Time to dismiss Welfare Working Group report, The Greens
Welfare Working Group recommendations flawed without investment, COMVOICES
Wrong-headed Welfare Working Group miss the point,NZCTU
If only those poor people would stop breeding, The Hand Mirror
A beneficiary advocate says proposals to contract out welfare services will create an industry out of misery, Sue Bradford
The only one I have a reaction to is Meteria Turei's, on behalf of the Greens;
“The earthquake in Christchurch has shown the compassionate and supportive power of communities. In that context the Welfare Working Group’s report looks incredibly harsh and inappropriate.”
My feeling is that most New Zealanders can differentiate between emergency aid and lifestyle welfare. The WWG report is an attempt to deal with the latter.
By the end of December 2009 14,394 babies born that year were being supported by a main benefit. A big chunk of the ensuing dependency must have been preventable. The earthquake was not.
2 comments:
The WWG report is an attempt to deal with the latter.
It's an attempt, yeah. But suggesting that sole mothers should be looking for work when their babies hit 14 weeks old, and that we should pretend invalids and the sick are actually "job-seekers," make the thing a ridiculous joke. As with Brash's productivity report, we'd have been better off not spending the money on it.
That's a misrepresentation PM.
They recommended that single mothers should be required to look for part-time work when their youngest child is three - in line with a number of European countries and more generous than the US or some Canadian provinces. It also coincides with the availablitiy of 20 hours free ECE.
The 14 weeks - same as PPL - applies only when that child has been added to an existing benefit and the parent was already in the work-testing regime. It is an attempt to discourage people from adding children to avoid work-testing.
Was it a waste of money? Not if National decide to adopt some of the recommendations as policy for their 2011 manifesto. The group also did us a service in forcing MSD to release some meaningful data about long term dependence.
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