Why National’s welfare reforms are just spiteful counterproductive hate masquerading as social policy 

I don’t know about you, but as I get older my tolerance for bullshit becomes wafer thin.

That’s why I am so contemptuous about National’s declared welfare ‘reforms’.

Brothers & Sisters, Comrades of Aotearoa, Pakeha and European Nu Zilinders. We are adults, and when we are discussing issues of importance like social policy, we should be only implementing ideas that actually work.

National’s brain fart of a policy announcement is less dog whistle and more canine trumpet. When you implement malice as social policy, the results are always counterproductive.

National’s welfare ‘reforms’ are spite masquerading as social policy, but worse than that, they will actually entrench, embed and intensify the very poverty they claim to be attempting to solve.

National started by claiming they wanted to tackle the ballooning $70b welfare costs. This is a lie. The amount is actually less than $27b in welfare, the vast majority of that is Superannuation payments, so the total amount National are supposedly targeting here is $5billion.

When you are inflating the problem from $5billion to a mythical $70billion, you are already intellectually on thin ice.

Banning gang members from welfare is just lazy and stupid. As I’ve detailed many times, the gang problems erupting right now are driven by the 501s, cutting welfare off to desperate people will only serve to ignite a gang war, not prevent one. Cutting welfare off locks those gang members into a life of crime, and what checks and balances exist so that the Police don’t misuse this new power? WINZ look for every opportunity to cut people off welfare as it is, are we to seriously believe they don’t have the existing mechanisms to do this sort of nonsense now?

If we empower state agencies to cut people off welfare based on their inclusion to groups we don’t like, it is one hell of a slippery slope and inadvertently locks people into crime, it doesn’t provide them an escape.

Punishing mothers who don’t name the father already saw 18 000 welfare dependent families penalised with welfare sanctions. How on earth does that help the welfare of those children? The truth is that the current child support mechanisms are deeply damaged and cause more problems than solve with child support penalties running into the hundreds of millions. Requiring women, many of whom are escaping violent situations, to name the father shows how damaged the entire system truly is.

Wanting to dob any parent whose house tests positive for meth into Oranga Tamariki uplifts is a recipe for disaster, and it’s audacious to even bring the issue up seeing how magnificently National fucked this up in State Housing! National needlessly pissed $120million against the wall in pointless decontamination costs that science clearly states was never a health risk. The problem with this new idea is the same problem with the last idea, how do you know who smoked the meth if there is no baseline test?

Is National seriously suggesting that a parent should have their child removed based on nothing more than a flawed meth test that can’t actually tell you who smoked the bloody stuff or when?

Punishing parents who don’t vaccinate may be the stupidest idea of all. Our health system was warned that we weren’t doing enough to engage with the community and get vaccinations out to where people needed them, our health system ignored that. Poverty is the biggest driver for a lack of vaccinations, punishing poor people who don’t have the money to travel into hospital for a vaccination in the first place seems like the dumbest idea ever articulated.

These ideas are not to create good social policy, in fact they are designed to create the exact opposite because solving problems and actually helping people is not the aim here, the point is to announce ignorance and spite to attract core National Party voters to rush to the ballot box so as to gain political vengeance.

This is the darkest parts of our psyche and National are actively attempting to cultivate them.

National’s hope is that Labour and Green voters will be so disillusioned by the lack of transformative change that they don’t bother to vote, thus inadvertently pushing National’s vote higher.

Without a strong vision and clear 100 day programme for a second term, Jacinda might just give National and their ill thought out hate a chance to win.