The awful welfare bind NZ is in

The DomPost reports that nearly 800 families are claiming the Restart benefit. Given entitlement was backdated to November 8, I believe this is quite a low number. Especially over a period where unemployment traditionally rises anyway. Of course, for context, what we need to know is how many applications have been denied.

I suspect that many of those claiming will be people returning to the DPB from working 20 or more hours per week and qualifying for the In Work payment. (It's a surprise that the Child Poverty Action Group haven't been carping about the inequity of this situation as they go on endlessly about the unfairness of the In Work payment and how it discriminates against children of beneficiaries. Now children of beneficiaries whose parent has been in work are getting more than those whose parents haven't.)

The article goes on to mention the Jobs Summit. My input/suggestion would be a radical overhaul of social security. As they say, ad nauseam, extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. It should have been done when the economy was strong. But now the matter is even more urgent.

Here's the awful reality. We can't treat individual benefits in isolation. Some say, get rid of the DPB! But because, unlike other countries, NZ pays unemployment benefits as of universal right, from general taxation, denied the DPB, most of these individuals will gravitate to the dole. The US was able to reform their DPB equivalent because unemployment insurance wasn't automatically available to all. It is impossible to extract a positive effect from abolishing the DPB without reforming the unemployment benefit (and sickness and invalid benefits for that matter).

When social security came into being it was funded primarily through a special and additional tax. Only contributors reaped the benefits. That changed in the 1960s when it was decided that social security would be paid wholly from the consolidated account. What a mistake. How we are going to pay, are already paying, for the utopian ideal of a fair income for every citizen regardless of their input.