adolescents and young adults – services that the reviewers do not think need to be delivered through individual NDIS packages.

The independent recommendations from scheme architect Bruce Bonyhady and former education department head Lisa Paul, published on Thursday, aim to improve people’s experiences of the NDIS while dampening its growth trajectory so that it does not blow out to $100 billion within a decade.

A new electronic payment system would help the government track who was getting paid for what – and more easily pick up fraud or overcharging – while providers would have to register under a new regulatory system.

A new role of “navigator” would be created to help connect people to the right services in an attempt to improve accessibility. The NDIS would also cover the cost of people’s application assessments, so they would not have to pay out-of-pocket.

But a significant piece of reform will be supporting children, who currently make up half of NDIS participants, outside the scheme by delivering stronger support in schools and childcare centres – places the reviewers say are more appropriate than clinical settings.

Access criteria will also be tightened to make sure the scheme is used most by Australians with significant and permanent disabilities.

Thousands of NDIS participants – in particular, children with autism level two or above – currently receive automatic access to the scheme through its diagnosis list, and remain on it for years.

“These lists were introduced during transition to the full scheme to accelerate access for some people... However, they have led to a focus on medical diagnosis rather than function and disability-related support needs,” the reviewers said.

“These lists can provide simple and transparent access to the scheme for some children. However, they also exacerbate inequity and delay support for children with similar levels of need who may not have a diagnosis on an access list, or lack the means to obtain a diagnosis if they don’t meet the age criteria for developmental delay.

“We recommend removing automatic access under the access lists.”

The reviewers said access to the NDIS should be based on the impact disability had on a person’s day-to-day life.

“It should not be based on a medical diagnosis alone or just your primary diagnosis... A focus on functional impairment will enable multiple disabilities to be considered - which when taken together, result in significant functional impairment.”

They said definitions in the NDIS legislation should be reset to link eligibility to the outcomes of a functional assessment process that can measure the impact of impairment and compare it to others.

“Reasonable and necessary” supports – another vague term that has created confusion in the NDIS legislation – would also be redefined, with people’s budgets instead based on a structured needs assessment.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese on Wednesday said enabling legislation would be introduced in the first half of next year, with phased in implementation.

Bonyhady and Paul said they wanted all Australians with disability to have better access to mainstream services as well as the new foundational supports within five years.

Participants would have two years before they were asked to meet any new access requirements, while children under seven should be able to stay on the scheme until they turn nine.

“Our recommendations will support more children in existing services, such as maternal and child health, integrated child and family centres, early childhood education and schools – reducing the need for families to access the NDIS and leading to better long-term outcomes for children,” the review said.

“Children with higher support needs would get additional, individualised support through the NDIS via an early intervention pathway.”

NDIS Minister Bill Shorten will address the recommendations at the National Press Club on Thursday.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/diagnosis-list-for-ndis-to-be-scrapped-under-five-year-reboot-plan-20231207-p5epq6.html

************************************************

Labor’s migration strategy to focus on national-building people power

The universities will howl at the cutback to their overseas student income

The Albanese government will create a new “skills in demand” visa and raise English-language requirements for all international students, to restore border control and suppress the temporary migration boom that has put cities under tremendous strain, led to worker exploitation and left hundreds of thousands of young foreigners in limbo.

To be launched on Monday, Labor’s Migration Strategy will seek to cut the overall intake, restore the social licence of the failing visa system, for which community support has slumped amid a world-leading post-pandemic population boom, and reframe migration to its historic, nation-building role.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said the nation could not sustain the migrant inflow of recent years, with almost 900,000 students, temporary workers and permanent settlers arriving in two years.

Ms O’Neil claimed the government’s policy tightening will now lead to a cumulative 185,000 fewer migrants over the budget’s four-year time frame.

The blueprint is built on five principles, with an emphasis on the skills Australia needs most to boost productivity and permanency to encourage social cohesion and cultural vibrancy, in line with the wide-ranging review led by former top civil servant Martin Parkinson.

Ms O’Neil said the road map “is a commitment to getting our system back on track and to returning migration levels back to normal and using that reduction in migration levels to move to the system we need for Australia’s future”.

“Australia’s migration system is not the nation building engine it once was,” she said.

“It often fails to identify and attract those people who are best placed to help build the skills base of Australia’s workforce, boost exports and raise living standards.”

The road map is built on eight drivers, including the delivery of existing visa and integrity reforms, new policy commitments over the coming 12 months, and longer-term changes to be developed in partnership with second-tier governments, businesses and unions.

Ms O’Neill vowed to abolish visa settings that drive long-term temporary stays (known as ‘permanent temporariness’), including through shortening graduate visas and ending settings that allow graduates to prolong their stay in Australia when they have fewer prospects of becoming permanent residents.

The Home Affairs Minister flagged an enhanced “points system” for permanent migrants, as well as updated occupation lists to better target the short-term needs of employers.

“The benefits of getting the points system for permanency right is massive,” she said.

The new strategy aims to simplify a complex system, which customarily deters the most talented young people, while expediting approval for the most desirable temporary workers to drive innovation and job creation.

These specialists must be paid at least $135,000 a year, placing them in the top 10 per cent of earners, and can be in any occupation, except trades workers, machinery operators and drivers, and labourers.

As well, the strategy aspires to properly allocate working holiday makers to regions and to implement better long-term population planning with the states, although the details of how this will occur are a work in progress.

At the end of October there were 2.3 million people in Australia on temporary visas with work rights. In 2000, the number of temporary migrants was around 700,000.

The Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, to be released on Wednesday, will show net overseas migration peaking at 510,000 in the year to June, compared with the budget estimate of 401,700.

Sky News host Danica De Giorgio says migration has “always been a problem” for either side of the Australian… government. “We’ve got a tight rental market which is a key driver for inflation,” Ms De Giorgio said. “Migration’s always been a problem … I don’t think either side of government More
For the current financial year, the migrant inflow is projected to be 375,000, a one-fifth blowout on Treasury’s May forecast of 316,000.

Of this year’s estimated inflow, 190,000 places will be in the permanent program, with over 70 per cent designated for the skilled stream.

Writing for The Australian online, Ms O’Neil said the “first problem we have to solve is to get migration levels back to sustainable, normal levels”.

“Numbers were always going to surge post-pandemic, but we cannot sustain the levels of migration we have seen in recent years,” she writes.

“There is too much pressure on housing and infrastructure.

“Our migration program only works with community support and to retain that, we must make a significant correction.”

The new four-year skills in demand visa, with full mobility and clear pathways to permanent residence, will replace the complex single-employer-sponsored Temporary Skill Shortage visa that business and unions agree is not fit for purpose.

The visa will be backed by three pathways, adopting the Parkinson Review’s model of a risk-based approach to regulation, including specialist, core skills and a lower paid tiers, with legislated indexation of wage thresholds to maintain integrity.

“A key feature of this visa is an alternative approach to mobility, with new visa settings, streamlined applications and consideration of trailing employer fees that remove many onerous conditions that tie a migrant to a single employer,” the strategy said.

“These features will help design out elements that contribute to worker exploitation and reduce barriers to job switching in the labour market, which will lead to a more productive workforce.”

The government argues this new model allows for worker mobility across industries, which better reflects the nature of how skills are used, and how they will be increasingly used, in the labour market.

For example, the most common occupation in the current Temporary Skill Shortage visa is a software engineer; like most occupations, a software engineer’s skills can be used across industries, such as in manufacturing, transport and logistics or financial services.

The strategy says the specialist stream, with the aim for a median turnaround of seven days of visa processing, will help Australia attract highly skilled engineering managers who develop electrolysers to help with our transition to a net-zero economy, cyber specialists who assist banks to respond to cyber-attacks and software engineers who help Australia embrace the artificial intelligence transformation.

The core skills stream must be paid at least $70,000 and will reflect current needs identified by Jobs and Skills Australia, such as a Registered Nurse who is helping a regional hospital’s emergency department deal with acute workforce shortages or a Secondary School Teacher helping teach science in our public schools.

The strategy says more work is needed to develop how best to regulate migration for lower paid workers with essential skills.

Early next year, the government will consult with state and territory governments, unions, businesses and migrant workers to determine limits.

As well, the strategy hopes to streamline labour market testing to reduce complexity,

create a best practice service level agreement for processing times and establish a modernised accreditation pathway to better compete for talent.

Chief executive of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia Melinda Cilento said “for too long, our migration system has lacked a cohesive and long-term strategic direction”.

“Instead, we’ve had a revolving door of changes that caused uncertainty, unpredictability and confusion for anyone using or relying on the system – migrants, employers and the broader community alike,” Ms Cilento said.

“We must get the right skills in the right places, and the focus on this, as well as simplifying the system and more transparency, is the right way to go.”

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/labors-migration-strategy-to-focus-on-nationalbuilding-people-power/news-story/33ec746da821362a9df1b2c62793bb3c

**************************************************

Tax office gold bungle

ROBERT GOTTLIEBSEN

The seven-year cover-up of Australia’s largest non-cyber fraud ended this week when the Australian Taxation Office lost its final legal action to recover gold GST from bankrupted gold refiners.

In the five years to December 2016 the Australian states were defrauded of at least $2.5bn in GST arising from gold trading. Australia’s previous largest fraud – the John Friedrich fiasco between 1983 and 1988 – totalled around $1.3bn in 2023 dollars.

Material uncovered in the seven years of ATO legal cases since 2016 showed that the GST money was stolen and sent overseas by people with close Middle Eastern connections, and almost certainly went to terrorists.

The ATO originally incorrectly thought that the thieves were linked to the gold refiners. But instead of prosecuting them, the ATO began sending the refiners into insolvency by withholding GST refunds and other acts. ­Australia lost not only $2.5bn to the Middle East but large segments of what was once a thriving gold refining industry.

According to the Inspector-General of Taxation, the ATO had been concerned about weakness in its gold GST collection systems as far back as 2012. (The $2.5bn loss estimate is contained in an Inspector-General report.)

But the ATO rules were not changed to stop the $2.5bn theft until I publicly disclosed the scandal on December 6, 2016, under the heading “Crooks exploit legal loophole in multimillion-dollar gold scam”.

Within a month of that commentary the ATO finally took the blocking action it should have taken in 2012-13 or much earlier.

After the January 2017 blocking action, the ATO started court actions against refiners. Then followed seven years of legal cases where the ATO lost on all counts, apart from a few wins in lower jurisdictions which were overturned by higher courts.

The courts ruled the refiners were obeying the law and totally innocent and indeed had been warning the ATO that the thefts of GST were taking place.

The case that finally ended the cover-up went before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal Dep­uty President Frank O’Loughlin KC.

The ATO tried to prove that the system of gold refining used around the world when applied to Australia was actually a section 165 avoidance scheme. In rejecting the ATO application the tribunal declared that applying Division 165 would have extraordinarily severe consequences on the refiner “who did not participate in the fraud, rather than the Fraudulent Suppliers who were the perpetrators that benefited directly from their fraud”.

Lawyers calculate that the ATO must have spent about $50m of taxpayer money hiring some of Australia’s best silks.

Had the ATO’s legal campaign succeeded in any of the cases the Commonwealth would not have received any money, because the defendants were insolvent – usually as a result of ATO actions.

Whether unintentionally or intentionally. the seven years of court cases chasing innocent people instead of the thieves concealed the fraud from the states and the public. Federal politicians asked ATO officials about the gold affair but were never told what happened.

Whether the states can claim the money from the Commonwealth will be a question of law.

Clearly they now have available all the evidence that was put forward in the seven years of legal cases to help sue the Commonwealth on the basis of improperly managing the collection of their money.

The saga starts when former treasurer Peter Costello introduced the GST in Australia in 2000. One of the problems he faced was deciding how gold should be handled, given that the yellow metal in pure gold bars was in fact currency.

Costello followed the British laws and declared that when people traded pure gold bars there should be no GST, but if they traded a gold bar that had been cut in half or where there were impurities that must be refined out, then GST would be payable on the transaction.

Three years after Australian GST was introduced, Britain discovered its system was vulnerable to fraud and suffered big losses. In 2003 Britain changed its rules, as did most other countries that had followed British practice.

While Australia had based its GST on the flawed British system, it did not follow the 2003 British changes and so was vulnerable. It took some years for global criminal syndicates to realise that Australia was still using the flawed system.

Around 2010 and 2011, the volume of gold being refined in Australia rose tenfold.

The investment market for gold is confined to bars of pure gold. Any pure gold that is made impure with the addition of impurities must be refined again in the same way as traditional scrap gold and gold from mines.

Impure or scrap gold was sold to refiners, who paid the sellers a price that was based on the gold price of the day plus 10 per cent GST.

The rogue sellers – the Middle Eastern-linked traders – were supposed to send the GST back to the government, but they disappeared, taking the GST money with them.

The refiners claimed back the GST they paid to the rogue traders in their next business activity statement. These amounts were required under Australian law to be paid to the refiners by the ATO, although the tax office never received the money from the rogue traders.

The Middle Eastern traders were sophisticated and had ABN numbers, bank accounts and other documentation. Once this material became part of court evidence it was easy to see a pattern, showing who was involved. There were no substantial prosecutions.

The states’ GST money ended up in Lebanon and other Middle Eastern centres.

Around 2013, the Australian Federal Police, tax officials and others raided a number of refineries. They stormed into the homes of executives as well as the offices of the refineries.

Some of actual culprits were also raided but they were not the key criminals, so the frauds continued.

Regularly, ATO tax auditors would come to the premises of refiners but found nothing.

The ATO began squeezing the refiners out of business by refusing to refund the GST that the refiners had paid to suppliers. Banks began tightening credit.

Without taking any court action to prove their incorrect belief that the refiners were “guilty”, the ATO used these techniques to put out of business almost every privately owned refining group in Australia.

The $2.5bn loss of state GST money might never have been discovered, but one of the early targets was a precious metals industry company now known as ACN 154 520 199, which was formerly known as EBS & Associates and had been a subsidiary of the Pallion Group, but had been demerged out of Pallion many years earlier.

The Pallion Group is privately owned and is the largest precious metals services group in Australia. It incudes ABC Bullion and is owned by interests associated with the Cochineas, Gregg and Simpson families.

The Pallion Group staked very large sums to fund the liquidators in the actions brought by the ATO. Pallion and their family owners wanted to clear the name of the refining industry in Australia and expose what the ATO had done to a large number if innocent people.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/companies/end-of-an-error-ato-gold-gst-scandal-finally-over/news-story/cc251ad06e9c345506ac475ce296c5ad

***************************************************

Journalists failing to report the unpalatable truths of energy and renewables industries

The failure of some journalists to report what is really happening globally in fossil fuel consumption and renewable energy generation is a scandal.

Why did so few environment reporters even mention the most important story in the lead-up to the COP28 conference being held in Dubai?

On November 30, the US Energy Information Administration reported global CO2 emissions would rise by up to 34 per cent between now and 2050. Its most optimistic estimate was a fall of less than 2 per cent.

Coal use would rise in electricity generation, particularly in India. Natural gas use in power generation would rise globally, as it would in chemical production.

The US would remain the biggest gas user while Middle East gas consumption would rise between 29 and 54 per cent between 2022 and 2050. Liquid fuel consumption would continue to rise until 2050.

Thank God our ABC 7.30 was able to confirm with Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen last Thursday week that Australia is on track to reduce emissions by 42 per cent by 2030.

With 1.1 per cent of global emissions, that will really make a difference. Not.

In various lead-up statements to the COP, senior ministers from Oman, Saudi Arabia, China and India all cast doubts on the global push to end fossil fuel use. Apart from Guardian Australia, much of the left media ignored those statements.

COP28 host country the United Arab Emirates has announced its state-owned oil firm, Adnoc, will increase oil output by 7 per cent over the next four years. The BBC reported last Monday that by 2050, UAE would still be producing 850 million barrels of oil per year, down slightly from its present 1 billion barrels annually.

COP president, UAE’s Sultan Al-Jaber, head of Adnoc, even claimed there was no science to prove a phase-out of oil was needed to limit global temperature rises to 1.5C.

The Guardian on December 3 reported Al-Jaber saying a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back to the caves”.

Reuters on December 5 reported work from the independent data consortium Net Zero Tracker, which includes Oxford University. It shows that 69 of the world’s oil producers have pledged to reach net zero emissions but “only Denmark, Spain and France have set out plans to eventually stop drilling”.

While climate writers here often discuss expanding renewable power generation in India and China, the unarguable truth is both countries are increasing construction of coal-fired power plants and expanding their domestic thermal coal production.

India is now the world’s No. 3 emitter. Its Minister for Power, R. K. Singh, said on November 6: “Our point of view is that we are not going to compromise with the availability of power for growth.”

S & P Global reported on November 29 that India was generating 149.66 terawatt hours of electricity by the end of September, 73 per cent of it from coal. That figure would rise to 77 per cent by 2025 before falling to “71 per cent in 2030 and 52 per cent by 2050”. S & P said public power companies were building 27 gigawatts of extra thermal power, almost all coal. It quoted Singh saying that would need to rise to an extra 80gW.

China, recovering from Covid lockdowns, plans to lift coal and gas power production. OilPrice.com says China expects peak winter power demand this year to rise by 12.1 per cent, or 140gW.

During the first half of 2023, OilPrice says, China approved more than 50gW of new coal power, expanded domestic coal output by 3 per cent and lifted gas imports by 11 per cent.

So if the world is struggling to wean itself off fossil fuels, how is the transition to renewables going? It’s going well for China, which makes most of the world’s wind turbines, solar panels and lithium-ion batteries, but the prognosis is not so good in Europe and the US.

Germany’s Greens Party Minister for Economics, Robert Habeck, told Bild am Sonntag last week that Germany would have to delay phasing out coal. Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government had planned to bring forward the end of coal from 2038 to 2030.

German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, from the Free Democrats Party, said now was not the time to be shutting down power plants. Lindner wants Germany to lean more heavily on domestic gas.

German industry has been hard hit by power price rises since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The industrial powerhouse of Europe risks deindustrialisation as large manufacturing and chemical companies move to China, or to the US to take advantage of environmental incentives there under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act.

Germany’s biggest car marker, Volkswagen, has flagged a €10bn ($16.43bn) redundancy package with its workforce.

It is struggling to transition from internal combustion engines to electric vehicles.

Bloomberg reported on August 29 that a third of German manufacturers are considering shifting their production offshore.

Domestic consumers are also facing cutbacks. Residential power grid operators, according to Euractive.com, will next year “be empowered to restrict the flow of power to heat pumps and electric vehicle chargers … to preserve the stability of the grid”.

Despite initial optimism in the US about Biden’s environmental package, things there are not rosy either.

Wrote Bloomberg on November 29: “Some of the nation’s most ambitious renewable power projects have been shelved, electric car sales are missing targets and investors are fleeing the sector in droves. The result is a $US30bn collapse in US clean energy stocks in the past six months.”

A quarter of the value of US companies “in the S&P Global Clean Energy Index’’ had evaporated in the six months to November 27.

The Daily Mail in London reported on November 29 that global ESG (environment, social and governance) assets had collapsed by $5 trillion in the past two years.

“In the US, where Republicans have railed against ESG funds … such assets plunged from more than $US17 trillion to $US8.4 trillion” in the period.

But in Australia, industry superannuation funds and the federal government are looking at changing superannuation rules to allow big funds – often dominated by former trade union officials and former Labor politicians – to invest more of members’ money in Australian renewable energy projects. It could be a disaster for retirees.

Finally, it’s worth looking at the economics of climate action.

Copenhagen Consensus president Bjorn Lomborg in The Wall Street Journal on November 29 discussed two new studies published in the journal Climate Change Economics.

A paper by Richard Tol says meeting 1.5C of warming would prevent the loss of 0.5 per cent of global annual GDP by 2050 and a loss of 3.1 per cent by 2100. But meeting the 1.5C Paris target would cost 4.5 per cent of GDP each year until mid-century and 5.5 per cent by 2100.

“This means the likely climate policy costs will be much higher than the likely benefits for every year throughout this century and into the next,” Lomborg wrote.

The prognosis in the second peer-reviewed study from economists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology was even more negative.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/journalists-failing-to-report-the-unpalatable-truths-of-energy-and-renewables-industries/news-story/9700a48efd2fd773ac04ba2c9996ff1b

************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

***************************************