Remember this…
…and this…
…Al Nisbet’s jaw droppingly racist cartoons from last year. They play on the talk hate radio stereotypes of beneficiaries designed to generate the ‘other’ who can have every manner of social ill blamed upon them.
To date it has worked extremely well. From Paula Bennett’s release of private information about beneficiary mothers daring to criticise her draconian double standards by cutting benefits she herself had accessed, to the venomous hate speech Cameron Slater vomits out whenever someone complaining about what little they receive. Punitive measures to restrict spending, contraception for welfare mothers, wiping tens of thousands off benefits and then not recording them so that they become invisible collateral damage.
Funny how it’s not an over bearing nanny state when it’s aimed at poor people.
All have been greeted with a cheer from the working poor who look at their measly low wage weekly pay and eye up their neighbours welfare pay with envy. The working poor don’t blame National for introducing crushing labour reforms in the 1990s for their low wage, they blame beneficiaries out of jealousy, it’s divide and rule at its best.
This changes when the cuts start going beyond the stereotypes and start cutting people they identify and connect with.
The contempt many NZers seemed to feel towards state tenants who have resisted being thrown out of their state homes is a sad recent chapter in our anger and spite toward one another, but that hate is difficult to maintain when those being so traumatised are the elderly and the disabled…
More than one in five of the first 780 state house tenants facing possible eviction under a new Government policy will be elderly or disabled.
A paper taken to Cabinet last month by Housing Minister Nick Smith and Social Development Minister Paula Bennett reveals that the two ministers have decided not to exempt the elderly and disabled from the new policy of reviewing all state house tenancies, ending the previous policy that a state house was “a home for life”.
…likewise, the absolute horror that blogger Writehandedgirl has had to endure in her dealings with WINZ resonate in a way that goes beyond the bennie bashing stereotypes.
For me, the current Kafkaesque welfare system was best on exemplified by Sam Kuha, the northland beneficiary who went on a hunger strike after attacking a WINZ Office with a hammer….
Kuha, who lost a leg and the use of an arm after being run over 20 years ago, started his hunger strike after being refused a food grant on September 14.
He had already received three special-needs grants so Winz rules required him to see a budgeter before getting another. Kuha refused, saying it was pointless as his income and expenses had not changed since his last budget, and in any case there was a two-week wait to see an adviser.
He said he would not lift his hunger strike until the three-grant rule was changed. As an adult on his own, he could get by. His concern was for families with children.
These struggles, these injustices are occurring every day to tens of thousands of beneficiaries. In the once egalitarian country of NZ, John Key has only managed to lock in inequality as a reality without end. Tax cuts and property speculation are enough for those doing well to turn a blind eye.
The inhumanity we are allowing to devour those on welfare hurts them as much as it hurts us.
That’s what this election needs to be about, not public opinion polls that rely on faulty landline representation.
Well said Martyn!!
There’s not a word I can add to you post, Martyn.
Hear’s a few words I could add, FM, which you may wish to investigate further …
I have been told that now the rich are not only content to bash the poor, they also want big business to make money from them.
Any beneficiary wishing to replace their white ware must now purchase it new through WINZ, who will have items directly supplied by Fisher & Paykel and delivered by Main Freight.
I don’t recall any tenders being sent out,and this seriously undermines second-hand and local businesses.
“not public opinion polls that rely on faulty landline representation.”
Makes you wonder if these polls asked the 600,000 Deaf/Hard of Hearing New Zealanders?
“Ready, Steady, Crook”, Principal Health Advisor Dr Bratt joked about the “malingerers” that he suspects of being too high in numbers, claiming benefits from WINZ for health reasons, while they should rather be working:
http://www.gpcme.co.nz/pdf/GP%20CME/Friday/C1%201515%20Bratt-Hawker.pdf
(see pages 13, 20, 21 and 35)
He likens benefit dependence to “drug dependence”!
And MSD have never apologised for such truly unscientific generalisations by their Principal Health Advisor David Bratt (a registered GP!), overseeing a group of Regional Health Advisors and Regional Disability Advisors, who often challenge doctor’s medical certificates for their patients, and try to deny benefit entitlements for health reasons.
Instead we even have Auckland City Mission tow the line on Bratt’s ideologically coloured reasoning:
http://www.aucklandcitymission.org.nz/uploads/file/Calder%20Centre/Sickness%20Benefit%20explanation.pdf
To me this is getting close to fascism, and the “work will set you free” dogma, that the Nazis propagated, and had written over entrances to their work and later mass murder camps.
Of course that is too far a bow to draw, but the danger of misled ideas must be stopped in their very beginnings!
It all comes from the UK, and where a Professor Mansel Aylward was virtually signed up as convenient scientific “mercenary” by a questionable insurance corporation from the US, convicted for fraud in many states there, to conduct “research”, proving that most illness is “illness belief”.
And we have New Zealand, Australian and UK governments give respect to that man’s questionable “research” and findings”, to justify draconian welfare reforms, ushering or pushing sick and disabled to look for work. Shame on these disgraceful traitors of the medical profession and breakers of codes of ethics:
http://accforum.org/forums/index.php?/topic/15463-designated-doctors-%E2%80%93-used-by-work-and-income-some-also-used-by-acc/
http://accforum.org/forums/index.php?/topic/14066-%e2%80%98a-tale-of-two-models-disabled-people-vs-unum-atos-government-and-disability-charities%e2%80%99-by-debbie-jolly-dpac/
http://accforum.org/forums/index.php?/topic/15188-medical-and-work-capability-assessments-based-on-the-bps-model-aimed-at-disentiteling-affected-from-welfare-benefits-and-acc-compo/
And now starting to drive people out of state homes, supposedly for “justified” reasons, that is just the beginning on that front also, as it always starts with the first steps and on a “small” scale.
Remember what the Nazis did, they also started off “small” and with “reasoned” actions, but later, it went out of control. I do not wish to expect the same to happen here, but fight the wrongs in their earliest beginnings, before wrong thinking may catch hold, and lead to more injustice, harm and crimes than already happens in too many cases now.
FIGHT the demonisation of beneficiaries!
Good on you Martyn, could not agree with you more.
And maybe some good representation of people who have been there eg earth quakes, accident s, redundancies, aging parents etc etc exist and are not just reserved for the stereo types.
I’ve often thought the US went so far down that rightwing nastiness road because of covert racism. We have some too – but also a proud history of cooperation. I reckon the latter is still stronger.
We can fix our economy – demonising the unemployed is hiding from the problem. Key isn’t hiding from this problem because he’s competent, but because he’s lost and afraid and out of his depth. Pretending to forget won’t solve any real problem, and NZ has real problems. Most countries do.
People of many ‘races’ ,who are in receipt of any social security payment (including pensions) are enduring envy, scorn, blaming, and humiliation by WINZ and their ‘caring neighbours’.
People who have insufficient formal education and work experience, disabilities both physical and mental, grim family environments, all face the extraordinary experience of being turned from a decent person into a skiving bludger who must be on the take the moment they enter a WINZ office.
It has nothing to do with ‘race’.
It’s more about the ‘crabs in the bucket’ – let none even look as if they’ve escaped the general misery. Pull them back. Put them down. Why should ‘they’ get cheaper rents and assistance when ‘we’ have to pay full price and go without?
Nothing to do with ‘race’.
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