Sue Bradford rejects inconvenient truth about DPB

Media Release
Sue Bradford rejects inconvenient truth about DPB
Monday, August 17, 2009

Green MP Sue Bradford is refusing to accept that the DPB is now responsible for violence towards women.

Quoted in The Epoch Times, 8 August, 2009, Ms Bradford said, "To remove it [DPB] would be one of the most evil things we could do to our women and children." It would mean a return to times when women " were dependent on men often (suffering) humiliation and physical violence."

Bradford was responding to a proposal contained in a report, Maori and Welfare, published by the New Zealand Business Roundtable last month.

Lindsay Mitchell, author of the report, said that Ms Bradford was ignoring aspects of the DPB that actually increased women's vulnerability to violence.

"Giving young women, in particular, a long-term secure income and home, makes them attractive to men who have no desire to raise and support a family themselves. Men who want a roof over their heads, sex on demand and another source of money when their own dries up. Men who want to control women physically and financially."

"This life style was acknowledged by the 1996 Ruka Ruling in which the Court of Appeal agreed that a woman who was living in a de facto relationship featuring violence and a lack of emotional or financial support from the partner, should be entitled to continue receiving state support - usually the DPB."

"Sue Bradford just doesn't want to accept that the DPB is no longer primarily about leaving violent relationships. It is about encouraging and staying in them."

"If, on the other hand, assistance became temporary only, the recipient stops being the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg. Women would make far more cautious choices about partnering and deadbeat men would cease to have their exploitive expectations met."

Reiterating the central message in her paper, Mitchell said every year thousands of uneducated and unskilled teenagers enter the welfare system that then traps them. "So long as the present rules continue, the benefit system is condemning many young mothers and their children to the very lives Sue Bradford likes to think it frees them from."