benefits

Categories under benefits

Helping people into work good but jobs needed first

Written By: - Date published: 11:50 am, June 9th, 2010 - 30 comments

The best form of welfare is a decent job. During it’s nine years in power, the fifth Labour government cut the number of beneficiaries by 150,000 by getting people into work. So assisting more sickness and invalid’s beneficiaries into work is a good idea. But you can’t help people into jobs that don’t exist. The danger is that the government will simply make it harder for people to get the help they need.

Bennett in yet another privacy breach

Written By: - Date published: 3:48 pm, May 29th, 2010 - 77 comments

Audrey Young reports that Paula Bennett has once again abused the trust and power that is given to her as a minister in her campaign to paint all beneficiaries as bludgers. I don’t know anything about this family. But if this family is not entitled to their benefit then Bennett should do her damn job and get them off it. If they are entitled then she shouldn’t be accusing them of being bludgers.

Privacy Commissioner tells Bennett to pay up

Written By: - Date published: 9:36 am, May 27th, 2010 - 122 comments

For her own petty political purposes, Paula Bennett has put Natasha Fuller through hell. Now (finally) the Privacy Commissioner has asked Bennett to apologise to Fuller for the damage she caused and pay her $15,000. Predictably, this awful person has refused. Paula Bennett, you are a disgrace to your office and a disgrace to New Zealand.

Key ‘not sure’ which Bennett he appointed

Written By: - Date published: 10:42 pm, May 6th, 2010 - 82 comments

Prime Minister John Key explained today that there are two Paula Bennetts and he is unsure which one is Minister of Social Development. The two are easily confused. The first Bennett is a solo mum who relied on the DPB. The second Bennett attacks DPB mums, forcing them to seek work.

Whanau Ora fizzer

Written By: - Date published: 1:36 pm, May 6th, 2010 - 25 comments

The budget for Whanau Ora, which has been billed as a magical, ineffable revolution in social welfare will be just $33 million a year. What a joke. Whanau Ora’s budget will be less than twice that of that other great fizzer, the John Key Memorial Cycleway. I predict it will have about twice the effect as well.

Pickled Paula picked a pair of Peters

Written By: - Date published: 12:13 am, May 6th, 2010 - 56 comments

But which Peter did pickled Paula pick?

Bennett floundering over Saunders

Written By: - Date published: 5:34 pm, May 5th, 2010 - 42 comments

Apparently Paula Bennet is not aware quite who she has appointed to advise the Welfare Working Group…

John, it’s time for Paula to go

Written By: - Date published: 1:02 pm, April 30th, 2010 - 230 comments

[Update: TV3 now admits its ’emails’ were a Facebook exchange between Fuller and a friend and Fuller says she made up the money offer. For fuck’s sake, TV3, you can’t run a story based on someone’s Facebook comments. Still, Bennett should not have been meeting with a complainant just before the report is due out. It’s clear she is looking to avoid an embarrassment]

Maori Party turns against beneficiaries

Written By: - Date published: 12:16 pm, April 30th, 2010 - 24 comments

The Nat/ACT/Maori Party government has seen 55,000 more people go on benefits. They want to work. There aren’t enough jobs. How to make life worse for families fallen on hard times? How about cut their benefits? Benefits are meant to go up with inflation. CPI. The tobacco hike puts up CPI. Government should put up […]

Corrupt

Written By: - Date published: 9:33 pm, April 29th, 2010 - 148 comments

It looks like Paula Bennett is getting desperate as the Privacy Commissioner’s report looms.

Perhaps it’s time someone explained to her that “personal responsibility” is more than just an attack line to use on beneficiaries.

Another hand-out for bludgers

Written By: - Date published: 9:09 am, April 26th, 2010 - 98 comments

Our glorious capitalist system should mean farms that can’t handle a bad time fail. Just like any other business. Land gets used for something better. It’s the market. But capitalists don’t really believe in the market. Come the bad times, the farmers want another hand out. So government’s giving them the dole. Yup, the dole.

Weeding out low quality

Written By: - Date published: 8:02 am, April 24th, 2010 - 58 comments

The Nats are looking to cut $1.8 billion in spending over four years. Where from? What and who will be deemed to be “low quality” in need of “weeding out”? The answers are going to tell us a lot about the National Party’s values…

English should follow Bennett’s lead

Written By: - Date published: 11:02 am, April 13th, 2010 - 27 comments

Well, I’m pleasantly surprised. For once, Paula Bennett has played it straight on the benefit numbers. She hasn’t slapped herself on the back, even though last month’s benefit numbers are the best we’ve seen on her watch (in line with normal seasonal variation). If only Bill English could follow suit, rather than claiming credit for illusionary movements in the government’s books.

Whanau Ora report unacceptably poor

Written By: - Date published: 6:42 pm, April 8th, 2010 - 41 comments

The Whanau Ora Taskforce report is out and it fails to even attempt to answer simple questions like ‘why is Whanau Ora the best way to help families’. It provides no evidence it will work. Check out the graphic to the right – what does it even mean? All we do know is Whanau Ora will put public money in unaccountable private hands and be privatisation by stealth.

Sticking it to the underclass

Written By: - Date published: 9:30 am, April 7th, 2010 - 39 comments

Remember “the underclass”? They were briefly fashionable in National circles in 2007. Now that they are the government National’s policies for the underclass seem to involve a good deal of beneficiary bashing. Invalids are being thrown off their benefit before the new legislation is even in effect. Election promises are being broken to remove the carrot and wield the stick. How will this help the underclass?

Over-promise, under-deliver

Written By: - Date published: 11:48 am, March 31st, 2010 - 7 comments

The Key Government is constantly promising us great results and actually do nothing that improves things for New Zealanders. English, Bennett, Brownlee, and Tolley are prime examples of this MO. While they promise great things and fail to deliver unemployment is rising, wages are falling, crime is up, and the government has no plan to move us forward.

Maori Party ambushed

Written By: - Date published: 2:02 pm, March 30th, 2010 - 29 comments

The Maori Party says it was ambushed on National’s welfare reform policy, which Tariana Turia opposes. The Minister and the Associate Minister are at odds on the issue. Does this mean that the Maori Party will be making a stand? Don’t hold your breath…

Bennett: a complete failure

Written By: - Date published: 11:06 pm, March 28th, 2010 - 72 comments

What a complete failure Paula Bennett is. If you could bear to sit through her interview on Q+A yesterday, you would have heard nothing but vacuous crap completely divorced from reality and her actual policies, which are opposed by Treasury, Health, and the Attorney-General. There are 67,000 more working age people on benefits than when Bennett became minister and she has no plan to reverse that.

What support are the Nats giving beneficiaries?

Written By: - Date published: 11:05 am, March 26th, 2010 - 84 comments

Paula Bennett is saying that her benefit bashing policies are about “supporting people into work”
What is that support?
I see punishment. I see threats. Where’s the support?
Where, for instance, is the kind of support that Bennett got as a beneficiary? Training assistance that helped her get into work.

Jobs only real benefit reduction policy

Written By: - Date published: 9:02 am, March 24th, 2010 - 18 comments

You can’t ‘force beneficiaries back into work’ by ‘giving them a kick in the pants’ if there’s no jobs for them to go into. This supposed ‘get tough’ approach won’t get people off the benefit. It’s a cynical exercise in political marketing to make the government look active and distract from the real issues. It is no coincidence that this policy was released a day after the mining policy.

Tenants already taking the hit

Written By: - Date published: 4:45 pm, March 18th, 2010 - 79 comments

I got a call from a friend today, thanks to National his rent is going up. I’ll call him Ned. He’s retired and rents a two bedroom home for $310 a week. He recently received a letter from his landlord advising him of a rent increase of $40 a week. He’s sure his landlord is […]

Glorified holiday for Bennett

Written By: - Date published: 10:23 am, March 9th, 2010 - 45 comments

There are 276,000 jobless Kiwis. The seasonally-adjusted trend on dole numbers is still on the rise. Many other people fall through the gaps and are unable to get public assistance in their time of need.
What better time for the Minister for Social Development to bugger off for five weeks?

Kick in guts for recesson victims

Written By: - Date published: 9:59 am, March 3rd, 2010 - 10 comments

The recession has forced tens of thousands of people out of work. There are now 276,000 jobless Kiwis. The lucky ones (only a third of the officially unemployed) can get the unemployment benefit. Now, the Government is letting inflation eat into their meager benefit payments. Benefit payments are meant to be adjusted for inflation. This […]

Whanau Ora defined-ish

Written By: - Date published: 10:31 am, February 18th, 2010 - 18 comments

BLiP gives the best definition of the Key Government’s billion dollar Whanau Ora plan to date: “Whanau Ora = privatisation of social services.”

Yeah, it does. But I’m still struggling to understand what social services. Will Whanau Ora providers be running hospitals and clinics? Will they be running schools? Will they be making dole and super payments?

Labour pins clueless Nat ministers

Written By: - Date published: 11:23 pm, February 17th, 2010 - 13 comments

It’s hard to decide which is worst: Do Nothing John Key flouncing around the country while thousands of Kiwis lose their jobs, the Joyce cabal pushing their hard-right economic agenda, or the rest of them who don’t have two brain cells to rub together.

No ideas? Bash some beneficiaries

Written By: - Date published: 1:00 pm, February 16th, 2010 - 30 comments

John Key says sickness and invalid’s benefit numbers are increasing because “the previous government encouraged a move off the unemployment benefit into those categories, which aren’t work tested”. You’ve been caught out on this lie by The Standard authors before, John. Did you think it would slip by us now?

What is Whanau Ora? 2

Written By: - Date published: 7:49 pm, February 15th, 2010 - 41 comments

Asked to explain his billion dollar policy Key says: “Whanau Ora is a way of saying we’re going to measure outcomes, instead of just inputs into a family to give greater flexibility to a third party private provider”. I take that to be a long way of saying “I don’t know what Whanau Ora is”.

Whanau Ora, who gains?

Written By: - Date published: 12:00 pm, February 15th, 2010 - 30 comments

Whanau Ora is a terrible idea. It is the beginning of the privatisation of social services, wrapped in a cloak of Maori-centred solutions for Maori. The Maori Party and the National Party can’t agree over (among many things) whether Whanau Ora will be open to all or just for Maori but the reality is that […]

Massive jump in dole numbers – minister washes her hands

Written By: - Date published: 3:32 pm, January 22nd, 2010 - 18 comments

You may remember that late last year John Key, Bill English and Paula Bennett could hardly find the words to praise themselves for the falling numbers on the dole. That was until I pointed out that it was a seasonal dip that always occurs between September and November, and, actually, the seasonally dip over the […]

Another benefit beat-up

Written By: - Date published: 11:00 am, January 20th, 2010 - 24 comments

The Key Government’s anti-beneficiary campaign continues. The latest is a beat-up on long-term beneficiaries. Apparently, 9 people have been on the dole for longer than 20 years, 14 for 15-20 years, and 181 for 10-15 years. ‘Bludgers!’ we’re meant to cry ‘Bludgers!’ But let’s actually think with our brains rather than our jerking knees. This […]

Dumb and dumber on the dole

Written By: - Date published: 1:49 pm, January 15th, 2010 - 13 comments

So, Tariana Turia has (eventually) come out against Paula Bennett’s pointless policy of making people on the unemployment benefit reapply after a year. Of course, Turia is for work-for-the-dole, which is just as stupid. Looks like there will be a show-down, a fight between the two dumbest welfare policies. I predict that Turia will meekly back down, […]

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