Northlanders owe nearly $80m to Ministry of Social Development
A child poverty advocate is calling on the Government to write off welfare debt following revelations Northlanders owe nearly $80 million to the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) to date.
Whangārei Child Poverty Action Group spokeswoman Ngaire Rae called for benefit payments to be increased. She said there were resourceful and tenacious people on benefits who continued to live, contributed to their community and cared for their children despite benefit inadequacy which left them living in poverty.
Rae said people, particularly families on benefits, were smart and creative and resisted going into debt with the ministry as much as possible.
Her views were shared by 155 Whare chief executive Awhina Liz Cassidy-Nelson, who said housing costs in particular were having a huge impact on beneficiaries and low-income earners.
About bloody time we started focusing on the Left to wiping beneficiary debt!
I have written many posts highly critical of the culture of MSD.
Their malice, their spite, their abuse of power over the most vulnerable.
This story manages to sum up all that is wrong with MSD, they are lending money to the poorest people to buy essentials.
How corrupt is that as a social policy…
Beneficiaries owe record $2.1b to Govt as cost of living soars
Low income New Zealanders now owe more than $2 billion to the Ministry of Social Development as they continue to have to borrow money to survive.
…this is the neoliberal welfare industry for you.
The madness is that MSD sees this debt as an asset!
They have a vested interest in loading more debt up on beneficiaries! We have loaded up billions in debt to the poorest amongst us creating debt slaves.
The state are acting like a drug dealer peddling desperation and entrapping people into literal debt coffins.
When MSD aren’t dealing in desperation loans, they are using vast mass surveillance powers to trawl through beneficiary social media accounts to catch them out in what MSD decides as ‘relationships’, and then claim beneficiaries are committing benefit fraud and then put them in debt to MSD!
MSD don’t tell beneficiaries what exactly amounts to a relationship and they do so on purpose to trap beneficiaries into a never ending debt cycle that makes them debt slaves until death, and this is all fine according to Labour.
461,000 Kiwis are struggling with MSD debt, this is a political decision to keep the poor in debt traps so they are compliant with the way they are treated.
Social Debt is a means of control.
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Do a piece on child support debt next. I bet a fair few of the “deplorables” in the parliament protests got a fair chunk of their anger from this.
Get real Bob National were giving the low paid 25 cents to 50 cent per hour pay rises.
And to make matters worse bringing in thousands of cheap workers.
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