Is new Welfare Advisory Panel another swing and a miss?
Just like Clare Curran’s sad panel with no real mana to change public broadcasting, the new welfare advisory panel has been announced and it’s missing some crucial voices.
Sure, Huana Hickey is brilliant, as to is Ganesh Nana, Robert Reid, Professor Innes Asher and Professor Cindy Kiro, but the fact that two of the most important voices are missing suggests this is another wasted opportunity to do something truly meaningful.
Dr Sue Bradford is THE expert on how beneficiaries are mistreated by the evil MSD and WINZ sadists, that she has been denied access is political and spiteful and gutless.
Alan Johnson from the Salvation Army is the expert at the very coalface of dealing with the madness of our neoliberal welfare agencies, that he isn’t present is eye rolling.
Another swing and miss from a Government already stalling in the Polls.
welfare panel
Auckland University professor Cindy Kiro
Paedeatrician and Professor Innes Asher
Beneficiary advocate Kay Brereton,
Academic Huana Hickey
Academic Tracey McIntosh
Economist Ganesh Nana
Former Business NZ chief executive Phil O’Reilly
Trade unionist Robert Reid
Council of Christian Social Services chief executive Trevor McGlinchy,
Student Latayvia Tualasea Tauta
Family Centre founder Charles Waldegrave
The absence of the Sallies Alan Johnson suggests that this govt is as good at plain bitchy politics as it’s predecessor. Now we know.
Phil O’Reilly?
A new public media voice was needed so badly here and for Jacinda to place the dossile MP Clare Cuuran in that important portfolio it was bound to fail, as it needed a top popwered poilicy to get our biased roight wing media turned around, so if Jacinda does nothing here we are all sunk.
Yes well he is the only one that shouldn’t be there which is amazing when you look at the stacked tax review group.
Come on, this is all about formal processes to gather the ‘evidence’ a minister requires to justify changes , hence the need to appear ‘balanced’ and to have academics sit on such a panel.
The neoliberally tainted laws we have seem to require such advisory panels. And if they would not do this, they would be attacked by National for not basing law changes on ‘evidence’.
It may simply be a ‘Welfare Working Group’ of the alternative kind, make 2018, without the likes of Rebstock an so forth.
Would you expect a revolution or major changes under this government? You must be dreaming if you would.
It sure beats this lot, selected by Paula Bennett and/or MSD in 2011 or so:
http://nzsocialjusticeblog2013.wordpress.com/2013/09/07/the-health-and-disability-panel-and-its-hand-picked-members/
There is a Maori (yea would have booted the business guy and added another Maori) and a very experienced Beneficiary Advocate.
Where are the specialist lawyers, like Paul Blair and Māmari Stephens? They could’ve done far better. Without people like this the group’s unbelievably inadequate.
Are you talking about Kay Brereton, as ‘advocate’? She has been working WITH MSD, even in a reference group with that hideous Dr David Bratt, Principal Health Advisor for the Ministry, to a degree collaborating, in my view:
https://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjQmKWL_arbAhXFzbwKHYTUCY8QFgguMAE&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nzdsn.org.nz%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F02%2F2016-December-meeting-FINAL-HD-reference-group-meeting-notes.docx&usg=AOvVaw0I2hbukaZZ8kHOOpbrdRHE
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:A4qR4XdC5x0J:https://www.nzdsn.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/2016-December-meeting-FINAL-HD-reference-group-meeting-notes.docx+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=nz
I wonder who payed her for her participation, and for some other work she has done over the years?
Check this re Dr Bratt and his mindset:
http://www.gpcme.co.nz/pdf/GP%20CME/Friday/C1%201515%20Bratt-Hawker.pdf
Bratt proved wrong, i.e. misleading the public and so forth:
https://www.nzma.org.nz/journal/read-the-journal/all-issues/2010-2019/2015/vol-128-no-1425-20-november-2015/6729