Just read his post on Kiwiblog on why people go to foodbanks. These are the people that John Key says make poor choices. Looks like Farrar agrees with Key. I just posted on this below.
Well mate, try going along to one of these foodbanks. And see for yourself who’s turning up. People in real need who are embarassed, who have been shoved out the door by Work and Income and refused help.
This is what my office was told this morning by one of these foodbanks:
… referred to the “new poor” and noted that they are not as resilient as those who have been poor on a long term basis. Their distress is high. She said that last week she was dealing with a former staff member from a govt department.
Farrar believes people who use foodbanks fall into one of three categories:
- Those whose expenses regularly exceed their income – which probably does indicate a budget prioritisation issue
- Those who have a temporary one off high priority expense, such as medical bills (note special need grants are also available)
- Those who prefer free food to paying for food
What rubbish. Talk about out of touch. And yes, I’m pretty cross.
I called it as I saw it.
The real debate is about how some people are forced into receiving charity, not how some smoke or drink their benefits away.
Your childlike attempt to twist the debate away from people in need, to engage in some more benefit bashing, just shows that while I may or may not resort to answering in slogans, at least I don’t actually believe those coming from nat party hq.
I say get some compassion, stop playing the nat’s blame game, and do something to help the poor sods caught up in a torrid time.
Next time you’re in the supermarket, maybe get an extra basket of groceries to donate to the sally army. If you like, you could even make it full of home brand goods so they don’t get use to the luxury of named brands.
And I say restrict benefit to those who don’t deserve it and give it to those who do.
Net result – those who do everything they can to help themselves but need a hand get more, those who can’t be bothered get less or nothing, and the hardsuffering taxpayer doesn’t have to keep stumping up ever more to featherbed the feckless.
All in all it would be seen as a positive result.
By all apart from those whose game plan is predicated on enslaving as many of the poor as possible on benefit so they can be used as fodder at the ballot box.
Ok George, who will play god to decide who is in need and worthy and who isnt?
A benefit has to be circumstance based not idealogy/worth based.
“And I say restrict benefit to those who don’t deserve it and give it to those who do.”
I am not disagreeing entirely as there needs to be some kind of sanction for those who (and its smaller than you may think) in this group act irresponsibly – but – my concern is the kids – whats your solution to protecting the kids in that rhetoric? As they are the collateral damage. And any real practical solutions to address the imbalance for the kids is not going to come easy or cheap.
paul/waterboy
I totally agree that this is a difficult one and accept that I don’t have the answer.
But lets agree on the acceptability of the principle that, in an ideal world, we would be able to find a way to direct benefit to those who deserve it and to deny it to those who don’t. And then the debate could be centred around thrashing out the practicalities of whether some movement towards doing that is possible.
Because at the moment the Labour attitude seems to be that it’s undesirable to have any situation other than the current one, and that as a natural side effect of a welfare state we have to live with a certain percentage who are on the take.
If there’s one thing that’s turning ordinary people against those who are legitimately on benefit it’s that attitude. Even an indication that Labour is vaguely interested in trying to make some progress in that area would be positive for them.
As I’ve said all along – I don’t believe Kiwis mind give folks a hand when they (i.e. those who are funding it) believe that it’s really needed, and that the recipients are doing everything they can to help themselves, but that they don’t like people who extract the urine. And there are certainly a number in that category.
That Labour tries to pretend otherwise implies that Labour doesn’t really mind how it spends what is, in fact, other peoples’ hard earned money.
I see Clare’s happy to sound off with immature ‘emotionally charged’ diatribes, but cannot back it up with reason.
lolz at the irony
Total bullshirt.
If that were the case, given how the benefit numbers have ballooned under the nats, wouldn’t it be wiser for the unemployed to vote smiley wavey in?
Silly post, george. Silly post.
“I see Clare’s happy to sound off with immature ‘emotionally charged’ diatribes, but cannot back it up with reason.”
Exactly the point I have been trying to make, yet no one can answer the simple question “What is incorrect, or ‘out of touch’, about the three catergories Farrar has used?”
Al1ens, elaborate..
I still haven’t had an answer to my question, is all.
thanks Clare. well said. and you’re not the only one who is ‘cross’. Farrar was god-awful on Natrad’s panel yesterday. It seems the starting point for most conversations on this is to agree that people are making poor choices and to start from there. which is ridiculous.
“Can someone provide evidence that no one on benefit spends any of their allowance on any of the items I’ve mentioned?”
I posted before you made this comment that John Campbell did that with regard to smoking in the footage around that free food shop. Can you provide evidence that people who go to foodbanks have made poor choices and cant budget?
I get what you are getting at but you are also playing the “if one person does it, then HA, I am right” game which actually changes nothing and advances nothing other than to allow people to make an unjust extrapolation of that one person to presume a greater number than can be proven.
No I’m not, Tracey.
What I’m trying to do is to get Labour and its supporters to accept that there is some rorting of the benefit system and that this really irks a great number of people. (And let’s not get into a slanging match about the rich ripping off the tax system because that’s another issue altogether).
And following on from that I’d like to get Labourites to state clearly that they’d like to be able to do something about benefit abuse.
At the moment it really does seem that Labour is content to look on bludging, to whatever extent it exists, like ‘shrinkage’ in retailing – basically something that you can’t do anything about, and that everyone’s got to pay for.
Shopkeepers aren’t criticised for trying to minimize shoplifting, even though it’s a tiny proportion of their customers who engage in it. Indeed they’re considered sensible for taking measures against it. When it comes to benefit abuse governments should take the same approach.
I truly believe, from the comments of various Labour MPs and supporters, that you couldn’t give a stuff about it.
That may or may not be true. If it isn’t it certainly appears that way to a large section of your potential vote. People who you need to woo.
The Left should never champion a welfare system which does not expect self discipline and effort…I wish Labour strategists would take on board what George (whoever he is) writes – he certainly speaks for many disenchanted Labour voters.
C’mon George on another thread you’re unhappy about paying $12.50 pe rhour for overnight care for people with intellectual disabilities, so please dont try to make it seem as though you are only concerned about holding the “no hopers” to task.
As for your question about getting tough on benefit abuse, here’s an answer, which includes efforts by labour to address it.
The evidence for the existence of widespread benefit fraud is paltry to non-existent – despite the fact that a special fraud intelligence unit was set up in the Social Welfare department in 2007 to detect it. Last year, the department checked 29 million records, and found the benefit fraud rate (as a proportion of the total benefits paid) was a miniscule 0.10 per cent. A declining number of prosecutions – from 937 in 2009 to 789 last year – resulted.
Of the $16 million in benefit fraud detected last year, a proportion was carried out by social welfare staff – ten of whom were sacked last year for ripping off the system – and not by beneficiaries themselves. While any level of benefit fraud is unacceptable, the $16 million a year currently being incurred is hardly an intolerable burden. Currently, New Zealanders spend $16,1 million a day on impulse purchases.
Moreover, other forms of unacceptable behaviour leave benefit fraud far behind in the dust without attracting the same negative stereotypes. The major foreign owned banks for instance finally agreed in late 2009 – and only after being pursued at great expense through the courts by the IRD – to cough up $2.2 billion of what they owed in unpaid taxes. Meaning : the settlement figure this case alone was about 140 times greater than the total amount lost in benefit fraud last year..
Has anyone from Labour got the guts to explain the damage it did to social welfare throughout its nine years as the previous government? Can it explain why they abolished the special benefit, introduced work-testing benefits paid to those who are sick and to carers of children and removed the purpose of social security away from providing direct support for the poor and vulnerable? Does it still stand by what it did?
So it’s bash Labour for being soft on benefits, and bash Labour for being firm on benefits.
Gotta love politics. It’s so much more fun than tv
Yeah the ones who give one tick to ACT, they’re exactly the disenchanted voters we want to court
Wow, what a daft analogy George. What you are saying might work if we had a good Government in power. let me ask:
What if the shopkeeper insisted on following you around the store as you shopped, checking up on you? If the moment you walked in the door, he started credit checking you and wanting access to your accounts? What if that same shopkeeper looked disapprovingly at you every time you picked up an item he thought that you couldn’t afford? And what if that shopkeeper insisted on rummaging through your hand bag every 5 minutes just to check that you hadn’t pocketed something off the shelf?
Do you think that shopkeeper would be criticised then? You think?
So take your sensible measures by all means. But all Basher Bennett, Key and English want to do – speaking in terms of your analogy – is make all shoppers look like shoplifters.
Thanks for coming on board, CV.
Now we only have to agree what measures are sensible…
There’s an old saying:
Beggars can’t be choosers…
I’m sure that Mr G would be happy to take the votes of anyone in November.
@Al1ens – it’s not a matter of bashing Labour for being tough on benefits, it’s wanting to know whether Labour still stands by it’s destructive policies from 1999 to 2008. Those policies weren’t just a slight lurch to the right, they altered the basis of our welfare system in ways it could only be expected from a very conservative almost Thatcher-like government. The nats in fact failed in the 1990s to do what Labour managed in it’s nine years as government. Labour’s ripping into Key and Bennett for their stance on welfare, but the way things stand Labour’s record suggests they agree with Key and Bennett. Trouble is, nobody from Labour wants to talk about it. Interesting how easy it is to get shut out for telling the truth.
So the right want Labour to come on board and ensure a bi-partisan approach to taking on the undeserving on benefits – a bit like the bipartisan approach to entrenching the Richardson-Shipley benefit cuts and tolerance of a level of benefits where children are raised in poverty.
The most unPC truth in the western world is this – while it is the bi-partisan economic policy of the OECD nations to have permanent unemployment there are no bludgers, just a surplus of workers over jobs.
As to the extent of the problem, at one point this surplus reduced to 17,000 on the dole – however the government wants to work test half those on the DPB (50/100,000), SB and IB (over 100,000) – so this means once including the 68,000 on the dole at the moment and those UB not eligible for the dole but excluding those on the DPB not being work tested – there are about 250,000 surplus workers in the country.
How do we choose to ration out the available jobs – to those who want them most, to those who need them most or to push the “undeserving poor bludgers” into work at the expense of the rest – many who want and need the jobs more.
The “shrinkage cost of benefit bludgers” is the most cost effective part of our welfare sytem while we have endemic continuous unemployment – with the notable exception of where there are children involved.
Labour’s position as at 2007 was the same – they wanted to work-test people on the invalid’s benefit, passed legislation that allowed it, then handed it over to the nats in 2008. The current government’s latest lot of legislative changes to the SSA didn’t touch the invalid’s benefit because it didn’t need to – Labour had already done it for them. This, of course, was only a fraction of the damage Labour did in its latest stint as government. Nobody saw it coming in 1999, especially given its stiff opposition to the Shipley/Richardson assaults. The most interesting thing now is that no Labour MP is prepared to discuss comparisons between Bennett and Key’s latest handy work and what they did when they were the government. There’s actually very little difference, and in many ways Labour’s attacks were far more severe.
The blog post asked what DPF was going to say next …
I suggest:
If the law is not changed (or appealed to Supreme Cout) then $500 million will be be spent – and not extra patient or pupil will get better care due to it. It will be $500 million for a zero return. No IHC patient will get better care due to that $500 million.
Do I get a prize?