Tuesday, December 11, 2012

Children's Commissioner recommends cutting welfare to the childless



This particular report has so many different 'costs' for tackling child poverty it's hard to make a reasoned response .

Does the Children's Commissioner want "$50 million to $60 million", "$159 million" or "$1.2 billion a year"?

Whatever it is, his suggestion for finding the extra money is ill-considered.

He suggested that the accommodation supplement could be cut for people without children to help pay for it. The report says 58 per cent of accommodation supplements are paid to people without children, 21 per cent of whom are boarders.
On principle, why is it fair to punish those who don't have children to reward those who do?

In practice, many of those "boarders" are paying board to a sole parent on a benefit. The very people the Commissioner wants to give more money to.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

He seems to have completely missed the point:

Pouring more money into families which have already been shown to be misusing welfare money is not going to fix anything.

If anything, we need to take the parent out of the loop and directly fund school dinners and disrict nurse visits to school... like we used to have in the 60's.

thor42 said...

I agree with anonymous.
This is a STUPID report!

It suggests throwing more money at families that have more children, so the more children you have, the more money you get.
Yeah, riiiiiiiiight.....

Gee - has anyone noticed that the vast majority of dysfunctional families on benefits seem to have a HUGE number of children?
**I've** sure as heck noticed that.

This report is airheaded, pie-in-the-sky, unicorns-flying-over-rainbows stuff.
It should be binned immediately.