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25 February 05
The single benefit
The mark of
an effective welfare system is not only how well it looks
after the genuine needy, but also how quickly it helps those
without a job into the workforce. On both of these counts, New
Zealand’s welfare system - once hailed as one of the best in
the world - is now sadly failing.
Corrupted
by widespread fraud and abuse, welfare not only falls short in
providing a decent standard of living for those who
permanently rely on state support, but, fuelled by the changes
made by the Labour Party, it has become a gravy train for too
many beneficiaries who feel that the country owes them a
living.
Amongst
this latter group is a growing number of women who have come
to regard the Domestic Purposes Benefit as their ‘right’.
Without an acknowledged stable relationship with any of the
fathers of their children, they expect taxpayers to fund their
lifestyle choice.
More often
than not, these women are the children of mothers who were on
the dpb themselves, like Marama, a young women who came to my
parliamentary office for work experience: not only was she on
the DPB, but so too were all her sisters, her mother and
aunties, as well as her grandmother and her sisters. When I
asked Marama what had happened to all of the men, she said
they were all on the dole - too poor and too violent to look
after the women.
In my mind
when a benefit system entices the weakest and most vulnerable
members of society – uneducated and unskilled girls from
broken homes – to become state-funded child-bearers, raising
children on their own without the fathers there to support and
protect them, then society is clearly heading in the wrong
direction.
That is why
it is now so imperative that welfare in New Zealand is
overhauled and given a fresh start.
In order to
turn around our entrenched culture of dependency - which sees
children in low socio-economic areas aspiring to little more
than going onto the dole or the DPB ‘when they grow up’ -
I believe there is a strong case for putting an end to these
institutionalised benefits by replacing them with a single
‘temporary’ benefit, with exemptions for people who are
permanently unable to provide for themselves.
For those
who are sick or have very young children, there would also be
exemptions from the need to take on work, but those exemptions
would be temporary. Everyone else on a benefit would be
strongly connected to the workforce, so that welfare again
returns to being a system that fast-tracks people into jobs.
Having
concluded that a single benefit would mean the abolition of
benefits that have become a way of life for far too many New
Zealanders who are not truly needy, I thought that the Labour
Party’s single benefit proposals released this week might
have merit. However, as details emerged, such optimism was
seen to be ill-founded.
The single
benefit proposals are now being widely recognised as an
election year stunt by the Labour Party designed to dispel the
fact that Labour is soft on welfare.
Part
of the problem is that the Minister leading this initiative
has already established a track record of announcements that
sound tough, but fail to deliver. It’s just like his
flagship
job creation scheme - ‘Community Employment Organisations’
- which were meant to create 4,000 ‘real, sustainable’
jobs but produced only 400, before sinking without trace.
Then
there was the much-vaunted ‘Social Entrepreneur Scheme’,
which gave the country the now infamous hip-hop tour, before
it too was scrapped. Later we had the ‘Jobs Jolt’
programme, which was launched with great fanfare but achieved
little, and now this week’s re-run of the announcement five
years ago about a single benefit.
Sadly for a
country that is crying out for welfare reform - with 355,000
working age adults and quarter of a million children dependent
on benefits - according to the official papers that were
released this week, the facts behind this proposal just
don’t stack up: the single benefit hasn’t been signed off
by Cabinet, exposing as hot air the Minister’s claim that
this is the biggest change to welfare since 1938! Further, the
proposal is short on detail, it lacks proper costings, and
according to insiders, in its present form it is totally
unworkable.
While
simplifying the administration of benefits may, without a
doubt, result in a welcome reduction in bureaucracy, such a
measure on it’s own will not reduce welfare dependency. In
fact, counter to such claims by the minister, the
government’s own Treasury forecasts show that welfare rolls
are expected to rise by 28,000 over the next four years.
If we as a
nation want to end the culture of entrenched dependency, that
is so harmful to children, that has fuelled our growing crime
rate, and is preventing us from achieving our potential, then
abolishing entrenched benefits is only a first step.
We also
need to bring back the requirement for an annual review of
benefits to cut out fraud and abuse, we need to introduce time
limits to create a sense of urgency, and we need to ensure
that those who find it hard to get work are engaged in
full-time work experience to help them develop the habits and
skills of the workplace. Further, a pro-active case management
system should be introduced that provides child care support,
transport help, financial planning assistance, and the like,
so that even those people with the most complex needs, can
sort themselves out, get a job and move off welfare.
Finally, it
is imperative, that any programme of welfare reform is
accompanied by policies to generate jobs including a lowering
of taxes and a reduction in business compliance costs in
particular, as well as the re-introduction of a trial period
into employment law so that more employers will be willing to
give those hard to place beneficiaries, a go.
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