The Dom Post reports this morning that National is looking at cancelling unemployment benefits after a year and forcing applicants to re-apply. This is in the wake of a story of notorious South Island family who look like they have been ripping off the system for years.
Ladies and Gentlemen welcome to the softening up phase of National’s welfare policy. Every New Zealander should be pi**ed off with the likes of the Harris family. If they have been ripping off the system in the way that has been described in the media then they are undermining our social assistance system, and effectively taking money from those who need it most. They have obviously intimidated Work and Income staff and some serious action is required.
But is their behaviour, and that of a small number of others, reason enough to slash and burn through the whole system? National want you to think so, and will drip these stories out there to soften the public up for cuts and tired old policies like work testing DPB parents and work for the dole. The reality is that the Harris’ of this world are a small minority and thousands of people legitimately need state support, only access it when they need it, and move off it in a reasonable timeframe.
Further, the headline announcement in this story- that people on the unemployment benefit will have to re-apply each year-is a deliberately misleading description of how the unemployment benefit operates. It is not a situation where you sign up and that is it for all of time. Nowadays people receiving the unemployment benefit are constantly followed up by Work and Income as to their progress with getting work. They are required to attend courses and training. The notion of re-applying is empty sloganeering, will achieve nothing and will really just be a bureaucratic burden.
By all means lets look at how we can help move people from welfare to work where that is possible. Lets crack down on those who abuse the system and let’s have more training and budget advice for those who need it. But sadly for National that is not really what this is about. It is quite simply about stirring up people against beneficiaries, and softening up the voting public for their welfare agenda.
the gnats always get into benny bashing when they cant think of anything else to do
I have always thought that being a parent is a full time job in itself. I don’t think they should be harrassing beneficiaries.
The hypocrisy of this is what most alarms me. Yes, let’s bash someone who has been knowingly rorting the system for years. Once we know about it – let’s take action against them and ensure they never do it again. But let’s be consistent shall we? Mr English, I’m looking at you.
Most beneficaries don’t rort so it’s bad to punish them all. And why do they need to reapply? Just a waste of time. There will always be crims out to rip off any system and all they can do is hope that they will be caught. I can’t wait til parliament opens again
Where would the harm be in cancelling the dole after 12 months and requiring reapplication? Surely this is part of the process at the moment anyway isn’t it?
I was on the dole for 4 months back in 1993, I had to go in once a week because I was working part time, and tell them how many hours I’d worked so it could be adjusted accordingly. Seeing as I was getting money for free, I didn’t have a drama with it.
Surely reapplying once a year isn’t too much to ask?
And why is your nose out of joint at the thought of work for the dole and work testing DPB parents? Everyone else has to work for their wages, why should we treat those requiring welfare aid with kid gloves?
I think this is a very clever tactic and is probably politics 101. Labour would have done exactly the same thing but on other issues.
For me personally I am pleased that there will be a toughening up of the welfare system. For nine years the Labour government reduced the concept of self responsibility by increasing the dependence on the state through a variety of measures. Now National are quite rightly working to undo all those dependencies and increase the concept of self responsibility. I look at it as tough love. Before the last election, I attended a social Justice debate at my local church and not one of the speakers talked about the concept of self responsibility. So (predictably) I fully support having to reapply for the benefit each year if only to stop or at lease make it harder for the parasites such as the Harris family living off my hard earned taxes.
one point needs to be stressed constantly – it is Mr Key’s government that is doing this – not Ms Bennett as some sort of autonomous spirit. It is about time that Mr key felt the heat of public scrutiny over this sort of vindictive and unnecessary proposal.
I said before when Basher Bennett released those details that the government would get around to some more beneficiary bashing in time for the budget. I fully expect benefits to be reduced in May. They’re out to reduce wages even more and to do that they need people to be even more dependent upon the capitalists.
Spud – Being a parent is a full time job – but the reality is that most self-sufficient families have both parents working out of a desire to provide well for their family and pay the bills. In my experience (being professional and middle class) most families we are familiar with have both parents working. Only the wealthy can afford to have Mum stay at home all day especially when the children are all at school.
So therefore why should a sole parent on the DPB whose children are at school not go out and work at least part time and make a positive contribution to the their own lives as well as to the country? As I note above people need to take much more responsibility for their lives and I think the left will become very surprised at how much support there is for a review of the Social Welfare system.
We will hear the screams of anguish as the threat of self-responsibility becomes a reality – I call it tough love and the sooner the better.
“For nine years the Labour government reduced the concept of self responsibility by increasing the dependence on the state through a variety of measures.” – Unemployment went down under the Labour government!
M, onty my man
Because those mums can spend those school hours cooking and cleaning and taking care of errands. Most beneficiaries aren’t crooks like the Harris family. And the Harris’ are getting punished so I’m satisfied that justice is being done. 
N, athan – not kid gloves, I just think that since these people are being monitored anyway that it seems a little redundant to make them reapply every year. It just wastes time and achieves nothing more than what is being achieved with their case manager visits anyway. IMNSHO!
Oops just realised my s, exism – Dad may also be taking care of tasks too.
@Monty. The right is traditionally most interested in the minutae of the lives of beneficiaries but hates the spotlight on its own ranks, especially when caught out (yes you Blinglish, Rodney and Roger). This curtain twitching junior stasi attitude, at its worst with the 90s “Dob in a bludger” taxpayer funded TV ads shows an unpleasant side to the NZ character.
Personally I support some sort of Universal Basic Income and revised taxation system to help end this awful hoop jumping for so many kiwis. Keith Rankin has done the sums on this and advocated it for years. And Monty if you are so principled hand back any Working for Families payments you may be receiving, join a union and achieve your own wage increase from your employer.
Spud – unemployment did go down – great – but i was not referrign to unemployment – a referred to a dependance on the state through a variety of measures – such as but not limited to the increase in sickness / invalid benefits, the ACC entitlements, WFF, stste funded healthcare, extra holidays and so on.
Neither did I say beneficatries were crooks – but plenty are. They are but one example. A full review and restructure of the Welfare system is long over due and is now necessary- it certainly has moved away from the original design and is now a comfortable hammock trapping too many people in the welfare poverty cycle.
I struggle with the concept of a struggling hard working family trying to make ends meet while down the road there is a beneficary quite content being a burden on society.
I think WFF is a great scheme
We’ll never agree on that.
I wouldn’t say plenty of beneficiaries are crooks, some are, but those kinds of people would find something to rip off anyway. The good ones shouldn’t be punished.
ACC is a world class system providing care with less cost to the public than private insurance
It made a huge profit last year. 
I like public health system, paupers get sick too you know!\
I think if a person is sick or worse an invalid then they should be state funded. I don’t begrudge Joe Painful joints the right to rest. They didn’t ask to get sick!
I havn’t forgotten my experiences in the mid to late 90s when I looked after an elderly parent with dementia. Winz treated me as a suspect malingerer and there was clear evidence that our address was under surveillance for a time in 1998. They disappeared when they realised I was on to them.
This happened under Christine Rankin’s leadership, and she was appointed to the Families Commission by Paula Bennett.
Not surprising therefore that Bennett is starting down the same path. They are two of a kind. It’s also ironic that both of them used the welfare system when they needed it.Then they turn on others who find themselves in the same predicament.
Oh Anne I’m sorry to hear that.
Sigh, everyone knows ‘a mate’ who is on the take and should get caught. It seems part of our national psyche, or at least our changing room psyche (that’s where I hear it). This is good news for WINZ; as unemployment is not going to go away WINZ can return to being the growth industry it was in the past!
Don’t worry Spud. I was one of many hundreds at the least who had the same treatment. It was more amusing than anything – seeing them take off in their car when they spotted me watching them. I took great delight in writing to Winz and telling them what I thought of them. They kept their distance after that.
My Dad in his late 50’s was made redundant and currently looking for any job but has not been successful as yet. He has to go into WINZ every week or so to show what he is doing to find work. How is cutting his assistance when he is already made to go in going so regularly going to help him or anyone else in this position?
As for me I am currently studying extramurally starting in Feb (Yes I got in yay me) at uni so will be qualified the year my youngest turns 6. She turns two next year. We not all trying to rip off the system.
I understand the reasoning behind ‘have both parents working out of a desire to provide well for their family and pay the bills’ but both parents come home and help out each other with household chores and getting the children dressed ready for bed, etc. Solo parents do all this on their own so it takes twice as long. This gets easier of course as the children get older.
This is so frustrating…
Anne, I take your example, how on Earth is this an abuse of the state Monty? Why should someone like Anne, hard working, cares for the family, contributing to our society, why should she be punished for the few?
Argumentum ad absurdum – this means we will have an expectation that all trust lawyers need to be monitored. All financiers are bad. All SME employers are out to gut the system. This proponderance of arrogance of the right is abhorrent.
What will you do when made redundant and your assets and savings are exhausted? What will you do to pay your mortgage when you can’t work because of a severe back injury? (Cue all the “I’ve got insurance”, “I would upskill” rhetoric, well, what if you can’t!)
What will you do if one of your kids (and I don’t actually wish this on you you understand) can’t find a job and is in need of support? – you’ll look after him or her. This is what the state provides. Yes, some will abuse it, just as lawyers will abuse trust, bankers might lie and kids might take the p*ss, but the state provides a safety net.
You’re cruel and unkind to suggest this net should be a priviledge. Social security is not a programme, it is a moral covenant between a government and its people.
♪ ♫Christmas bells, oh Christmas bells
ringing through the land
bringing peace to all the world
and goodwill to m-a-a-a-an♪ ♫
. . . unless you’re unemployed, in which case, go take a flying fling at a rolling doughnut cos when the Goober gets back from Hawaii he’s got some extra chores for you scum.
Working for Families is a state subsidy for businesses that don’t want to pay the full costs of raising a family. So, yeah, it does pay out to bludgers which are, more politely, called capitalists. This is also true of everything else you listed as well.
If everyone had to try and exist on the measly wages paid by our businesses it’d only take a generation or two before our population went into permanent decline and eventual collapse because if you can’t afford to have children then you won’t unless you’re forced to.
I really am not that familiar with NZ law. There is no such thing as a constitutional right here. So, if a government agency arbitrarily denied you a benefit to which you were otherwise entitled, would a court force them to provide the benefit? What if John Key and his majority passed an Act called the “Arbitrary Welfare Act” of 2010, and that act allowed agencies to deny benefits for any or no reason? We can call them “at will” benefits. The entitlement language is still there, but agencies could treat benefits like privileges, which they can take away at any time.
This could be applied to any public employee, tenured professors, police officers…city council members. Anyone who has a statutory benefit of any kind.
The fact is that every time the Nats get in they start a process of “prepairing “the public for “Justified ” cuts to the welfare system.They tell of Solo Mums who have “dozens of kids by different fathers . ACC clients who are working at back breaking jobs ,ect ect . I wonder if they have a full time force out unearthing these people .Most of their cases are unproven but it seems to warm their cold hearts so as start savaging the welfare state . They do it every time and the gullible public fall for every time. It always amazes me that when the Tories are in lots of people seem to become very lazy
thats the only explanation why so many people become unemployed when they are in .I mean what other explanation could there be? it could not be mismanagment by the Government could it??
@ John Marshall
Back in the 1990s(their previous term in office)they set up a
” benefit fraud squad”. This squad consisted mainly of ex-policemen and women who had probably resigned from front line duties in their 40s. At the same time WINZ started the “dob a beneficiary a day” scheme as it came to be known. They set up a phone link where people could anonymously dob in supposed fraudsters. It later transpired that the vast majority of these calls were maliciously motivated and only a very small number of benefit fraudsters were prosecuted. Anyone with an ounce of common sense could have told them the outcome and I recall Labour trying very hard to do so. But of course it was really a political exercise to gain brownie points with the bourgeoisie. Now we have them trying to do it all over again and for the same reason.
The despicable aspect of the exercise is: that many innocent people will have their lives turned upside down just as happened last time.
@Anne – That’s awful
@ Spud
My circumstances have changed so I’m no longer affected, but I feel sorry for those who, for whatever reason, are currently in the welfare system. It’ll be the usual story… Labour will have to pick up the pieces when they are back in power.
Anne, that’s great! Congratulations!
I hope it all works out for you!
My friends have six children so are doing very well on WFFamilies..They own a rental property..he has a pension from a previous state job , he is in secure fulltime employment..It came out awhile ago that about 900 families on WFF’s owned at least one rental property..These people don’t need this benefit.
I agree Anne about the hypocrisy of Rankin and Bennet…They are the ultimate hypocrites..I saw somewhere where Bennet had to back down over some allowance or other..
The Nats like to talk tough..but they are still letting”migrants” in here..My husband is unmemployed..so are many of his former colleages..Cheap Philipino labour was brought in the replace the existing workers..and hardly a whisper in the media..Hope all the newbies had agreat Xmas.
@theresaj
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/students-study/news/article.cfm?c_id=329&objectid=10612920&pnum=1
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/3120558/500-study-assistance-is-a-token-gesture-MP-says
@ Spud. The elderly parent died some years ago now so I no longer had to rely on the DPB.
@ theresaj. Yes. I agree with you about the WFF. It is often going to families who don’t need it. The trouble is, it is difficult to figure out how it could be administered without incurring huge overhead costs. It would mean setting up a huge bureaucracy if a means test was introduced.
Grant, you are dead right – this is precisely what they’re doing. But if you look over the last nine years your party was in power they did exactly the same thing, with even worse results. There were some extemely damaging changes made to basic welfare provision that not even the nats could manage to get through, but not for lack of trying. When they did try who was the first to cry foul? Labour’s lucky though, because what it did to social welfare went pretty much unnoticed because most of the changes were whacked through under urgency, and in any case we’re talking beneficiaries here, so most people either don’t care or think it’s a good thing. The changes made under Labour have made it much easier for Key and English to follow up on too, with the help of mouthpiece patsy Paula Shipley Bennett.