The Time For Change Is Now – 63% in poll want Cost of Living Payment to be extended to people receiving benefits and superannuation – AAAP

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A poll released last night showed an overwhelming 63% of people agreed that the Labour government’s recent budget announcement of a Cost of Living Payment should be extended to those receiving benefits and superannuation.
‘The government is aware of what’s happening in our communities, as so many frontline organisations have spoken out about it. This payment in no way meets the standard that the Fairer Future coalition has set out, but it will help those receiving benefits and superannuation until we can have Liveable Incomes’ says Auckland Action Against Poverty (AAAP) coordinator Brooke Stanley Pao.
The United Nations published its 2022 ‘Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction’ which calls for us to be ambitious and transformational in our policies and systems in order to be resilient in preparation for the changing impacts of the climate.
‘We are staunch about Liveable Incomes and Universal Services as bridges toward Matike Mai Aotearoa (Constitutional Transformation) as we’re very aware that economic growth and ecological collapse are interconnected. We’re aware of the ways in which all parts of our system are interconnected – and in order to enact a Just Transition, no-one should be left behind. We can’t call it a Just Transition if whole communities are’.
‘The recent increase in gun violence and ram raids are just the tip of a very long genealogy in which the government refuses to accept the part it’s played in ignoring the needs and dreams of our communities. Weaponising our police force in Auckland isn’t going to solve these issues, which are deep rooted and require lots of changes to occur at the same time. We need robust and universal services to ensure that our communities are looked after’.
‘We support the Cost of Living Payment being extended to people receiving benefits and superannuation as a step toward Liveable Incomes and Universal Services for Matike Mai. Labour have a very rare opportunity to set the standard for what settler governments can be, and they should take it’.

4 COMMENTS

  1. Top ups will help but the problem is high rents and high power costs which are starting to kick in. Unfortunately a top up of all superannuation means many get it who do not need it but all those getting the benefit do .

  2. We have gone a long way down in our societal behaviour and reached a new low for the modern times in NZ. Labour led the way, and now should take note of Mother Teresa’s stringenty comment:
    When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread. But a person who is shut out, who feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person who has been thrown out of society – that spiritual poverty is much harder to overcome.”5/08/2018
    5 of Mother Teresa’s Most Inspiring Quotes Regarding Poverty
    https://borgenproject.org › The Blog

  3. It is not the case that this Labour government have anything against beneficiaries and retirees. It’s simply that, as so often happens, the advisors overseeing the budget drafted it to exclude these two groups simply because they are already receiving government assistance. It is not the first instance that something akin to this has occurred.

    The AAAP group is fundamentally correct in their desire to extend the payment to beneficiaries and retirees; however, from a litigious standpoint, it isn’t altogether sound. How can you justify, as a politician, to your scores upon scores of working voters, the need to extend such a payment to two vulnerable groups, both of which are already receiving government assistance, and both of which you continually assert, as a politician in power, that you are already adequately looking after?

  4. It would be nice if someone in the media asked Robertson exactly how many people are eligible for the payment. When you take out the pensioners and all other beneficiaries there would be bugger all.

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