DPB birthday?

Stuff reports today on the 40th anniversary of the DPB coming into being.

The DPB turns 40 today, but beneficiary advocates say it's no cause for celebration.

Except the DPB can't turn forty today because it no longer exists. This is like celebrating the birthday of someone who is dead.

 Before the domestic purposes benefit was introduced by Norman Kirk's Labour Government on November 14, 1973, only widowed solo mothers received income support.

Wrong again. A National government introduced the DPB emergency benefit in 1968 and prior to that single mothers could access emergency benefits but there was no legislated entitlement.

Wellington City Mission chief executive Michelle Branney (said) it was increasingly hard to get off the DPB, with the financial slowdown meaning fewer available jobs, and employers being less willing to give solo parents the flexibility needed to work around childcare commitments, she said.

Yet the employment rate for sole mothers has steadily increased.

 The cost of living had since "gone ballistic", he said. He remembered paying $10-$20 a week in rent, which the Reserve Bank's inflation calculator puts at $43-$86 in today's money.

Yes, I can remember paying $22 a week for a one bedroom flat in Wellington in the late seventies. But accommodation supplements and income related rents are far more generous now.

Conservative Party chief executive Christine Rankin, a former families commissioner and Work and Income boss, was briefly on the DPB in 1978 in Auckland, while caring for her two preschool-aged sons.
"It was really tough. You have to be very skilled in terms of how you manage your money."
After about two months, she got a job that paid only slightly more than her benefit, but it set her up for a career, she said.
She did not believe it was any harder now than then to survive on the DPB or its successors. "We didn't have very much, and life was a real challenge then."

There's a surprise. I didn't know that Christine Rankin was Conservative Party CE. That makes them a good fit for National in the welfare reform arena.