Why help people with disabilites when you can help Property Investors and Big Tobacco?
A (long) chat with podcaster and disability advocate Blake Forbes, of the BFG podcast. This government preyed on the vulnerable: beneficiaries, the disabled, and patients. But enough's enough.
It’s a bleak time for people with disabilities. Cuts to benefits, cuts to respite care, cuts to residential care. All while government says it’s not cutting anything.
Here Blake and I talk about this current government’s toxic effect on the lives of people with disabilities, and the health sector more broadly. But we all know that no essential public service is spared: education, housing, defence forces, police, primary care…it’s all being degraded. But hey, at least the property investors are winning big.
The National Party: ‘9 out of 10 landlords recommend us.’
-Gary Payinda
Especially when it is not about a lack of ability to finance it, it's a choice
"For many people, it is quite difficult to grasp the concept that the government faces no financial constraints. I don’t blame them. It isn’t helped by the simple (and entirely incorrect) frame that the government ‘is like a household’."
From https://neweconomicmanagement.substack.com/p/rethinking-how-government-spending
The underfunding of disabilities and health is simply criminal. Is it negligence or pre-meditated murder when the government decides to underfund or understaff health and people die as a result? Is there a legal challenge to be made when the decisions made by this government are so harmful?