Here is Vernon Small this morning:
The Government rejected plans to include beneficiaries in a package to help families with newborn babies, despite official advice they were the most vulnerable.
Budget papers show that last November, Treasury, Inland Revenue and Social Development jointly considered ways to give more help to families after the birth of a baby, in particular those on low to middle incomes, including beneficiaries.
Options considered included an increase in the parental tax credit (PTC) – part of Working for Families, but not available to beneficiaries – and extra paid parental leave (PPL).
Documents do not show when things changed, but by February ministers had rejected the inclusion of beneficiaries and had limited it to those in paid work.
That prompted officials to note: “Such a package would be targeted solely at families in paid employment. The children most at risk are those from beneficiary families and this package would not provide additional assistance to them.”
Why on earth would you exclude the most vulnerable children, if not simply to enjoy poking them in the eye?
This move by National Ministers is so disgracefully mean-spirited. The cost of helping those kids – the most vulnerable kids – as well as others would not have been enormous. The world economy is rebounding. It was the moral thing to do.
lprent: Rob saved you from me writing about this. My commentary was going to be a whole lot more sulphurous and it isn’t just a moral things to do.
This is just outright stupid by this National government. There is nothing as economically and socially expensive to society as a child that grows up badly into their long long adulthood. There is no time that is more stressful and more vulnerable for their opportunities for the future and their parents as in those first crucial months. It is also one of the most expensive points in any parents life.
The idea of National deliberately trying to make it worse for a section of our society during that period because they don’t like them being poor beggars belief.
Somewhere in this article they talk about creating jobs to get “working” parents. Of course the “creation” of jobs by this pack of ministers has meant that they still have a level of household unemployment that is not decreasing and with increasing numbers of long term unemployment. This is exactly the same as the result that they produced in the 1990s, so you’d have to assume that it is deliberate. But then National talks blithely about trying to have equality of opportunity while hamstringing their kids? WTF!
While Labour did stick this particular assistance in WWF, at least they made the attempt to get people into work rather than just kicking them off benefits like National does.
Somehow babies are meant to suffer a lack of future opportunities for National’s incompetence because National has moral quibbles about people managing to be poor when that is where they put them? National – a party only for the completely insane selfish hypocrites.
Damn. Looks like I wrote my post anyway.
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