No. Way.
High court rules loans are not income for welfare beneficiaries
In a breakthrough decision released today the High Court has said that loans are not income for social security purposes and Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) is calling on the Minister of Social Development to immediately remove all debts, cases and prosecutions against beneficiaries where loans have been counted as income.The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) argued before the High Court that a sole mother who took out loans in the form bank loans, credit cards and family loans to pay for needed home repairs and to support herself and her children should have to repay more than $120,000 of her benefit. She explained that she needed to borrow because she could not pay her bills while living on the benefit.The loaned money was all repaid but it was called ‘overpayments’ by MSD.
Just pause and consider the level of state sanctioned cruelty you are seeing here. Beneficiaries who borrow money had that money counted as ‘income’ so MSD could then claim the beneficiary had committed fraud and then started charging them with penalties and interest.
How genuinely hateful must you feel towards the poorest amongst us to attempt to up hold that fuckwittery as social policy?
This is as appalling as the Meth Hysteria by Housing NZ.
MSD are the Al Nisbet of welfare agencies, a vicious wickedness of stereotyping that revels with joy in its brutal malevolence.
The punitive culture that makes beneficiaries ‘unpeople’ was prevalent last week when the Government paraded around new shiny WINZ offices to declare their brave policy to have welfare suspensions signed by a superior had seen a 23% drop in benefits being cut off.
R-i-g-h-t.
So what about the month before that, and the month before that, and the month before that?
If a simple double checking of the current punitive regime has seen a 23% reduction in suspensions, what about all those people who have already been cut off wrongly?
No one asked any questions about them.
How about we don’t have any bullshit punitive sanctions with a toxic staff culture who seem to relish the power they have over others.
This isn’t welfare, it’s sadism.
The people in WINZ behind this thinking clearly want to replace income support with borrowing off an account (as per living costs off the tertiary loans) and thus have people pay the money back when they find employment – the same principle would also apply to AS and WFF tax credits.
It is very very right wing. Apparently there was serious consideration in National of determining the ACT party policy they adopted on victory in 2017 to be a move to term limit welfare – perhaps as a step towards this outcome down the track – part of the Key/English incrementalism to extreme polices.
You’re probably right SPC. I have two ACT supporting rellies, including one founding member of the Libertarians who are opposed to all benefits, and also opposed to any minimum wage. Part of their thinking is the assumption that in any household there is more than one income coming in.
Needless to say, both the ACT supporters are well-heeled and as far as I know not discomforted by collecting NZ Super.
Yeah, I know the type. I used to work with a guy in the 00’s who was always railing about Helen Clark’s “socialist” government and how it was going to ruin the country. Funny thing was he had 6 kids but I never heard him complain about ‘Working for Families’ which meant he never paid a bean in income tax.
Benefits are already half-way to becoming “employment insurance” or loans that have to be paid back. By keeping benefit rates to low they are unlivable for most people, beneficiaries are forced to go to pawn shops, payday loan sharks, and all sorts of other sources of loans, just to get by. The lucky ones can find enough casual or part-time work to make ends meet, but that just means those employers are effectively having what they should be paying in wages subsidized by the welfare system. Especially when you consider the Accommodation Allowance that is paid not only to beneficiaries and the under-employed, but to a huge number of fulltime workers who can’t afford market rents on minimum wage pay checks. Then those stuck in unemployment and semi-employment – hardly the lap of luxury – are scapegoated as bludgers, for a benefit system that is actually set up to subsidize employers and landlords. The whole system is shocking.
However, as I’ve already pointed out in response to a previous story on WINZ, it was the WINZ computer system, not WINZ staff, that were cutting off most of those benefits (“computer says noooo”), and WINZ staff who are *not* cutting them off now that they actually get to check the computer’s work. It grinds my gears that Bomber keeps misleadingly smearing WINZ staff on this subject, in his misguided jihad against the PSA.
Income is something you keep after you have earned it . A loan is something you must pay back , so how can a loan ever be” income.”
Taking ten years of mind numbing Winz litigation to confirm this is truly horrific .
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