Little sympathy for MSD Security or MSD staff
The Ministry of Social Development is cutting security guards at regional Work and Income offices. For some, this raises legitimate safety concerns. For others, it reopens unresolved questions about how the welfare system treats those who walk through its doors — and the violent legacy that still hangs over Ashburton.
Why Is MSD Cutting Security Guards Now?
Ministry of Social Development set to cut security guards
The Ministry of Social Development is planning to cut the number of security guards at Work and Income offices throughout the country.
Twenty jobs are set to go at 20 offices in regional towns next month – reducing the number of guards at these sites from three to two.
Security guards and unions are blaming cost-cutting and are alarmed at the safety risks the lay-offs pose, following the murders of two Ashburton Work and Income employees in 2014.
The Shadow of Ashburton Still Haunts MSD
We are not allowed to talk about Russell John Tully.
He is the nameless horror outside the rattling windows whistling gaps from underfunded maintenance.
Welfare Bureaucracy, Power and Public Anger
WINZ and MSD are sociopathic organisations staffed with burn outs who grow to despise the vulnerability and weakness of their ‘clients’.
It is an ocean of petty tyrants who enjoy the power sadistically and take great joy in declining requests while lecturing.
Russell John Tully was a fractured man at the end of that tether and he shot up and murdered WINZ Staff in an act of violence that freaked the entire bureaucratic establishment out because the unspoken deal between the neoliberal welfare agencies and the Government of the day that underfunds them, is that they are not held to account for the harvest of bitterness their spite produces.
Russell John Tully’s violent defiance threatened to overwhelm the barriers put in place to dehumanise and belittle the poor, and that is why he is made invisible while every single WINZ Office is now staffed and manned by burly security guards who intimidate the moment your shadow darkens the door.
Fear, Funding and the Politics of Silence
John Russel Tully is a toxic legacy that we can never discuss in case he inspires a tsunami of rage from an ocean of homeless beneficiaries who rise up and cast their terrible vengeance against a cruel bureaucracy protected by the Political elite who underfund them.
Sympathy, Accountability and Structural Failure
There is little sympathy for MSD Security or MSD staff.
Security guards are not the cause of the anger. Nor are frontline staff the architects of the system. But when the state builds a machinery that humiliates, delays and dehumanises — and then protects it with muscle instead of reform — the resentment doesn’t disappear. It calcifies.
While it’s been decades since I had any experience with MSD or whatever they were called then your description is accurate. I only went there once after being made redundant and they were very difficult to deal with although I found work through other contacts so have been fortunate in not having to depend on them.
MSD staff are public servants doing their job in the way most publicservants do their job by being authoritarian and bullying yet National are blamed for getting ride of them. and making those left more aware that they need to do the job properly