The Government is poised to implement a key election pledge requiring parents on the domestic purposes benefit to find work or training once their youngest child turns six.It's not all stick, according to the Nats. Beneficiaries will now be able to earn an extra $20 a week before their benefits are abated. That's one hour of cleaning Bill English's non-residence in entitlement-speak, although I don't imagine many Nat MPs will be hiring me to do their dirty work.
Sickness and invalid beneficiaries are also in the Government's sights, with plans to make it tougher to sign up and stay on either benefit indefinitely.
That's right dear readers, I am an invalid beneficiary. Hire me. Yes, I'm half deaf and have a mind that is part fluffy duck, part gin trap, but the Nats think I'm up for work. Yes, I have been on the dole before and been turned down as under- or over-qualified, or just plain not-what-we're-looking-for. But, like Tolley's testicles, the Nats want to tick the boxes more often to see if I am still strange.
I tell you what, Nats. You can introduce your Benny bashing bolicy once you get WhaleOil a job and off the disability pension. Go on, he's just one man. If you can't do well with one of your own, what hope do you have with all the others apart from locking them up in jail at three times the price of an out of town MP allowance?
5 comments:
Welfare reform in the US since 1996 has been remarkably successful, especially in moving single moms from welfare to work. Check Rebecca Blank's work, Journal of Economic Literature, for starters. NZ could learn a lot from what succeeded and what didn't work so well in the different states' experiments.
The first focus should be DPB. In the year to June the number of part-time jobs actually grew.
As always I wish you well and I sympathise with how you must feel when you read the headlines. But I can't shut up about welfare dependence to save your's and other friend's feelings when such a manifest change has occurred over the past 40 years. Sorry Will.
Eric, I read up on the Wisconsin project back when Muriel Newman was an MP, but will have a read through Rebecca Blank's work. Interesting one of her recent papers suggests extending the tax free credit to childless people as well as the breeders.
Lindsay, I'm keeping well away from the DPB side of it. My experiences and accumulated stories on the subject are too contradictory to mould into any simple solutions.
Don't worry about hurting my feelings. You do what you do. I won't always agree but that's pluralism for you.
Welfare dependence isn't the only thing that has grown in the last forty years, as the NZ Gini Index shows. There's a correlation there but buggered if I can see a way around it. But picking on the largely non-voting underclass while protecting the super-voting seniors is not the most equitable way to deal with it.
Some people need benefits longterm but that's not a reason to not encourage those who could work to get a job.
Not giving assitance to peole who don't need it should extend to policies like Working For Families which give benefits to middle and upper income earners.
Short reading list:
Blank, Rebecca. 2002. “Evaluating Welfare Reform in the United States.” Journal of Economic Literature. 40:4, pp. 1105-1166.
Blank, Rebecca. 2000. “Fighting poverty: lessons from recent U.S. history.” Journal of Economic
Perspectives. 14:2 (Spring), pp. 3-19.
Coutts, Justin. 2004. “New Zealand lessons from United States welfare reform.” New Zealand Business
Roundtable Policy Backgrounder, available at http://www.nzbr.org.nz/documents/policy/policy-2004/PB_No4.pdf
Haskins, Ron. 2006. "Work over Welfare." Brookings Institution Press. See there especially Ch 15, which details the research on what's happened since welfare reform.
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