Estimates Debate — Vote Employment

It has been very interesting listening to the speeches this afternoon in this estimates debate. I welcome back the Hon Steve Maharey, the Minister in the chair. I hope everything is fine. We have missed him. Certainly, we have missed his sense of humour, which I think was so aptly displayed in that last speech. What a comedian! It is certainly good to have him back again for the time that he will be a Minister, which will not be long.

Today I shall talk about employment. I certainly noted that the Minister referred several times to employment rates in New Zealand. He forgot to mention all the people who shift off the employment benefit and go on to the sickness benefit or the invalids benefit. At the end of last week, and just this week, doctors have been saying that they are sick of Work and Income people sending unemployment beneficiaries to them, having told them to tell the doctors to give them a sickness form. I note that the Minister has previously been quoted as saying that sometimes unemployed people get sick. Well, we know that. Lots of people get sick. That does not mean to say that they end up on a sickness benefit. Many of us would know of people who we would think could be on a sickness benefit, but they are not. Many of us know people who are on an invalids benefit, yet can commit criminal activities, can have children, can do things like pick kiwifruit, and all sorts of jobs that they get paid for under the table. Many of us know of such people in our electorates and just generally.

Not too many people are fooled by the contention of the Minister that the number of people on the sickness benefit is suddenly increasing—35 percent under Labour, in the last 4 years—because we have an ageing population. Does the Minister think we all came down in the last rain shower? When people are past the age of 65 they get superannuation. That is what we call being aged. Being aged is not being 50, 55, or 60; being those ages does not necessarily mean that suddenly all those people cannot work. We know that it is a “have”, the doctors know that it is a “have”, and the people of New Zealand know that it is a “have”, and they have had enough of it. They are saying constantly in the polls that they have had enough. They have had enough of that politically correct rubbish. They have had enough of burglars and sexual predators who happen to have been on a sickness benefit, an invalids benefit, or an unemployment benefit, because they are supposedly too sick or too ill to work, or are unable to get work.

Many of us see in our electorates and around the country that a number of people in small businesses are really, really hurting under this Government. Small businesses are finding it difficult to find staff who are stable, to compete with bigger firms, to pay all the extra holiday pay, and to do everything else that this Government is imposing on them. That will have a detrimental effect on employment.

I know that the previous Minister in the chair talked a lot about how the Budget is helping families and all of that. Has he taken a couple of kids to the movies lately? Does he actually realise what the cost of living is under this Government, and that there have been substantial increases in the cost of living? The more that we tell people that it is OK to be on a benefit, and that they can survive on it and earn some money under the table, the worse it gets. In fact, the cost of taking kids to the movies now is pretty horrendous. Just the other day I took a couple of kids to the movies, and at the end of the day, after I had got all the things they thought were a requirement in going to the movies, there was not an awful lot of change out of about $70 or $80—after parking and everything else. Many, many families in this country could not afford to do that. Certainly, I felt it was not something I would do again in a hurry.

Costs are constantly being imposed. They do not just go on to businesses; they go straight back through the system to the very people who can least afford it. We are talking here about the families. They are the ones who can least afford it. Our just doling out a few dollars here and a few dollars there does not help them. Those people want some relief. They want some relief in taxes and they want it now.

I was just waiting to see whether any other member wanted to speak on employment. I really do appreciate members giving the Government an opportunity to speak on this topic.

I remember when I first came into Parliament, which was some time ago, back in the 1990s. Soon after that we were entertained—or whatever the National Government thought it was doing at the time; it treated it almost like entertainment—by cuts in the benefits of people throughout this country by up to—

💬 Judith Collins: Did you put them back?

Yes, we have, actually. Incomes of people were cut by up to 30 percent.

I tell people who are new in the House, and maybe were not around politics at that time, that that is where the food bank industry came from. It came from those cuts. I can remember the Christmas after the cuts had taken place. I had asked Mrs Shipley in the House what the impact would be of those cuts in people’s incomes—whether we would see poverty, and what kinds of problems might emerge. She had said that she did not know, and that the Government would wait and see. About 12 months later we saw that households no longer could put food on the table. I remember ringing Peter Gresham, who was the Minister of Social Welfare at that time, and a member for an area not far away from my Palmerston North constituency, and saying to him that I had queues outside every church in my city, that people were queuing all over the place, because in the post-Christmas period they simply could not feed their kids. I remember he came home from his holiday and introduced changes to the benefit system, because people simply could not live on the benefits that had been cut by the Shipley-led National Government at that time.

One other thing that happened in 1992 was that unemployment hit 11.9 percent, under a National Government. That meant that there were unemployment rates of 30 percent amongst Pacific Island people, and we had unemployment rates of plus 30 percent amongst Māori people. We had entire communities of people around this country where no one had paid employment, under the National Government. So when we look at employment and unemployment today I want to say thank you to the National Opposition for giving this Government’s members an opportunity to say that we are very pleased that in 1999 the people of this country put us into Government; that we now have the fourth-lowest rate of unemployment in the developed world, at 4.3 percent; and that more people are gainfully employed in this country, as we sit here today, than ever in the history of this country. More people are going out every day, earning an income, and taking it home, and being able to put food on the table. They have a future for themselves because we now have more people in gainful employment than ever in the history of this country.

National members say we need to do something about the number of sickness and invalids benefits, and I know that they want us to do that because they could not do anything. There was an 84 percent increase in the number of invalids benefits during the 1990s—84 percent—and, from memory, an around 65 percent increase in the number of sickness benefits during that time. But they point to the one little window when there was a change. That one little window was when Mr Sowry and Mr McCardle decided they would abolish the sickness benefit—there was to be no sickness any more; people could not get sick under the National Government—and put all those people on the community wage. In other words, they blurred the figures for those 2 years, because they amalgamated a range of benefits under the umbrella of the community wage.

National members now come into the Chamber and say: “Let’s compare the period when we abolished the sickness benefit with the sickness benefit situation now.” Nobody, except Dr Newman, would accept that kind of shell game, because good public policy is about comparing an apple with an apple, so that one can make the difference and say one is improving things. The National Government abolished the sickness benefit for a couple of years, before we changed it back to being a sickness benefit because we do acknowledge that people get conditions or diseases that mean they cannot go to work, that mean they are out of work for a short period of time. That is what a sickness benefit is for, so we have put it back in place. But to compare the period now with the period when there was no sickness benefit is an extraordinary piece of charlatanism in terms of trying to say: “Well, we did one thing and you’re doing another.” Let us compare apples with apples.

Under that Government, the number of sickness and invalids benefits went through the roof, and it had not one single policy that would change it. Do we? Yes, we do. We have a change that means that in April this year, against the backdrop of a very positive employment and unemployment situation, we introduced radical new policies around the sickness benefit and the invalids benefit. They are the kinds of policies that people right throughout the OECD are following closely because we do better than they do. We have better policies than they do, so they are following us. New Zealand is once again getting back into a position, thankfully, of being a leader in social policy, rather than having no social policy, which is what we had under the National Government. Once again we are leaders in this policy, and we will try to address these problems.

The last point I want to make is this. If people around this country are listening to this debate—and I am sure there are many thousands riveted to what we have been saying here this afternoon—they can compare these two policies. We are interested in ensuring that people are treated fairly when they are sick or have a disability. We will treat them fairly. We will ensure that, where it is possible, they will get an operation, they will get treatment for their condition, we will train them, we will support them in the workplace, we will fund the transition to work, and we will be extraordinarily positive in opening security and opportunity for those people. That is what we will do. What would a National Government do? It might abolish the sickness benefit again, it might introduce time-limited benefits, and it might tell people that it will introduce work-capacity testing again of the kind that was a disaster for people with mental health problems in the late 1990s. We have not heard one single idea from these people that they had not already tried in the 1990s, and those ideas caused them to lose heavily the election in 1999. People were sick of the mean-spirited, hopeless, misguided policies that the National Government introduced in the 1990s. People are now looking at more people being employed than ever, the lowest unemployment rate we have had in 20 years, optimistic communities all over the country looking for more, and a fair and just Government that is now beginning to do things about the sickness benefit and the invalids benefit.

I have one last point to make. Dr Newman said on the radio today that she would provide me with individual cases of doctors who have been browbeaten by a Work and Income person. I have the senior people from Work and Income and the Ministry of Social Development sitting behind me now, and they are anxious to hear about such a case. We have not heard of one single case yet. Dr Newman promised me today on National Radio, on Morning Report, to provide individual cases. We are eager to hear of those cases. I say to Katherine Rich and Mrs Collins over there that we are eager to hear from them too. If we have individual cases of doctors who are being browbeaten to the extent that they break their ethical position and give medical judgments that do not have a sound basis, because they feel threatened by one of our clients at their clinics—if that sort of scenario is playing out, if there are individual cases of doctors around this country having to do unethical things or to make judgments that are not soundly medically based, because they feel threatened—we want to know about them.

I make this invitation now, and I extend it to tomorrow. If we can hear of those cases, we will support those doctors to make ethically and medically sound judgments on the people who are in front of them, because what do we want in terms of Work and Income? We want one thing. We want those doctors to tell us whether that person is sick within the terms of that benefit, disabled within the terms of that benefit, or fit to be a job seeker under the terms of the unemployment benefit. That is what we want. We have no policy for anything else other than that. If there are individual circumstances that Ms Rich or Dr Newman knows about, we are eager and waiting to hear of them. We want to support those doctors to be able to do the right thing. We look forward to hearing of those cases, because we have not heard of them yet.

Vote agreed to.

Vote Housing agreed to.

Vote Social Development