Susan St John

The Winter Energy Payment (WEP) provides older people extra income to keep warm during the winter. It sounds kind, but is it a glaring example of wasteful expenditure and poor allocation of scarce resources?

Individuals arguing their case for justice have been caught up in Kafkaesque-like experiences at WINZ, MSD, ACC and IRD, where unresponsive officials impose anachronistic rules and laws made for a different time and era. For those who don’t cave in at this point, there may be appeals to the Benefit Review Committee, the Social Security Appeals Authority, and then the daunting prospect of higher courts. Some disappear for years in the labyrinth of the Office of Human Rights Proceedings (OHRP) and the Human Rights Review tribunal (HRRT). While getting to a hearing in the HRRT can take years, after the hearing an actual decision can take many more years and even then, a finding of unlawful discrimination does not bind the Crown to reform the laws.

ANZ New Zealand has posted a record net profit after tax of nearly $2 billion. That’s a 12 percent increase on last year’s profit. ANZ is the country’s biggest home and business lender as well as the biggest KiwiSaver provider. New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority review of banking practices is expected shortly.

The latest statistics on dobbing in highlighted by Radio NZ this week should send a shudder down the spines of every thinking person in New Zealand.

let us acknowledge that it has been a long harsh winter for far too many children. The Families Package was too slow coming, and for the 140,000+ children below the very lowest 40% poverty line it has been a drop in the bucket.  Without a longer-term goal of systemic reform, short term improvements can seem like tinkering and band aids.  Or even worse, they may create the illusion the problems are solved.

Blaming WFF for low wages is a bit like pointing to our high rate of suicide and blaming it on the existence of the mental health services.  The true cause of low wages is found in casualised hours, precarious employment, automation, globalised labour markets and falling wage share of output due to loss of union power.

The debate about WFF including  Matthew Hooton’s extreme view that WFF is communism by stealth is full of sound, fury and little substance.  Eric Crampton contributes a more academic approach to support the view that Working for Families is an employer subsidy.  

Matthew Hooton (19th July, NZ Herald) trots out the tired old John Key scarecrow of ‘Communism by stealth’ to debunk Working for Families (WFF). Hooton even wants to blame WFF for the nurses’ strike and low productivity.

An injustice that is so obvious requires immediate action- not delay until some report is written by the very people that don’t want change and have just argued that very position in court.