Social Assistance (New Work Tests, Incentives, and Obligations) Amendment Bill

The Social Assistance (New Work Tests, Incentives, and Obligations) Amendment Bill is being rushed through Parliament as a piece of political posturing. It is poll driven. It is populist. It is not based on policy that works. It is discriminatory, it is judgmental, and it is anti-children and anti-families. Those are the views of so many people up and down New Zealand. This Government has been told so over and over and over again at the Social Services Committee, by social commentators, by opinion leaders in opinion pieces in newspapers, by researchers, by academics, and by Government agencies like the Human Rights Commission. They have said in one voice: “Dump this bill!”. They are telling the Government to dump this bill because it will not do what the Minister for Social Development and Employment said she wants it to do. It will not achieve what she set out to achieve.

💬 Dr Paul Hutchison: Who said that?

I can hear Dr Hutchison interjecting as I speak. He was not on the select committee, so he did not hear the submissions, most of which came from organisations that I know that Dr Hutchison would support and find very credible. They came to the select committee and said that this bill was wrong and that they opposed it. They said that it will not achieve what the Government said it will achieve.

We ask why this bill is in the House now. What was the reason for the so-called Social Assistance (Future Focus) Bill? What was the reason for it? The Minister has set up a very expensive—very expensive—working party to fund long-term solutions to what she calls dependency. When asked at the select committee what dependency was, she could not give a definition. In fact, she does not know what dependency is and she was unable to answer that question.

Labour asks why there is a bill that sets out sanctions and a punitive approach to people on benefits, when the Government also has a working party looking at how to solve long-term dependencies. It appears to us that many of the recommendations of the working party, which is made up of a very narrow group of so-called experts on welfare, will be very much in line with this bill. It is a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

We think this bill is part of National’s propaganda machine. First of all, National identifies the scapegoat. Who are the scapegoats out there, to be beaten up on with special reports, special reviews, and special attention, but beneficiaries? National is beating up on people who are invalids, people who have been released from mental institutions, and people who used to be in IHC homes. It is beating up on people who are sick or who are sole parents caring for children. Those people have become the scapegoats for the National Government in this bill. So first of all National identifies the scapegoats.

Secondly, it heaps lots of criticism on them. We need only to look at the comments from the Hon Judith Collins to know what National thinks of beneficiaries. She said National members are upset when they see people sit around all day, watching Sky TV, living off the taxpayers, letting their children run riot, and getting stoned. That was her view on beneficiaries; that was what she said about people who are trying to do their best to raise the most vulnerable children in New Zealand. She thinks beneficiaries sit around watching Sky TV and getting stoned. Well, I do not agree with that, this party does not agree with that, and most New Zealanders do not believe that is what people who are on benefits do. So first of all National heaped criticism on them, then it blamed them.

The next thing National did was use bogus figures to stir up a bogey against beneficiaries. The biggest bogus figure we got was the $50 billion figure, which was in the Minister’s working party group report. It said that beneficiaries will cost us $50 billion if they stay on benefits for their entire lives. Let me tell members that if Paula Rebstock was to have stayed in her Commerce Commission job for all her working life, she would have cost the taxpayers $12 million! That is about as stupid as saying that beneficiaries will cost us $50 billion. John Armstrong said that in a very good column written by him. That figure is a bogus figure and it has been said to scare people who look at beneficiaries.

This bill will not achieve what the Minister wants to achieve. First of all it was misnamed. It was not named correctly, because one of the strongest early submissions we received was from the Legislation Advisory Committee, which advises the Government on all matters to do with legislation. The committee said that this was not a good law and that naming a bill with a meaningless political title meant it meant nothing, and that was a very bad track to go down. It said that the title should include the substance of the bill, because people would have no idea what the bill was all about if it did not. Saying that the bill is future-focused does not describe what is in the bill.

Members will note that I have lodged an amendment to clause 1 that gives much more realistic names for the bill. If members look at my amendment, they will see that the bill could be called a number of things. It could also be called the “We’re Giving Them a Leg Up Bill” or the “We’re Backing Them Bill”. There are many things that we could call this bill that would go along with the slogans that the Minister constantly uses. The name of the bill was a misnomer. It was not the correct title for this bill. This bill is not about assisting people to get off benefits. It is punitive; it does not provide the tools to get people off benefits.

We know, and there was a very good example of it today, that people will work given the opportunity. There were 150 jobs in a supermarket in Mount Roskill today. How many people applied for them? Over 2,700 people. People do want to work. Look at the statistics. When we had full employment in New Zealand, with unemployment at around 3.8 percent, very few people were on benefits. We even had a drop in the number of people who were on the sole parent benefit, because they want to work, as well. They want to work in jobs that suit their child-caring arrangements and that suit their education. But what has this Government done? It has taken away the education assistance that made it possible for people to get ahead. It has taken away the very education assistance that the Minister herself had, which gave her a university degree and which gave her a leg up the ladder. That assistance has been cut by this Government. This bill does not put back that sort of assistance. It does not provide help for beneficiaries to get ahead. We know they want to work, given the right opportunities and the right environment.

One of the most powerful submissions the Social Services Committee received came from the Human Rights Commission. It came from the Equal Employment Opportunities Commissioner at the Human Rights Commission, who had done a focus on work project. This is evidence, if the Minister would listen to it. She went out and surveyed 16 regions and 300 employers, and she found that there was a total lack of jobs. Jobs are a critical component when one wants to get people off benefits and into work. She found that there were no jobs. She also found evidence of a lack of childcare. So people who are told by this bill that they are required to seek 15 hours of work when their last child is 6 will find that there are no jobs for them and that there is inadequate childcare and inadequate after-school care. Those children are the ones who will be at the bottom of the heap once again. They are the most vulnerable and the most in need of our help, and their parents are the ones most in need of our assistance to get them into a position where they can return to the workforce. But this bill is about punishment, punishment, punishment! There is no pathway forward for unemployed people.

I know that many of them do want to work and are struggling. They are struggling now and the Minister intends to make it tougher for them. Why would any Government want to do that? Its focus is wrong. This bill is not a future focus; this is a focus on political point-scoring and votes. A Government that really cared about beneficiaries and their children would be looking at providing support for them.

It has been pretty obvious that the Green Party position on the Social Assistance (New Work Tests, Incentives, and Obligations) Amendment Bill is that it is abusive, it degrades beneficiaries, and it encourages the community to have a negative and very destructive attitude towards beneficiaries. We saw support for the Government’s position that beneficiaries are somehow inherently bad in the Welfare Working Group’s report, which made all sorts of ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims about beneficiaries, including mentioning the ridiculous figure of $50 billion, which has largely been completely discredited even by fairly conservative media.

We are working through the bill in the Committee stage, and there are a number of amendments on the Table. The Green Party will be supporting the amendments that try to mitigate some of the damage that this legislation is doing. But it is clear that nothing in this bill will address the growing gap between the rich and the poor. The household expenditure and income survey came out yesterday. The Government has failed to make any comment about that. That survey shows that the gap between rich and poor is stagnant, and that nothing that this Government has done will impact positively to close that gap. We also know, from all of the research that has been done, that it is the families on benefits who are at the very bottom. They are the ones on the very lowest incomes. The children of those families are the ones who suffer the worst from poverty.

This Government argues that the “work first” ideology, which is that any work, no matter how demeaning, no matter how inappropriate, and no matter how poorly paid, is somehow still good for people, and particularly good for the children. That is the argument that this Government makes. But we know from all of the facts, and the research that has been done and the experience in Australia, for example, that that is just not true. There is no evidence that any of the measures in this bill that will threaten sole parents and force them out into inappropriate employment will have any positive impact on them or on their children. In Australia the Government has retreated from the measures that are in this legislation. It has retreated from those measures because it knows that they have failed. Australia is working more towards educating sole parents and providing educational opportunities for those families so that they have a chance to get better work, have better incomes, and be better able to care for themselves and their families.

Paula Bennett and I both come from similar situations. We were both sole parents. We both were educated while on the domestic purposes benefit. I am very proud to have been a beneficiary and to have had that support when I needed it. Paula Bennett says the same. But what this legislation does, and what Paula Bennett’s policy and this Government’s policy does, is take away those exact same opportunities that she and I had. Sole parents on the domestic purposes benefit will not have access to educational opportunities. In fact, they will be forced out on threat of losing the very money that they need in order to pay their power bill, to pay their rent, and to get food on the table for their kids. On threat of losing that very desperately needed income they will be forced into taking inappropriate employment that is likely to be demeaning and not advantage them or the children in any way. That is the effect of what this Government is doing. That is what Paula Bennett is happy to promote as a woman who herself needed that support and received it.

I still fail to understand why someone who was in exactly this situation, which I have been in and which others in this Chamber have been in, should take away from other sole parents those same opportunities, when we know that by providing education and support, particularly to sole parents when their children are young, the chances are they will get a better job, and a better-paid job, once they come off the benefit. It is much better for sole parents and their children in the short and long term to provide support for them rather than threatening to strip them of their meagre income and forcing them into a market place where there just are not the jobs. It has already been discussed by my Labour colleague, Annette King, that there simply are not the jobs for people to go to. In fact, by forcing sole parents out to work like this, this legislation drives wages down. It worsens conditions for employees who are vulnerable and it makes it very difficult for employees in this situation to exercise any kind of control over their lives. Parenting is a full-time occupation. If one wants to do a good job of it, one needs to be able to do it full time.

The sad thing about the Social Assistance (New Work Tests, Incentives, and Obligations) Amendment Bill is that it is not about getting beneficiaries back to work. The sad thing about this bill is that it is not about instilling a work ethic in people who do not have one. The sad thing about this bill is that it will do nothing to help into work the ever-growing number of beneficiaries in this country who want to work and are trying to do so in a way that two-parent families can often take for granted. The sad thing about this bill is that it is a nasty, nasty piece of political theatre.

When I heard the Prime Minister, and the Minister in the chair, the Hon Paula Bennett, say that what was wrong with this country was that beneficiaries needed a kick in the pants I was ashamed to be a member of this House. I am ashamed that we have this legislation from a Minister for Social Development and Employment who herself benefited from a system that saw her value as a mother, saw her value as someone who needed to be there to raise her daughter, acknowledged that sometimes there were barriers to her leaving that system, and provided assistance in the form of the training incentive allowance.

To see that Minister not only take that assistance away from every other solo parent in this country but also introduce legislation that says that beneficiaries are worthless is a shameful day for this House, and it is a shameful day for a Minister who has pulled up the ladder behind her and left behind every other solo parent who is in the same situation that she was in. This is not a day of glory for the Parliament of New Zealand.

The fact is that this legislation is being put in place to hide the fact that the Government has no plan to deal with rising unemployment. It was not that long ago that New Zealand had the lowest rate of unemployment in the world, and we did not do that by vilifying beneficiaries. We did not do it by taking some of the most vulnerable people in our country and saying that they are worthless and we will give them a kick in the pants. We did it by trying to create the economic environment that allowed jobs to be made.

In Mount Roskill today, 2,700 people applied for 140 supermarket jobs. Why does the Minister continue to tell us that New Zealanders do not want to work when 2,700 people queued up for 140 jobs at a supermarket? Last year in South Auckland more than 3,000 people queued up for 150 supermarket jobs. New Zealanders want to work but their Government has abandoned them. Worse than that, their Government is now blaming them for the fact that they are not in work. Their Government is now saying: “It’s your fault. You’re lazy, you’re worthless, and that is why you do not have a job.”

💬 Hon Dr Nick Smith: Oh, rubbish! It’s just tripe.

I tell Dr Smith that the reason they do not have jobs is that this Government has no plan to deal with rising unemployment.

The Government talks about its plan. It talks about research and development. It should tell that to my friend who has a PhD and was fired recently from a Crown research institute because of health cuts. Government members should tell that to the dozens of other scientists in this country who are being fired from Crown research institutes while this Government stands up and says it is doing such a good job in research and development and is creating jobs. Well, it is not.

This legislation is a smokescreen. It is the nastiest type of political smokescreen that we ever see in this House, but, unfortunately, it is one that we have come to expect from a National Government. We can vilify solo parents all we want. We can call them lazy and worthless, but we need them to raise their kids.

Let us talk about the reality of solo parents. I have a parent who went on the domestic purposes benefit after my parents’ marriage broke up. My parent did that because one parent needed to be at home, not so much for me because I was old enough to deal with it, although it was still hard, but because a parent needed to be with my younger brother and sister at a time that is very, very difficult for any family, and at a time when kids need their parents more than anything else—in the case of a marriage break-up.

This is often the norm for domestic purposes benefit recipients. They are not baby factories, as the Prime Minister called them. They are not baby-factory 14-year-olds popping out kids to make money. They are very often solo parents, leaving at the end of their first marriage, who need to be with their kids—and their kids need them. They are not worthless. They are carrying out a very important job to make sure that those kids do not end up in such significant trouble in their education that they end up in our justice system. For a Government that constantly trots out the hollow rhetoric of being about families to say that it now does not care, that suddenly it is just standard that all kids who grow up in sole parent families at a certain point—

Debate interrupted.