Rift over reform

I see Trevor Mallard is now getting it in the neck from The Standard over his allusion to UK Labour taking up the welfare reform cause.

The welfare system isn’t broken – unless you count the 40% of 65 and 66 year olds who are getting a pension while being employed.  The point of the welfare system is to do what any civilised society ought to do: provide some basic support to those who are unable to work due to sickness or injury and to those who want to work but find none is available. It does that at a cost of $5 per day each.
The system works because when there are jobs to be had people go off the dole and into work. Employment growth under Labour dramatically reduced the number on the dole to just 17,000. Long-term unemployment recipients numbered a couple of thousand. The numbers on other benefits only rose in line with population and demographics. Overall, Labour got 100,000 people off benefits. Now, its gone up 60,000 under National. Why? Not because anything’s changed about benefits. Because there’s no fucken jobs.

The problem with these observations is the assumption that the high number of people on other benefits when Labour took over was OK.  It wasn't. The phenomenal rise in dependency - DPB and SB and IB - occurred during the 1980s and 1990s. That has to be reversed.