Budget targets poor, not poverty

 Earlier this week Bill English talked about ‘targeting poverty.’

 “In fact, today’s budget targets the poor, not poverty,” says Sarah Thompson, spokesperson for Auckland Action Against Poverty.

 “In almost every way, this Budget means life will become harder for those already struggling to survive.

 “Bill English restates National’s commitment to an ‘unrelenting focus on work’ as the goal of their welfare policies, while maintaining a zero commitment to employment creation.

 “The one exception to this is the creation of 354 new extra jobs at Work and Income as part of the welfare reforms already passed into law.

 “These new staff will be part of National’s ‘unrelenting focus on work’ which will see many more sole parents, sickness and invalids’ beneficiaries harassed and intimidated into competing for the identical low wage, insecure jobs as the unemployed and underemployed.

 “All this means is that the same people will be constantly recycled between paid work and the benefit system.

 “Nor does Bill English take into account the faltering Australian economy and what will happen if Australia no longer remains a safety valve for unemployment here.

 “In one of Nationals’ most shocking moves, all state and other social housing tenancies will become subject to review, which means any form of long term housing security will become a hopeless dream for many.

 “This is a total repudiation of the purpose of state housing as originally conceived in the 1930s.

 “The shift of housing need assessments from Housing New Zealand to MSD may make sense, especially as Housing New Zealand have been doing such an awful job of it lately.

 “However, it will be critical that Work and Income staff take this new obligation seriously and don’t play the same destructive games in this area as they do so often when assessing peoples’ benefit entitlements.

 Auckland Action Against Poverty invites everyone who shares our disgust at National’s continuing attacks on those living in poverty to join us on a picket tomorrow. Media welcome.

 11.00am Friday 17 May – Vector Arena, Auckland – Picket of John Key who is speaking about the Budget to the Trans-Tasman Business Circle at 11.30am.

 ENDS.

11am this Friday the 17th of May
Vector Arena, Mahuhu Cres, Auckland City

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/594168963927536/?notif_t=plan_user_joined

Join us in calling for Decent Job Creation, a Living Wage, and a Universal Basic Income.

Look forward to seeing you there -  it’s time to unite and fight back.

Media release – Thursday 2 May 2013

Manukau Pak ’n Save paying poverty wages

Auckland Action Against Poverty is joining a FIRST Union picket outside the Manukau Pak ‘n Save at 67 Cavendish Drive at 8.30am this morning.

“After our collective success yesterday in sending a message to Pak ‘n Save Royal Oak, we’re heading to Manukau Pak ‘n Save today to let them know they can’t get away with 90 day contracts and nil wage rises,” says Auckland Action Against Poverty spokesperson Sarah Thompson.

 “Pak ‘n Save Manukau and its owner Stephen Lockie make huge profits every day off the backs of hard-working staff.

 “Auckland Action Against Poverty thinks it is totally unfair that employees at this store are being offered no wage rise this year.

 “We also reckon it stinks that a big company like this uses the 90 day rule for its staff, which means that new workers can be fired any time during their first three months on the job.

 “That’s why our group is supporting FIRST Union in their struggle to get a well-deserved pay rise for workers here and to get rid of the 90 day rule from this store.”

 AAAP and FIRST Union also picketed outside Royal Oak Pak ‘n Save this week, to protest that supermarket’s 90 day rule and introduction of youth rates.

 AAAP is an activist advocacy group made up of unemployed workers, beneficiaries, students, low wage workers and others who support our kaupapa of decent jobs and a living wage for all.

 ENDS

Media release – Wednesday 1 May 2013

Youth rates no solution to unemployment – AAAP joins Pak N Save picket

Auckland Action Against Poverty is joining a FIRST Union picket outside the Royal Oak Pak n Save at Manukau Rd at 8.30am this morning.

The store is trying to introduce youth rates in line with the new law which comes into effect today.

“Paying young workers $11 an hour will not help create jobs,” says AAAP spokesperson Sarah Thompson.

“We know that as time goes by older workers will simply be displaced by younger ones at lower wages, shuffling people on and off the dole queue.

“It’s also unacceptable that under the new law 18 and 19 year olds may be forced on to youth rates if they have been on the benefit for six months or more.

“If any company can afford to pay proper wages, it’s Pak n Save, which at Royal Oak might be more aptly named ‘Pak n Slave’.

“These Pak n Saves are enormous money spinners for their owners.”

“This particular store can certainly afford to pay its workers more than $11 an hour.

AAAP also supports the demand by Royal Oak workers for more than a nil wage rise this year, which is all their employer is offering.

“It’s grossly unfair that profitable companies like this are making the most of a business friendly government to keep wages as low as possible.

AAAP is an activist advocacy group made up of unemployed workers, beneficiaries, students, low wage workers and others who support our kaupapa of decent jobs and a living wage for all.

ENDS

24 April 2013 for The Daily Blog

On another current political battleground, however, Labour remains as dubiously shifty as ever. When it comes to welfare and jobs, I still have no clue as to where Labour stands in the face of the Bennett-Rebstock rampage.

It was great to see Labour and the Green Party come out with their proposal for a single state-owned buyer of electricity last week.

Ah hah, I thought. At last Labour – perhaps spurred on by their new best friends the Greens – have found some courage. And lovely to see John Key accusing the two parties of sabotage and ‘far-Left’ politics. Couldn’t be further from the truth, but it lifts the spirits to see some spark finally emerging from the centre left.

On the electricity front, the big question of course is whether Labour and the Greens will actually action their proposal once they’re warming the government benches. I remember all too well how Labour lost its bottle on the employment relations front in the face of massive business opposition in the winter of 2000, despite a recent election victory and the Alliance being part of that government.

But good luck to them, and may both parties remain true to their single-buyer promise.

On another current political battleground, however, Labour remains as dubiously shifty as ever. When it comes to welfare and jobs, I still have no clue as to where Labour stands in the face of the Bennett-Rebstock rampage.

Well meaning MPs like Jacinda Ardern and Carol Beaumont make resounding speeches in the House opposing National’s brutal welfare bills.

However, what many of us out here in the real world really want to know is whether Labour will legislate to overturn the reforms in all their awful detail when their party becomes part of government again?
There has been no clear statement on this from Labour at any point.

Over the last few decades, Labour has been as culpable as National when it comes to its approach to welfare and decent job creation.

Roger Douglas and co in the 1980s methodically wiped out hundreds of thousands of jobs, decimated small town New Zealand, ended full wage job creation schemes (now looked back on with great fondness by many in districts currently hard hit by unemployment) and began the first work for dole scheme since the Depression.

Labour in the 2000s never even attempted to lift benefit levels to their equivalent before National’s 1991 cuts; got rid of the Special Benefit which made the difference between survival and desperate penury for many; reintroduced no-go zones in a number of rural and provincial areas, making it even harder for working age people to stay in or return to their home districts; established massive structural discrimination against the children of beneficiaries via the In Work Tax Credit portion of Working for Families; and undermined in legislation the very purpose of social security as established by their forebears in 1938.

Paula Bennett and John Key have ridden in on the back of Labour’s 2000s welfare changes to cement in a culture and practice which foments our country’s unfortunate disposition towards hatred of beneficiaries, as evidenced by the recent report showing that those dependent on income support are now the most discriminated against group of people in Aotearoa.

Last week a Labour MP told me that her party does not plan to make any announcements on welfare policy till some time not long before the 2014 election.

That’s just not good enough.

David Shearer’s sickness beneficiary on a roof speech was naively revealing of his true feelings about beneficiaries. His lack of regret since then about what he said and how he said it simply shows that he, too, buys into the blind prejudice so prevalent in our communities.

In the face of Shearer’s speech and the lack of any commitment to turn back National’s reforms, every day that goes by only deepens the sense that Labour is still stuck in the same conservative, blinkered space on welfare and jobs.

We need a clear positioning statement soon, or the suspicion will be that Labour is going to carry on as usual, perhaps making small superficial changes for the better, but not dealing with the finely tuned cruelty of our complex welfare system and the total lack of any Government commitment to full wage job creation.

I challenge Labour to tell us where you really stand, well before election year.

Come clean on whether you’ll wipe out the Nats’ reforms of the past two years, or let them ride.
Show us that you’re interested in real solutions on welfare, poverty and unemployment, like full wage job creation, the fair application of Working for Families to all children, and a move towards a Universal Basic Income.

People are suffering now, day in and day out, and once the impacts of the latest social security legislation come into force, that suffering is only going to deepen.

I’d love to see your party apply a little intelligence to the situation, rather than blind prejudice.

The pledge to establish a single buyer of electricity is well and good, but how about showing some courage on another, more desperate front, and recall on whose votes the Labour Party first rode to power – the unemployed workers of the 1930s.

Media release Monday 15 April 2013

No joy in falling beneficiary numbers, fraud stats

We take no joy at all in seeing the number of beneficiaries drop under Paula Bennett’s regime, says Auckland Action Against Poverty spokesperson Sarah Thompson.

 “While we hope that at least some of these statistics represent happy outcomes, our experience carrying out frontline beneficiary advocacy tells us that in fact many of those pushed out of the benefit system are not going into decent jobs at all, but into an appalling limbo without either paid work or income support.

 “We also wonder how many other people didn’t get jobs – or have fewer paid hours – because a struggling single mum or person on a sickness benefit has been forced by Work and Income to take the job or the extra hours someone else needs for survival.

 “National’s welfare changes are all about recycling the desperate, the poor and the unemployed, not about decent jobs or quality of life for beneficiaries and their children.

 “And in regards to the Ministry of Social Development’s other announcement on numbers ‘caught’ receiving welfare overpayments – from the figures given, there is no telling how many of these 525 cases would have been picked up anyway.

 “There has always been an issue around people continuing to receive benefits when they’ve started work. The cross over is sometimes only one or two weeks and is as frequently Work and Income’s fault as it is that of the person concerned.

 “Chester Burrows is deliberately manipulating and trumpeting these statistics to deepen the opprobrium National is so keen to attach to beneficiaries.

 “With his Social Security (Fraud Measures and Debt Recovery) Amendment Bill due for its first reading in Parliament sometime soon, Mr Borrows is obviously keen to set the scene for the third round of Government beneficiary-bashing.

 “Auckland Action Against Poverty believes that ultimately the only real solution to this horrendous blame and shame culture is the introduction of a universal basic income which will do away with this whole state apparatus of control, which is more reminiscent of a totalitarian state than of a free and compassionate society.”

 ENDS

10 April 2013 for The Daily Blog

Paula Bennett is becoming more and more blatant in her persona as the face of National’s war on the poor.
In this morning’s Herald she says, “… I think living on the full DPB is hard. I don’t know how you can live on 50%.”

Yet Paula Bennett’s welfare reforms are the very vehicle by which more and more people are being sanctioned.

Sanctions can mean having your benefit cut by 50%, losing it altogether – or never being granted assistance in the first place.

The government’s own figures show that over the last six months an average 4,654 beneficiaries a month have had at least half their benefit taken from them, or had it cut completely.

Last month, in March 2013, 5,600 people were officially sanctioned.

The latest welfare reform legislation which passed through Parliament last night on a vote of 61-59 – the Social Security (Benefit Categories and Work Focus) Amendment Act – is only going to make things a whole lot worse.

In the past National has boasted about not replicating its infamous ’91 benefit cuts.
Yet what they’re doing at the moment is just as bad as what they did back then, and a lot more insidious.

I am really fearful of what is to come.

In a time of high unemployment, these changes are simply going to force more and more of the already disadvantaged into competing for what low wage, insecure jobs do exist.

Many more sole parents, disabled, sick and injured people are going to be work tested – and drug tested with sanctionable consequences – as a result of Bennetts’ reforms.

Women who dare to have babies while on welfare face work testing from the time their child is one year old.

And as we can see, the numbers of people being sanctioned is already increasing exponentially.

Benefit rates are wildly variable depending on circumstances and whether your local Work & Income officer grants you your full entitlement, but just to give you some idea of what we’re talking about here, the current net DPB rate is $295.37 a week (half = $147.68); the unemployment benefit rate for a single person aged 22 is $171.84pw (half = $85.92).

The results of all this will be tragic and costly.

More and more people will live in various forms of homelessness – in boarding house rooms, garages, sheds, tents, cars and already overcrowded houses – or outside, in bus shelters, doorways, beaches and parks.

More and more will not have enough to eat each week, much less have adequate heating this winter.
All the reports on child poverty in the world are useless in the face of a Government which deliberately inflicts deepening poverty on people every day of the week.

Paula Bennett displays an amazing honesty when she says she doesn’t know how people can raise a family on half the DPB and that she has ‘concerns’.

Yet she is the Minister responsible for taking the axe to our welfare system, and to peoples’ lives.
I continue to struggle with what kind of disconnection is happening in her mind.

National loves her. She’s doing a much better job than Jenny Shipley ever did at fronting harsh welfare changes.

Much better to have a Maori woman, a former solo mum, taking the lead, than a former school teacher from the white South Island heartlands.

And Bennett knows what she’s doing.

She knows it even more than someone like Shipley, which makes her leadership role in this even worse.
Paula Bennett’s seeming naivety and smiling, bubbly front mask a long, deep commitment to National’s ideology – a belief in helping the already-rich get richer while the poor are forced into ever deeper poverty, no matter the downstream social and economic costs.

I’m no psychologist, but I’m sure there’s a name for the psychopathy she so evidently displays – a complete disconnect between ‘caring for people’ and the ideological principles which drive her political career.

Shame on her – and shame on every single person who voted for her and for National at the last election.

We are all reaping what you have sown.

Beneficiaries are to receive the biggest boot in the guts since the infamous ’91 cuts says Auckland Action Against Poverty spokesperson Sarah Thompson.

“The Social Security (Benefit Categories and Work Focus) Amendment Bill will see ordinary New Zealanders become collateral damage in Bennett’s race to move 100,000 people off welfare, no matter the cost.

“This Bill is not about supporting people into work as National’s mantra would have us believe.

“Instead, it aims through sanctions, obligations, work tests, drug tests and work ability assessments to drastically increase the number of people forced to compete for low wage, insecure work.

“This is all within the current climate of 284,000 jobless.

“AAAP calls for decent job creation at decent wages, and a total restructuring of our welfare system, including moving towards a Universal Basic Income.

“We’d also like to see every party opposing this bill give assurances that they will repeal all National’s abusive welfare changes should they be part of government following the 2014 election.”

ENDS

By: Sue Bradford 

“This is not about helping people into better, more fulfilling lives. Instead, it is all about helping keep the wages and conditions of employed workers as low as possible by enforcing a race to the bottom for insecure, low paid work.”

Full blog post available on The Daily Blog here:

http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/03/27/destroying-lives-to-win-votes-nationals-anti-beneficiary-rampage-continues/

Media release Thursday 21 March 2013

Welfare reforms will hurt not help

Paula Bennett seems set on enacting reforms to the welfare system despite clear evidence from specialists that they will hurt vulnerable members of society, says Auckland Action Against Poverty spokesperson Sarah Thompson.

 “Expert evidence from the Ministry of Health, the NZ Drug Foundation, the Children’s Commissioner and the disability sector highlights that the latest wave of welfare reforms will significantly harm both families and children who rely on government assistance.

 “The repeated message from National MPs during the second reading of the Social Security (Benefit Categories and Work Focus) Amendment Bill was that these reforms will ‘support people into work’, yet no single clause in the Bill provides the support that the above groups or other submitters argue will lead to this end point.

 “The solutions demanded include decent job creation; financial support for, and access to, education; the removal of barriers to work such as the cost and provision of childcare; and increased access to drug and alcohol rehabilitation.

 “The Ministry of Health have previously given a strong and persistent warning to the Minister of Social Development that the sanctions relating to Wellchild checks would have serious, negative impacts on families and vulnerable children including risks of increased child maltreatment and neglect.

 “While it was (incorrectly) reported on Tuesday that NZ First was going to support the bill, we are pleased that in fact they have stuck to their principles as outlined in their Select Committee minority report.

 “Auckland Action Against Poverty calls on all parties to follow suit and reject this Bill at its third and final reading. People who receive benefits will return to employment when work is available and their health and family circumstances allow – not as a result of draconian welfare legislation.

 ENDS