The ramifications of the mass surveillance of beneficiaries is starting to be understood by the NGOs who are now finding their funding threatened.
Sexual abuse survivors have been exempt for 12 months from spying on their clients, but every other welfare agency must hand over all details of their needy or face funding cuts.
This mass surveillance of beneficiaries is sold as prudent management of taxpayer money, the truth is that it’s being used to punish and bill beneficiaries for anything the Ministry believes is a breach.
The insanity of National’s mass surveillance policy was spelt out by Bill English last month when he was trying to explain the explosion of desperate people being housed in Motels. Bill said the policy was flushing beneficiaries out who attempted to escape Government agencies because they fear the agencies.
Tick, tick, tick.
Annnnnnnnnd what do you think the end result of this policy to take beneficiaries details will be?
People who know their details will be sent to the Government will do all they can to avoid seeing those services in the first place! That will lead to fewer numbers being seen! Which will lead to a reduction in budgets! Which will lead to the Government claiming another victory!
That’s 4 exclamation marks! Make it 5.
We see the exact same rhetoric used and repeated by lazy mainstream media when it comes to beneficiary stats. The Government trumpet that they’ve moved 50 000 off solo parent benefits, yet they can’t tell you where they’ve gone.
Abusing the privacy of the weakest and poorest amongst us while pretending that such abuse is for their benefit is fucking Orwellian.
And following hot on the heels of this civil abuse will be those further up the food chain. Those currently feeling secure in their financial affairs ie classically the middle classes…
Those who , currently , feel the need to side with the govt narrative and crack down on benefit fraud in a misguided sense of moral virtue, … will be vulnerable to any number of future economic downturns that is used by a govt that seeks to ensure even tighter controls over a populace.
Gone are the days of jackboots crunching up to ones front door , today’s methods are far more subtle.
We are now several generations removed from the absolute reality’s of totalitarianism once experienced and suffered by the greatest generation – that demographic who once fought and paid for with their very own blood the freedoms that govts such as the current one are taking by increment from us.
The first in all these scenarios to go are always the poor, the sick , the marginalized – those vulnerable members of society that are deemed by the authority’s as the least worthy in terms of measurable contributions…
And after that ?… remains the concentration of consolidating their power base by ever increasing social controls on those remaining…
Morality , freedom , ethics, values … indeed the very quality of any society , – is ALWAYS measured by how that society treats its most vulnerable…
It appears we have already have started the long descent under this National govt quite some time ago.
It is divide and rule again, so rape crisis centres get exempted, at least for time being, while ALL other social service providers will still have to provide the details of their clients to MSD.
I remember well also some exception that was given to cancer sufferers, when this arose:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/286914/jobseeker-benefit-for-cancer-patients-%27ludicrous%27
MSD and their Minister did then move swiftly to accommodate the concerns of the Cancer Society, but to my best knowledge, all other sick and incapacitated are still put on the Jobseeker Benefit and need to “prove” that they are too sick and impaired to seek open employment, or at least “prepare” for it.
Frank also wrote on that topic:
https://fmacskasy.wordpress.com/tag/winz/
All the NGOs that feel affected should damned well STAND TOGETHER and show loyalty in their collective effort to force MSD to ditch this effort to get more “surveillance” and controls enforced over clients of their services.
Do not accept exemptions, stand together, and demand the same treatment for ALL NGOs and service providers and their clients, thanks, Ms Tolley!
I can back this up .
I have a 25 year old type 1 diabetic with multiple health issues who absolutely been hounded by winz and refused the sickness and invalid benefit ever since he was 18.
Even though his doctors have requested it multiple times.
If you are ill you have to be virtually dead before they will give it to you.
“The Government trumpet that they’ve moved 50 000 off solo parent benefits, yet they can’t tell you where they’ve gone.”
I went through Onehunga and its “Mall” the other day, where I do at times do some errands and shopping.
That area has been depressed for ages, and things have clearly not changed. I see numerous 2-dollar and op shops, and the “ordinary” commercial retailers do mostly seem to struggle, to get any person come in through the doors. Some are bused from the city to nearby Dress Smart, but even there the business does not seem to “boom” that much at all.
At the same time we hear this endless propaganda by the Minister for Social Development (aka ‘Social Dismantling’), about how great their outcomes and achievements supposedly are. They cite numbers and more numbers, claiming it is a massive “success” to have fewer people on benefits.
In Onehunga there is a WINZ Office, a security person stands outside with a clipboard and list of names, checking every person going inside, whether they have an appointment and ID. If they don’t they have bad luck and are told to bugger off again.
I see beggars in the street corner, I see downtrodden people with stern, depressed and sad faces, some try to pretend they may enjoy the sunshine, but deep inside they are torn to bits, so down, they have lost all hope, to “participate” in society.
The crappy benefits, where only the main benefit gets “inflation adjusted”, but where all other supplements are the same as they have been for years, they are insufficient for most to get by on. So even sick and disabled feel pressed to try any work they can find, but they mostly end up in another rut and dependence, on self interested employers, who try to get blood out of a stone.
That is what this government calls “breaking the chains of dependence” (from WINZ), “empowering” and “freeing” people, giving them “independence”.
I call this massive BS, the most cunning propaganda there has ever been in this country, so that the indoctrinated, brain washed and thus prejudicial common people, who are working “diligently” as supposedly “hard working”, “decent” NZers, they have NO clue what it is really like to live off a benefit today.
Many sole parents will have ended up in new and old relationships, some likely to be abusive, in dependence on family members and some perhaps in prostitution and whatever activity, just to somehow get by and survive.
But kicking people off benefits is not enough, the MSD wants to track and trace them, keep control on them, gather data, and thus use them for more social experiments for the future, to create an Orwellian kind of society, where we will all be pressured to be “productive” as serfs or slaves, to provide cheap and desperately “willing” supply of labour for employers who like to hire and fire as they please, and who “utilise” “human resource” for their end, to make a profit, one way or another.
There is NO SHAME to be found among the lot belonging to Nats, ACT and UF in Parliament, they are “proud” to show off as they do, but in reality commit a crime against human dignity, which includes a decent and necessary degree of privacy and true independence, not fake independence as Tolley et all see fit.
Best description of this nasty bunch yet.
Agree Mike. Now they will be profiled for their criminal potential using big data and further singled out.
And it’s all headed up by former GCSB drone strike killer Peter MacCaulay at MSD, too.
James Stonehouse is one of a number of people going between Datacom and MSD and the agencies making sure the poor are under total control (while posing as leftists, typically).
Sickening
Woops, extra c in P’s name there, GCSB’s man at Google! Would have thought you’d know better ’bout the deets of our man who was in the NSA?
Yes isn’t it funny that some of those who like to make a lot of noise about rape culture are actively involved in surveillance of rape victims? No, not really so funny.
“‘If there is hope,’ wrote Winston, ‘it lies in the proles.’ If there was hope, it MUST lie in the proles, because only there in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated. The Party could not be overthrown from within” – George Orwell, 1984
True every word Martyn,
The elite global bankers that control Nactional, see most of us especially the retired, disabled and un-employed as useless un-productive waste and would love to send us to another round of Auschwitz ovens if they could and as time goes on they will achieve this if we keep these NAZI Government’s in power.
Dr Julian Abel Constantine Gojer of Toronto Convicted of Drugging and raping two woman and killing a third one with the drugs he used to render his victims unconscious before raping them. Date fall of 2000. Psychiatrist gets off with a slap on the wrist and works as a psychiatrist regardless of criminal negligence against him.
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