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Believe me, people with disabilities are just as concerned about benefit fraud as anyone else. Money spent on those who are not in need is money that isn't being spent on vital services to support us in the community.

Disabled people need more invested in their education, housing, job training, transportation, assistive technology, and independent-living facilities. Governments earn back this investment - and more - by making people with disabilities economically productive citizens.

Why is it is claimed that if people won't or can't take care of their own needs, that people in government can do it for them?

These days the technology can solve our problems and then some. Solutions may not only erase physical or mental deficits but leave patients better off than 'able-bodied' folks. The person who has a disability today may have a superability tomorrow.

People didn't always see a person with a disability who had to use a ramp or elevator as people who have been given unnecessary privileges. But I run into that often now. People are saying, 'Why do we have to go to great expense for these people?'

We are all in this together. We want to have, I suppose, a single point of entry so that anyone coming near a disability service can get a very complete picture. Government needs to understand that picture, and we need to be able to offer somebody a one-stop shop.

State government has too often been used to look out for the insiders and not the citizens. This has insulated poverty from progress, and need from remedy.

Without being overtly political about it, if people with severe disabilities are calculated in societal terms purely as a monetised unit, in terms of how much they cost in terms of care, you lose an important sense of who they are and the effect they have.

The elderly are all someone's flesh and blood and we cannot just shut them in a cupboard and hand over the responsibility for taking care of them to the state.

We have an opportunity, but we have an obligation to senior citizens and to the younger people who are entering the workforce today to help ensure that they are going to be able to trust the government to have a workable program that benefits them as well.