The Government has outlined their formula to get us back on track to grow poverty, grow inequality, grow the number of people living in their cars, and this formula includes cutting benefit increases, keeping benefit levels below the poverty line, then increasing unemployment, followed by increasing benefit sanctions. And just watch as more people experience material hardship and food insecurity, and as UNICEF reports that Aotearoa continues to be one of the worst countries for children’s wellbeing in the developed world.
The Minister should be ashamed to even refer to this bill as supporting people into employment, because there’s nothing in this bill that does this—absolutely nothing. She either did not read the bill or is just choosing to omit the bits of this bill, the majority of this bill, that will simply push people further into poverty. The so-called non-financial sanctions—and that is, I think, an inaccurate description of what they do—will push people further into poverty. I think calling them “non-financial sanctions” is simply incorrect, because let’s outline the benefit sanctions that are in this bill, and what they do.
Compulsory money management will put 50 percent of someone’s income in a payment card that then they won’t be able to use to pay their rent, to pay their bills, or for other basic essentials, when we know that most people on the benefit are already paying 50 percent of their income on rent. We know that this benefit sanction, deemed “non-financial”, will literally leave people unable to keep a roof over their head. There’s a financial impact in here.
Then let’s look at community work experience. Most organisations who were consulted reported that they were not so keen to participate in this because it actually destroys the purpose of volunteering and it burdens those volunteer organisations. That benefit sanction will do nothing to adequately support people to engage and to be part of their communities. And what’s worse, people subjected to the sanction as well as others will be unable to access things like hardship grants. For those who don’t know, people on the benefit, many of them, rely on hardship grants on a sometimes regular basis, sometimes even weekly basis, just to survive. How can we call these sanctions “non-financial” when they strip away people’s ability to access the very assistance that allows them to sometimes have food on the table?
Then we also have two benefit sanctions that were added later in the piece—terrible lawmaking process, because the Minister outlined in the Cabinet paper that she intended to do this and didn’t let anyone in the public know until later in the select committee stage, stripping away people’s ability to submit on these two other so-called non-financial sanctions. If the Minister was so confident about the process that she was following in her policies, she would have let people know of her intentions so that these sanctions could be adequately scrutinised.
Let’s talk about the so-called job-search report, which will then force people to apply for three jobs each week, but then those people won’t even be able to access the assistance that then allows them to enter into employment—so, for example, financial assistance that allows them to have access to uniforms, that have access to transport, that have access to a vehicle that allows them to get into that very same job. Literally, what the Government is doing is making it harder to get into employment, and no matter how much evidence we present to the Minister over how benefit sanctions do not work—they simply push people further into poverty—the Minister seems to not care, but I actually think that it’s beyond the Minister not caring.
The Minister always intended to increase poverty in this country, because I cannot see anything in this legislation that does otherwise, and we’ve already seen the impacts of Government policies. For example, there is the stripping away of subsidies that allow people to access basic essentials, such as prescriptions and such as public transport, and that number is growing—the number of children who don’t have the bare essentials. like food at the table, to just be well.
It’s really clear to me that there’s nothing in this bill that will support children to thrive and parents to find employment. It’s also clear to all of us—it doesn’t take anyone doing an economics paper to know this—that there are not enough jobs out there for every unemployed person on the benefit. Those are facts. This means that the Government has not just relied on increasing unemployment—they haven’t created enough jobs to actually ensure that everyone who’s unemployed has an opportunity to get into work—they gutted benefit increases only to then increase financial sanctions.
But I want to also believe that a different future is absolutely within our grasp, because, under the last National Government, I was privileged enough to actually take part in a campaign to get rid of a benefit sanction affecting solo parents. At the time, around 2017, there were 17,000 solo mums who were affected by the sanction for simply not naming the other parent of their child, being stripped away of income support. The National Party then did not care. They did not care about the fact that solo parents were being pushed deeper into poverty as a result of this benefit sanction. They had no evidence of working. They constantly opposed repealing it.
But we changed the Government and we got rid of the sanction, and if it were up to the Greens, we would not only get rid of the sanctions imposed in this piece of legislation but all benefit sanctions, because it’s actually the Government’s responsibility to show us and demonstrate that their policies are working as intended. So far they haven’t. They’ve gone off vibes; they’ve gone off cruelty; lack of empathy. But we should not expect anything else from a Prime Minister that called people on the benefit, during the campaign trail, “bottom trawlers”. This is the kind of attitude that the Government members take when it comes to the people living in poverty—using names, conjuring beneficiaries who they’ve never met to simply try to make ideological points and punch on those that are literally sometimes sleeping in their cars, often many of them receiving income support, working to make ends meet.
What’s worse is that in this piece of legislation, the Government also narrowed the definition of what we call “work gap”, which is the definition that allows people to then apply for a benefit by narrowing who is considered to have a work gap. Effectively, what the Government is doing is limiting who can access income support. This is to get them on track for their target of 50,000 less people on the benefit. It is not about getting those 50,000 people into work; it’s simply to strip 50,000 people of income support. The Government has admitted that they don’t care where those people go when they are not on the benefit. They simply want to get 50,000 people off income support.
For what? To pay for tax cuts for landlords. That’s basically their motive. They’re taking away resources from the poorest people in our country to give money to the landlords. It shows that this Government is reheating their nachos by bringing back policies from the 1980s: having massively increased unemployment and inequality simply to give bucks to the wealthy few.
I want us to commit—and I commit everyone on this side of the House, at least from the Green Party—to fighting back against this piece of legislation. We commit to listening to the voices of people on the benefit, and we bring them with us in our campaigns to change this Government and have an income support that allows people to live with dignity. In fact, I would say that caregivers form a large part of who is on income support. It’s the work that is actually the most under-appreciated by this Government, because if this Government appreciated caregiving, raising children, they would not have income support for those that are raising children, and are focusing on raising children as a primary task, below the poverty line. This Government has decided to treat caregiving obligations as not worthy of livable incomes.
I want to mihi to everyone out there doing their best to access income support under our Government, that is making it harder for them to do so at a time where even Work and Income staffers are telling us that their phone line is “oversubscribed” because of the policies that this Government has introduced. We even have the case managers telling us that they don’t have the capacity to help people and continue with programmes to prevent homelessness because of shameless and terrible, cruel policies that simply increase poverty. We know that something is terribly, terribly wrong. No matter how much the Government members on the other side may try to spin this as a positive thing to help people get into unemployment, the facts speak for themselves: this bill will increase inequality, poverty, homelessness, and will not support people into employment. No matter what the Government member says, it doesn’t actually match the facts that are in all the reports, all the evidence, all the research—because they don’t care. All they’ve cared about, as they’ve indicated to us, is calling beneficiaries “bottom trawlers”, punching down on those who need help the most, and increasing unemployment. This isn’t a Government that is here to serve the many; simply to serve their wealthy few mates.
We will fight for an economy that works for everyone and to repeal this terrible and shameful piece of legislation as soon as we get back into power. Let’s make this a one-term Government.