The Māori Party and the Green Party are the only political parties to release income policies that would improve the lives of people on the benefit. Auckland Action Against Poverty welcomes both parties’ policies and their support for our Liveable Incomes Campaign.
“The Māori Party and the Green Party have shown the public they have a vision to lift people out of poverty and recognise that people have a right to a life with dignity independent of their employment status”, says Brooke Fiafia, Auckland Action Against Poverty Coordinator.
“The impacts of COVID-19 will mean thousands more people will be reliant on our welfare system and deepen the effects of our housing crisis. Our benefit levels were already too low before COVID-19 struck, and people simply can’t afford to make ends meet with current benefit levels. We’ve seen a sharp increase in the demand for food grants over the past few years and more families in debt to Work and Income. It is irresponsible for political parties to pretend our welfare system is not in need of a complete overhaul.
“The Māori Party’s commitment to doubling baseline benefits, indivualise them and remove all sanctions would help lift thousands of families out of poverty. These are the sort of changes that we have been calling for since the Government term started to ensure that people are not having to queue at Work and Income for food grants to survive”
“The Green Party’s Poverty Action Plan also proposes individualised income support and a Guaranteed Minimum Income, which would remove the punitive culture at Work and Income. While most people will be better off with the Green Party and Māori Party’s proposals, we hope both parties review their policy to ensure the baseline incomes are set to liveable levels.
“In July we launched our Liveable Incomes For All campaign which asked political parties to commit to increasing benefits to liveable levels, indivualising benefits and removing all sanction within the next three years. Both Marama Davidson from the Green Party and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer from the Māori Party made a commitment in August to AAAP to implement the demands of our Liveable Incomes For All campaign within the next three years.
“We are disappointed that neither major political parties have committed to overhauling our welfare system. Despite Government reports and calls from people on the benefit, unions, advocates and faith groups the Labour Party and New Zealand First have yet to commit to substantially increasing benefits to lift people out of hardship.
Those are the two parties that the TVNZ “Vote Compass” thingy gave back to me when I ran through their Interactive. They were way ahead of the rest (which surprised me a lot – I’d thought it would come up ‘Labour’).
I have no problem with welfare being increased providing we put other measures in place to help people to get
of it. We should be helping them to get jobs and upskill. Being on a benefit is not good for peoples wellbeing either. And long term is worse. We should work more intensively and positively with people to get them back into work or training. The training and upskilling needs to be pathway to work not a merry go round. Some of the courses Winz use to provide were rubbish and did not lead to work. Even if we pay incentives to those who can get people into work. We will always have some people that are much harder to get of welfare.
As usual not a word said about people with long term health issues who cannot access welfare funding and the blatant underfunding of healthcare.
The only party talking about reforming long term health welfare funding is the Greens.
Forget about the gween party theyre dog tucker, but the Maori Party has a better chance of getting across the line by taking a seat or two from the labour party.
Doubling the UB and increasing the accommodation supplement per person is sensible and necessary.
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