Beneficiary debt has created a nation of debt slaves
Cost of living: MSD owed billions as families spiral into ‘crippling’ debt to government
Ministry of Social Development data shows the amount of debt owed to it has risenfrom $1.536 billion in the 2018 financial year to $2.61b as of March 31, 2024.
The amount of debt that was due to “recoverable assistance” payments had risen from $557.8 million in 2018 to $1.213b.
MSD client support group general manager George van Ooyen said increasing living costs, particularly with regard to housing, had led to a rise in demand for recoverable assistance in recent years.
“Recoverable assistance provides people with interest-free loans to help them meet an immediate need for essential items or services, like paying late utility bills or rent, buying essential household appliances, or meeting other urgent needs.
“Repayment arrangements are agreed with the client at the time recoverable assistance is granted, taking their individual circumstances into account.”
Another $1.261b was due to people having been overpaid.
There were 623,541 individuals with debts.
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.
Lending money to the poor for the basics is corrupt social policy!
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.
623,541 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.
Horrible, just like Working for Families, the terrible, cynical, depressing, corporate welfare scheme that perpetuates a low wage economy and locks working people into years of dependency on the state.
All true, and as a previous beneficiary advocate I know how MSD/WINZ run their punishment maze. Not informing people of their full entitlements, “losing” previously supplied documents and information, humiliating people with personal criticism, expecting people with no resources to have enough phone data to interact with them, and on it goes. Making people beg for some money for urgent dental care, or groceries, that becomes a debt as Martyn says.
Thousands of public servants of various stripes are being sacked at the moment and my empathy for them is tempered by the fact that many of the case managers and torturers at MSD are PSA members! The State Sector unions need to drop their faux political neutrality and take some action at least rather than issue media statements.
“Thousands of public servants of various stripes are being sacked at the moment and my empathy for them is tempered by the fact that many of the case managers and torturers at MSD are PSA members!”
Indeed!. And they should be ashamed of themselves. More often they’re not.
I think about this sort of shit quite a bit. Ladder puller uppers often. Often egotistically driven feelings of power, and an ability to laud it all over others.
It’s all pretty pathetic really.
Don’t temper your empathy too much though @Tigger. This bugger’s muddle of a gummint will see the unintended quinsequinces of their policies before too long. (And when they do, rest assured they’ll be claiming victimhood – some already are)
There’s another thing that bovvers me quite often. The relationship between so-called ‘intelligence’, and common sense (pedants might argue there’s no such thing as common sense), along with what constitutes our understanding of a man’s ego.
That little runt Seymore (for example), is a prime example. As is ‘hold-the-ladder-steady Shane’ for that matter.
NZ might yet get what NZ deserves if they don’t wake up soon UNFORTUNATELY. Hopefully the revenge voting that happened last, won’t become a habit
Most people are debt slaves. Mortgages, personal loans, farm loans, student loans, MSD loans etc bind people more strongly than chains. Work Kiwis, work & slave for your real masters.
Time for a jubilee year for people. Business has set up systems for getting free of debt so why can’t we under a so-called business-friendly gummint, perhaps not people or citizen or
taxpayer (all thru GST!) friendly?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_jubilee
https://www.rnz.co.nz/programmes/two-cents-worth/story/2018751387/the-case-for-a-modern-debt-jubilee
https://www.lynalden.com/debt-jubilee/
https://croakingcassandra.com/2020/05/19/debt-jubilees-revisited/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_debt_relief
https://www.jubileeaustralia.org/about-us/our-history
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years
https://www.interest.co.nz/news/104502/debt-jubilee-universal-basic-income-and-regionalism-rather-globalisation-are-among-steve
https://www.ft.com/content/a9e48501-0f73-4aba-8070-ab672a6d8eb2
Raised as debt slaves the system will always get it’s pound of flesh.
An interesting situation arises in that taxation in NZ is not legal as it was never “Gazetted” hence not law, but big Government has ways of shaking you down led of course by the lawmakers.
Most people know if you don’t supply an IRD number to your new employer you are taxed at 33% until you comply, of course most people don’t want to pay extra tax so off they trot like the good little taxation unit they are thereby acknowledging the illegal system and their authority over you.
HOWEVER, there is a little known loophole where you can apply through a lawyer to IRD to be exempt from tax, all perfectly legal mind you and lets be fucking honest here who’s first thought was i bet those rich fuckers do it?
So it’s a debt spiral?
Pay a too small benefit. Money loaned. Repayments come out of future too small benefits which necessitates more loans.
Is that actually how it works?
Yes.
Debt slaves, the result of years of right wing governments and low wage economies.