The obscenity of throwing 50000 off welfare

The Government’s target to have 50,000 fewer people on a benefit by 2030 will include those who go to prison, move overseas — and those who die — not just those who enter the workforce.

It will also include people who change relationship status or switch to superannuation — but the Government says this will be offset by people flowing onto the benefit.

It’s prompted Labour to accuse the Government of “dishonesty” about whether the target is about getting people into work or just “pushing people off benefits” — something the Government has rejected.

The target is 50,000 fewer people on the Jobseeker Support benefit by 2030 — comparing December 2023 figures to December 2029.

Social Development Minister Louise Upston confirmed all types of benefit exits — not just those going into work, training or study — would be counted in the target figure when 1News inquired.

She said any suggestion they impacted the target “in any meaningful way” was a “red herring” because people will also join the benefit in the same period — such as returning to New Zealand or leaving prison.

But Labour’s social development spokesperson Carmel Sepuloni said she believed it was “a dishonesty to the target and the purpose of the target” and it showed the Government was not focused on getting people into work, but simply getting them off the Jobseeker benefit.

The political project of the Right is to starve the State of revenue so that wealth can’t be redistributed in the first place.

They attack the universals the Left fund and build to only focus on funding the ‘worst case scenario’ welfare cases which only serves to drive more people into poverty rather than give them a standard of living they can grow from.

Indeed this Government’s agenda will push up to 13000 children into poverty!

The reason the mental health foundation need to cut is because this Government is more focused on the interests of their donor mates than the people of New Zealand.

We need a new taxation and regulation model to stop the neoliberal rot. We need to remove the yoke of taxation from the 90% and reset it to the 10% richest.

The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media hate algorithms in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.

Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.