Member

We should not be surprised that we saw such an increase in the amount of money lost to fraud in the system. The truth is that when there is a knee-jerk reaction to a moment of crisis, there will be serious repercussions. When the state takes extra powers and the powers of the state go unchecked, many inequities flow. The Bill is another example of that. There seems to be an unwillingness to talk about it. There is a collective denial about the reality of what lockdown did to our country and the dire consequences we are all suffering. We need to admit our mistakes and learn from them. That is the only way we will not repeat such mistakes of mass state intervention again. That state intervention, a one-size-fits-all approach, exacerbated by haste and rapid deployment, lacks the detail of planning. It lacks tried and tested vehicles of delivery, and it lacks safeguards. The massive intervention proposed by the Bill at the very least needs further testing and piloting, and, most importantly, the publication of the results and an analysis of them.