There is a belief amongst some on the Left that our comrades inside the Government are so over whelmed by the enormity of the job and are being so expertly manipulated by the Public Services that there will be only shallow promises an no real policy change.
With the new level of spin masters stepping in, the oil ban managed to completely stop the slide of the Government after some painful weeks of sustained media attack.
I am someone who knows the people inside the machine and know how staunch they are and want to believe they can make the changes.
On housing, education, environmentalism and public transport this new Government are working hard.
We must not let the perfect defeat the good.
There is however one area where Labour, the Greens & NZ First are letting everyone down.
The toxic culture of our spiteful Welfare departments.
It is disgusting that a beneficiary had their benefit cut because of two Tinder dates.
That the State continues to use a boyfriend/girlfriend as a reason to cut welfare is so sick and so damaged and so fucking ugly it makes me feel deeply hateful towards a system designed and built to be as cruel and punitive as possible.
That this obscenity, this specifically designed hook that is masquerading as social policy is still allowed to exist under a new Government that claims to be progressive is offensive.
The reason the partner rule exists is so that Social Welfare can police beneficiaries and look for a way to cut beneficiaries off. They can spy on welfare recipients and use this information to claim fraud and will go back to the moment a ‘relationship’ started and recollect the lot PLUS penalties and interest on the penalties.
This traps beneficiaries into punitive debt servitude.
Remember, these are welfare departments who hunted down a beneficiary and claimed she owed hundreds of thousands from being in an abusive relationship and when quizzed by the Judge as to why WINZ were continuing to chase her when she had no money, they said she might win Lotto!!!!
This counter productive spite makes our prison nation complex look like well thought out social policy.
The new Government must detoxify these neoliberal welfare agencies immediately.
- Giving AAAP a public contract to hold the agencies to account and provide beneficiaries with support people to guid them through the toxic welfare culture.
- Create a 0800 tip off line that takes complaints from frontline staff if Managers are being cruel.
- Demand an immediate working group of community groups forced to work with social agencies and look to implement immediate changes over the toxic culture.
- Retraining of front line staff, better wages, conditions and more mental health off time.
The new Government must show they are serious to change the toxic sadism of WINZ and the rest of these neoliberal punitive monsters.
It is not good enough to demand investigations into historic abuse by the State when you are enabling abuse right now.
It’s a debt-slave system, and the government is the prime facilitator of debt slavery.
It’s also a provide-the-minimum system, whereby everything is underfunded….hospitals, schools, social welfare, environmental protection…….everything underfunded except the military and infrastructure provided for corporations to extract money from the populace. And God help you if you need major dental work.
It’s an international phenomenon because the global banking system operates in much the same way practically everywhere. And the general populace of most nations is slowly being pushed ‘off the cliff’ while being lied to.
This item is about the dire situation in Canada:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-23/reset-looms-canadians-start-feeling-pain-debt
However, the graph embedded in this article indicates the housing situation in NZ is far worse than that of Canada.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04-22/imf-blasts-new-zealands-discriminatory-ban-home-sales-foreigners
The recent fall in the value of the NZ dollar has been accompanied by a significant rise in global oil prices, which will put even more pressure on the NZ economy and on households, with those at the bottom of the heap being completely crushed, and those further up the heap being pushed further down.
It must be about time for a review of politicians and bureaucrats salaries which will recommend a 10% or 15% increase.
Lonely people are also being wooed on Tinder for relationships with people seeking residency.
Know of someone who needed to take a cocktail of medicine daily because even though young has obesity and related health, depression, type 2 diabetes etc, got into a relationship with a migrant on minimum wages, had a baby, after working previously. As soon as the paperwork was through, she went onto WINZ but see each other a few days a week.
You are better to break up financially if you have a child on minimum wages. For example, minimum wages gives you approx $600 p/w, working for families tops you up to about $850 p/w but if you split up you can get $500 from DPB and then the $600 for from your minimum waged job so you are approx $300 a week better off after splitting up.
In both cases the taxpayer is paying a top up of between $250 – $750 p/w so that the employer can pay those low wages…
Something is wrong when you earn more on a benefit that the government expects employers to pay in minimum wages and we are bringing employees in on minimum wages!
This is slightly tangential to the post, but the reality is, that you can’t afford a child on $850 p/w and you are better off splitting up to get more income to survive on.
Not good for the kids though being raised in these weird situations. It’s hard to raise kids on your own – especially if the main caregiver has major medical problems themselves.. and I think the break up was mainly to get the extra income.
Government need to look at wages a lot more, because they are bringing in so many low waged people who are adapting to the complex rules of social welfare to gain the most from it including residency, and I’m not sure that’s going to be good for the children being born, the next generation and society in general.
Not enough is being put on the employer and why they can’t employ local people on minimum wages (quick answer it is not enough to live on) and they are creating these weird Ponzi schemes where tax payers somehow ending up tangentially subsidising low waged workers hundreds of dollars a week, as well as their families and keep the low wages going…. time to cut the cord on low waged employers and certainly not allow any low waged workers in.
Some apple picker was complaining about not getting workers in when they used to previously. Maybe there is a range of reasons, accomodation, low wages, difficult casual work, bad employees, bad marketing.
Tired of wide spread corporate welfare, business needs to be encouraged to solve their own problems in the industry without expecting all the other tax payers to top up their employment.
This is particularly true when many low waged companies are not even NZ owned!
In short I’d like to see more focus on quality of service of social welfare for existing citizens not trying to overload the services due to low wages and the import of more people needing social welfare services for them or their families due to lower and lower wages.
The person in question might also like to avoid this man, who has got 3 women pregnant concurrently, but apparently no problem to stay in NZ – because our midwife services and health is not overloaded enough as it is…
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12037904
I’m also guessing they only noticed this guy because the pregnant women all went of benefits. So it would not surprise me at all if it was investigated under benefit fraud not immigration fraud!
Maybe they need to take all the WINZ investigating the benefit fraudsters to actually take a walk on the immigration side because something seems very wrong in the immigration area and very little investigation or statistics seem to be being kept, no matter how many disturbing stories of what is going on, are surfacing in that department…
I think the international elite with their fancy jobs are sadistic. They have designed the system to work for themselves. Therefore they must realise with the policies working the way they do its going to hurt people below their stations. But i think these people lose empathy and any connection with the society they live once them big bucks start pouring in. They say the Elites parents are cruel to there children to set an example and I believe it.
WINZ will maintain these policies unless challenged by the 99%. To be honest i think the sadistic elites are running the show there. Getting there jollys by pushing people into poverty.
I think the international elite with their fancy jobs are sadistic. They have designed the system to work for themselves. Therefore they must realise with the policies working the way they do its going to hurt people below their stations. But i think these people lose empathy and any connection with the society they live once them big bucks start pouring in. They say the Elites parents are cruel to there children to set an example and I believe it.
WINZ will maintain these policies unless challenged by the 99%. To be honest i think the sadistic elites are running the show there. Getting there jollys by pushing people into poverty.
So straight after writing this Jacinda goes on RNZ and says they want to change the culture at WINZ and that this particular example is not OK.
My hope is that just by saying this out loud she will have empowered the last few decent people at WINZ to stand up to their nasty hierarchy
Another problem is those struggling on low wages struggle to get help when many need help to get somewhere to live. This is what happens when we open our floodgates to immigrants while we might need immigration this needs to be done properly the government need to make sure we have the infrastructure in place beforehand not after the fact. National were too hasty to boost their mates coffers and it has come at the expense of too many Kiwis now finding themselves homeless and some jobless. Where are all the jobs people have been boasting about they certainly ain’t in the local newspapers. Maybe agencies have them on their books and many are very lowly paid hardly enough to pay high rents, power, food, transport cost and what about those that have kids. Too many kiwis only care about themselves and are far to quick to judge others.
On the cheerful side the Minister is planning a culture change at WINZ according to a news release this morning on RNZ.
Could we also start agitating about denying a worker who becomes unemployed any financial assistance because they are partnered? That person has paid, and still is paying, taxes.
If you pay tax as a worker then you are eligible for full social security -regardless of marital/partner status.
And if someone buys food/clothing/household goods for a person on a benefit – that should not be counted as ‘income’.
I also wonder when National’s tax on working kids is going to be reversed or amended. That was iniquitous.
Yes I agree, for mine the dole should be available to partners when they are between jobs.
Many singles live together rather than marry so they can claim the dole when between jobs, something they could not do when married.
For mine this is discrimination based on marital status and it should end.
The government could look at the definition of what constitutes support for the purposes of the “DPB”.
It should be related to (regular) paid share of household living costs, rent/mortgage and power that comes from a partner.
Support from family and an ex (other parent paying support to government) should not count.
Definition of partner, would be based around usual shared residence with, rather than at another location.
What’s really disturbing about this story to me is that the ‘ client’ was so traumatised she spilled the beans about every aspect of her most personal life, thinking, no doubt, so she couldn’t be had up about providing false information at some later – potentially exposed, date. God knows we read about these social welfare ripoff stories all the time, but which amount to accumulated interest and debt for wrongly given funds. Easy to make a mistake – hell even Peter’s did it, lucky he could afford the bill. But what a scary bill, and most people receiving benefit’s couldn’t afford to repay that kind of mistake.
Back to the point: the case worker does not seem to know what information is for them to know and what is not. They need to know, and they need to advise.
MSD / Winz still haven’t learnt from the unnecessary death of a lady who took her own life in the Lower Hutt bloody mongrels they make me sick. I know a bit about Winz I was once a beneficiary like pulla benefit who got everything then cut everything. And then she started treating many of these people like shit she is one nasty b…h who I for one would like to see gone and every time she opens her big fat nasty know it all mouth I feel like vomiting.
[…] We have all been horrified to learn a woman was cut from welfare for going on 2 Tinder dates. […]
[…] We know MSD are still spitefully cutting off welfare for Tinder dates. […]
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