Yesterday David Farrar linked to a story about a man who has spent 21 years on the dole. Redrag comments that the number of people long term dependent on benefits is not very high. He says, Wow, is that all?
At the moment at least 124,000 working age people have been on a benefit continuously for four or more years. Almost 60,000 have been relying continuously on a benefit for more than ten years.
Note the word continuously. Many people cycle on and off benefits which breaks the continuity. When I took this into account in 2002 I found that the average stay on the DPB was not the publicised 3.7 years but at least 6.5 years. This is because almost half of the recipients had more than one stay on the benefit. There is a significant difference between continuous time spent on benefit and cumulative time.
Also remember that thousands of people who were on a benefit long-term are now on Super. It would be an interesting exercise to add those numbers into the mix.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
I've posted this previously at DPF's place ...
From the public perspective welfare is like local anaesthetic applied to a skin injury. The injury is supposed to get better and there should be no continued need for further drugs or for the doctor.
In the NZ context, the socialist politician is the doctor. Their objective is to prescribe Heroin masquerading as local anaesthetic for the same injury. The injury doesn’t heal, the patient become numb and totally dependent on the doctor continuing to supply the drug.
An increasing number of NZers have such injuries and believe they’re getting local anaesthetic while the government has continued to increase the dosage of the dependency-creating welfare drug
Don’t get me wrong; there is always a need for local anaesthetic and sometimes for surgery. No caring society would allow genuine injuries to go without treatment. But there is never a need for a whole society to become increasingly dependent on one sole supplier of the welfare drug.
NZ needs to detox and the doctor should be struck off.
Post a Comment