Friday, May 07, 2010

Green MP - blinkers on

Catherine Delahunty had this column published in the DomPost today. It contains the following;

"Most people spend less than one year on any benefit and use that time to rebuild their lives and education."

The MP need only refer to the latest Ministry of Social Development factsheets - available on-line - to find that 69 percent of people reliant on any benefit continuously, are dependent for more than one year; 38 percent for more than 4 years. These percentages however take no account of the fact that many people leave a benefit and then return. The clock starts afresh on their new spell.

The Ministry cannot provide information about how long the average or cumulative stay on a benefit is.

The concern of the Welfare Working Group is breaking the 'cycle of dependency'. Except for Green MPs most people can see that it exists and that it is damaging, to children especially.

The cycle exists recession or not. It is immune to periods of strong economic and low unemployment.

I despair of the Greens and their blinkered attitude to welfare. Some of what Catherine Delahunty says is true. Some beneficiaries work in the community; some are too sick or disabled to work. But to use that to justify crying 'beneficiary bashing' at any suggestion of reform is tired and negligent.

2 comments:

Mark said...

While I am a person who had difficulty at the start of my employment career to stay employed, I did have brief periods year in year out where I was on the Unemployment Benefit.

What I found most depressing was the Case Managers I dealt with didn't care or weren't keen on helping me out to get me a job. In fact that I turned up when asked was all they cared about, not whether they could help me to get employed.

I was an abled body NZder that wanted to work and would do anything, they didn't seem to care less.

Thankfully a friend got me an interview to a job that has now provided stable employment for the last 11 1/2 years.

WINZ is no good at founding you a job, in fact they seem to only care about there own jobs and not getting young and hard to employ people into work.

Anonymous said...

Remind me again: why are the Greens allowed to be in Parliament?