$25 benefit rise is as meaningless as Neokindness
$25 benefit increase ‘too little to make a substantive difference’
A year on from the government’s $25 increase to benefits, some solo parents and people with disabilities or chronic illnesses say it has made very little difference to their budgets.
“Supplementary assistance like temporary additional support gets clawed back if you essentially earn more income,” she said.
“For some people, they were actually only getting about $3 more than they had previously, so understandably, they were frustrated by that because costs had gone up during particularly the lockdown period, far more than $3 a week.”
For those in public housing, with income-related rent, the benefit increase meant their rent went up as well, Humpage said.
Whenever the Prime Minister is challenged on the lack of progress on poverty she cites the $25 a week lift in benefits, but the truth is that amount is far below what the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) recommended and the MSD saw the increase merely as a means to claw back money from Beneficiaries!
If this is what ‘transformative change’ looks like, the Prime Minister needs a new dictionary.
We can pump $60Billion into the pockets of property speculators but can’t spend $5billion on eradicating poverty.
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The problem we have is the moment you raise the benefit by $10, $100 or $1000, those actually working must see increases in wages. Then landlords, businesses, will cry foul that they must raise their own costs to meet the those demands. It’s a vicious cycle.
Benefits need to go up massively if we as a nation want to really help the poorest members of society out financially.
That’s what the Liberty Party believes anyway. Note they are not a registered party
https://www.facebook.com/LibertyPartyNZ
https://twitter.com/LibertyNZParty
‘A post that doesnt have National or fault contained in the same sentence.’
Pedro
It is all National’s fault for cutting benefit levels in the first place. ( ta-da)
They may do Bert, but that’s just them being misinformed, PLAYED by the system, greedy and being allowed to have their ‘conveniently created’ opinions reported by a corrupt media.
The system is has trained us to hate our fellow repressed but LOVE our repressors.
Money is created out of thin air by the ‘uber elite rich’ and they charge interest on it which is why they stay rich and can relatively sit on the fat arse and do nothing.
The issue is NOT giving the poor more money, they spend 99% of that on daily necessities of ‘goods and service’, which eventually end up in the hands of the rich anyhow (as they own almost everything), but at least that creates jobs and makes an economy.
Remove tax for the first $30K a year, remove shed loads of loop holes that mean the really rich pay bugger all tax. Get rid of WINZ/MSD, they are just a modern day Gestapo, meant PURELY for evil cruel and psych-ops and give a UBI of about $400 pw to everyone over 16 (phased in?)/18 on less than $60K per year and phase it out for those on about $100-120K p.a. And as per the ‘big kahuna’ book we’d probably break even.
The system is RIGGED purposely to be cruel and ONLY wok for the rich. Your argument is a classic, let’s argue over the breadcrumbs whilst forgetting about the banquet.
Judge a society on how it treats it’s unfortunate less well off and by this standard we are a horrid society who need a radical rethink.
The media carries a HUGE responsibility for this, but they are captured bought and very well paid for prostitutes; prestitutes.
Very well stared Kevin and right on the money.
Middle class, neo liberal managerialist Members of the bourgeois Parliament, would not have clue number one really, about how the other half lives. Marama Davidson and likely ex AAAP man, Ricardo Menendez March being the exceptions. Sue Bradford was the only other exception in living memory.
Aotearoa NZ is totally a tale of two cities–50% now own just 2% of the wealth–and the other 50% don’t seem to see too much wrong with that picture–can enough of them be persuaded to change? Because action is needed.
• Implement the full WEAG Report now!
• Make all COVID related payments direct to workers through IRD
• Urgently institute a Basic Income, again, paid through IRD
As Bert as pointed out when you raise the benefit wages need to be increased to keep relativity. The answer is to cut the cost of living and the biggest one of these is rent .It has ben said so many times but I do not see any signs of it happening build more homes . We need good quality apartment type homes so we increase the housing stock without losing good agricultural land . This would give couples a chance to get on the housing ladder before they need a larger family type home.