A few weeks ago I did a blog asserting that data on unemployment that was available seemed to indicate that a large number of people were being denied access to the benefit one way or another.
I compared the number of people getting an unemployment benefit with various measures of the unemployed and pointed out that the percentage on an unemployment benefit as a percentage of the unemployed was steady for many years and then declined significantly in the late 2000s.
I was simply pointing to a trend. I also asserted my view that literally tens of thousands of people were being denied a benefit one way or another. It was not possible for such a statistical anomaly to occur without a change in how people were being assessed for eligibility or how people were being actively managed off the benefit by WINZ.
I knew of far too many cases on a personal level (including within my own family) where it was becoming simply impossible for them to negotiate the bureaucratic nightmare that a benefit application has become and to meet the increasing demands for participation (again and again) in some sort of course or training to stay on it.
It may well be that many unemployed have simply given up applying for a benefit and rely on family and friends to survive.
In order to try and refute my claims the blogger Lindsay Mitchell made a bit of a fool of herself in my view.
She has continued in the same vein with a
recent blog “revealing” that the number of people actually being accepted as applicants and then being refused hasn’t actually changed that much over the recent few years.
Cameron Slater
reprints her blog with the headline “More lies of the left exposed”.
But that I made no claim about the refusal rate because I had no figures for that. You can’t prove me wrong on a claim I never made.
What I actually said was the following:
“However, around the mid 2000s the Labour government introduced a severe case management regime that seemed designed to prevent people accessing their entitlements rather than encouraging them to. The numbers on the unemployment benefit began to fall dramatically faster than the HLFS unemployment number until the gap hit 50,000 in 2008.
The international crisis and recession of 2008-10 sent the HLFS unemployment numbers soaring but the new National government’s even more punitive regime managed to keep the numbers on a benefit from increasing anywhere near as fast.”
I believe that statement to be true and remains true.
BY your own admission above you asserted that “data on unemployment that was available seemed to indicate that a large number of people were being denied access to the benefit one way or another. ”
Lindsay’s piece quite clearly refutes that, because the refusal rate has not changed much over that time period. Unless you somehow suggest there is no link between ‘being denied’ and ‘refusal’, Lindsay appears to have effectively refuted your conjecture.
And your post ignores that a WINZ refusal rate won’t include people who’ve been unable to get a benefit as a result of the staff refusing to help them, or refusing to provide assistance to help them apply, or where the systems are so perverse that the person is unable to negotiate the bureaucracy to get the benefits they qualify for.
Essentially you’ve missed the point that the culture of WINZ fails people in need of assistance.
And your evidence for this is??
Your imprimature is sufficient you tireless menkurt servant of the extreme right.
You don’t have any hard eveidence for your opinion. All you have is a feeling it must be because unemployed people are being actively discouraged from applying for an unemployment benefit because you perceive a gap between the official numbers receiving the benefit and the survey results. Have you actually dealved in to the survey results in any great detail to see if such a gap exists? Perhaps you could find out from the people carrying out the survey itself what the measurement actually is as opposed to just making assumptions based on your political bias.
“just making assumptions based on your political bias”
pot, kettle etc.
Sez Gosman – the person who has been caught out lying about Treasury statements. (And is thick enough to repeat those lies ad nauseum and expect to get away with it!)
Having read Mike Treen’s earlier blogposts and the data he presented, I’d say his research, analysis, and conclusions were a damn sight more credible than the cherry-picked, mis-represented, and often false data that Gosman, IV, and other assorted right wingers try to pass of as “information”.
Check out the growing number beggars or homeless in Auckland City and look properly at them, even talk to them. I’m not seeing healthy happy individuals. They are real, a John Key legacy and it is not pretty.
Something has definitely changed in the last 5 years in respect to getting a job or a benefit.
Comments are closed.