The partner of a family member, for instance, a healthy and fit young man, spends his days on various “courses” arranged for him by WINZ and his evenings prostrate on the couch playing with his PS3 while his partner struggles to keep house, raise two children and juggle a part time job. How the system can allow him to coast from one non-job to another I simply can’t understand.

I’d love a crackdown which saw his ample ass tossed off the couch and into a job – yes, even one at McDonalds if necessary. And if the money that previously went to him and people like him were distributed amongst the deserving recipients, I’d be ecstatic.

The difference between me and the people to whom you refer is that I’ve been round politics long enough to know that no one is willing to do the hard work necessary to improve things on a micro level and will just make sweeping macro changes which will redistribute inequality.

In Paula Bennett’s case, after reading recommendations written in stick figures and speech bubbles, by all accounts.

I knew you would.

Foreign workers and foreign small business owners, beneficiaries, immigrants…anyone slightly ‘other’ presents a convenient and thoughtless ‘explanation’ for the majority and becomes a target for all that is going ‘wrong’.

And all you can expect from the media if or as it hits an ugly spiral is reporting without explanations. They are a part of the real problem as outlined by QoT

‘Course it’s a lot easier to say “I’m struggling day-to-day because of That Bludger There” than “I’m struggling day-to-day because of systematic oppression and socio-economic mechanisms specifically designed to keep me down”.

It’s an unpleasant world when people are sticking the knife into each other over a few crumbs that have fallen from the table.