Weekend Wrap: Morrison’s ”blessing” a curse on NDIS, Barnaby’s Insiders sell off plus wage theft & pork barrelling

"The Week on Wednesday" with Van Badham & Ben Davison

Ben Davison looks at Morrison's explanation that his debate response to a mother who's child has had their NDIS support cut that he was "blessed to not have had to go through that" was about the difficulties in navigating the NDIS, rather than a comment about children with a disability. Even if we take Morrison at his word it is, at the very least, a condemnation of his own failure to properly deliver the NDIS.

Plans have been cut by an average of 4%, appeals to the AAT have doubled, foreign private equity backed unregistered and unregulated "platforms" that "connect" workers and participants in, what has been described as, digital sham contracting arrangement are taking 14% margins out of the tax payer funded system.

As the campaigns head into the Northern Territory it is timely to remember that HALF of NDIS plans in the NT have been cut in the last six months.

Insiders discussed in detail the failures of the Morrison government on the Solomon Islands and Ben explores how Morrison spent the end of the week setting up another pork barrel program while refusing to answer questions about Australia's largest foreign policy blunder in the pacific for over 70 years.

Barnaby Joyce was the Insiders guest from the government and he made it clear that their only plan is to let multinational corporations sell our resources overseas. While sitting in Gladstone, where people have to fly to Brisbane to get medical treatments as billions of dollars of resources depart the docks, Barnaby was asked what the government's plan for the future "If they want to buy it we will sell it" was his response.

This ideologically lines up with the findings of two major pieces of work from the Australian Union movement this week.

The ship building company Austal received a Morrison campaign visit and a $124M contract after having been found to underpay its workers. The union, ETU, won the money back but Morrison wouldn't even acknowledge the request for safeguards to prevent this from happening again on government funded projects.

The ACTU released research showing that while 100 countries put limits on the use of "fixed term contracts" Australia is not among that group of 100 nations and that casuals in Australia are being paid up to $350 LESS than ongoing workers doing the same job.

Ben urges everyone to join their union at australianunions.org.au/wow and to put the Liberals last (with a brief explanation of how the ballot papers work)