I don’t know about you, but as I get older my tolerance for bullshit becomes wafer thin.
That’s why I am so contemptuous about National’s declared welfare ‘reforms’.
Brothers & Sisters, Comrades of Aotearoa, Pakeha and European Nu Zilinders. We are adults, and when we are discussing issues of importance like social policy, we should be only implementing ideas that actually work.
National’s brain fart of a policy announcement is less dog whistle and more canine trumpet. When you implement malice as social policy, the results are always counterproductive.
National’s welfare ‘reforms’ are spite masquerading as social policy, but worse than that, they will actually entrench, embed and intensify the very poverty they claim to be attempting to solve.
National started by claiming they wanted to tackle the ballooning $70b welfare costs. This is a lie. The amount is actually less than $27b in welfare, the vast majority of that is Superannuation payments, so the total amount National are supposedly targeting here is $5billion.
When you are inflating the problem from $5billion to a mythical $70billion, you are already intellectually on thin ice.
Banning gang members from welfare is just lazy and stupid. As I’ve detailed many times, the gang problems erupting right now are driven by the 501s, cutting welfare off to desperate people will only serve to ignite a gang war, not prevent one. Cutting welfare off locks those gang members into a life of crime, and what checks and balances exist so that the Police don’t misuse this new power? WINZ look for every opportunity to cut people off welfare as it is, are we to seriously believe they don’t have the existing mechanisms to do this sort of nonsense now?
If we empower state agencies to cut people off welfare based on their inclusion to groups we don’t like, it is one hell of a slippery slope and inadvertently locks people into crime, it doesn’t provide them an escape.
Punishing mothers who don’t name the father already saw 18 000 welfare dependent families penalised with welfare sanctions. How on earth does that help the welfare of those children? The truth is that the current child support mechanisms are deeply damaged and cause more problems than solve with child support penalties running into the hundreds of millions. Requiring women, many of whom are escaping violent situations, to name the father shows how damaged the entire system truly is.
Wanting to dob any parent whose house tests positive for meth into Oranga Tamariki uplifts is a recipe for disaster, and it’s audacious to even bring the issue up seeing how magnificently National fucked this up in State Housing! National needlessly pissed $120million against the wall in pointless decontamination costs that science clearly states was never a health risk. The problem with this new idea is the same problem with the last idea, how do you know who smoked the meth if there is no baseline test?
Is National seriously suggesting that a parent should have their child removed based on nothing more than a flawed meth test that can’t actually tell you who smoked the bloody stuff or when?
Punishing parents who don’t vaccinate may be the stupidest idea of all. Our health system was warned that we weren’t doing enough to engage with the community and get vaccinations out to where people needed them, our health system ignored that. Poverty is the biggest driver for a lack of vaccinations, punishing poor people who don’t have the money to travel into hospital for a vaccination in the first place seems like the dumbest idea ever articulated.
These ideas are not to create good social policy, in fact they are designed to create the exact opposite because solving problems and actually helping people is not the aim here, the point is to announce ignorance and spite to attract core National Party voters to rush to the ballot box so as to gain political vengeance.
This is the darkest parts of our psyche and National are actively attempting to cultivate them.
National’s hope is that Labour and Green voters will be so disillusioned by the lack of transformative change that they don’t bother to vote, thus inadvertently pushing National’s vote higher.
Without a strong vision and clear 100 day programme for a second term, Jacinda might just give National and their ill thought out hate a chance to win.
Agree, except we shouldn’t assume all gang members are criminals. Leave those assumptions to National politicians, the police and the media.
Parents do not need to go to hospital to get their children vaccinated. It is free from their local doctors. If they cannot be bothered to do this small think what else cannot they be bothered to do . Being a parent comes with many obligations and finding the time to get them to the doctors is one of them. If they need encouragement then it should be used and cutting off their income seems a good idea. Officials should listen to the benefituries and find out if there are any true hurdles to stop them vaccinating their children and get them sorted.
Yeah – like cutting your wages would encourage you to work longer and harder? If you really believed in encouragement instead of maliciousness, you would be advocating for an immediate and substantial payment the moment each child of a beneficiary was vaccinated.
For the wealthy politicians like those in National it’s far easier for them to attack the faceless and nameless many that are on a benefit than for National to attack the wealthy that donate to say the NZ National Party.
National will forever denigrate those they deem as lesser beings and unworthy of attention. They will try to dehumanize in an attempt to gain votes from those they deem more merit worthy of attention i.e the donators to the NZ National Party.
National have absolutely zero interest in any that earn less than say $50,000 either by benefit or by work. But they will be the ones National will court when it suits them. Lets all remember this gem from 2008: http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/10469892/Community-back-Aroha
Jim Bolger’s cousin would often refer to the lead up to an election as the National MPs having to ‘Shake hands with the great unwashed’. That was prior to National becoming government in 2008. And so if that is the attitude of a National Party supporter then it’s obvious now in 2019 that nothing has changed.
National will never change its attitude towards the beneficiaries. Remember when 50,000 people protested against the TPPA and John Key disparaged them and called them ‘Rent a Protester”. Remember also when the former DPB recipient Paula Bennett breached the right to privacy of beneficiaries that criticised her beloved National government and of course her beloved John Key.
National cannot be viewed seriously as a political party that cares about ordinary low income NZers when in all reality they are Hell-bent on destroying low income workers who are quite obviously Labour Party in support.
And so my advice to the low income workers and the gangs is at the next election 2020 please do get out there and vote for Labour. DO NOT VOTE FOR NATIONAL because they have shown their true colours time and again but they(National)depend upon you(the voters)having very short memories.
Not just gangs maybe they should start with the rapists and pedos too why should they get any help just bury them all and as for the whole issues with imms not everyone believes in it my daughter had her 15 month imms and still got fricken measles so just saying it doesn’t always work and my kids are both up to date with their imms I don’t believe in them but I’m not having o.t come and uplift my kids over a stupid fricken injection
I support cutting gangs off from all forms of assistance. Why should we pay for them to commit crimes against us?
Because targeting gangs is petty and generic and as Ross says to begin with a failure. Organized crime on the other hand is much broader and covers stuff like money laundering, big multinational marketing scams.
Great idea – without a legitimate income, what do you expect the gang members to do, since most would be considered unemployable because of their associations? There are a couple of obvious options, like selling drugs to members of your family or committing some other profitable crime that deprives you of something that is of personal value or significance to you?
Fly spray residue creates a false positive test for methamphetamine.
True story.
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