Kerre Woodham: Giving some benefit of doubt

I'm all for people working. If people are capable of work, then there's no way they should be leeching off the rest of us. I have been many things in my life but I have never been unemployed.

At times it's not been glamorous work. Cleaning other people's homes, dishwashing and waitressing aren't highly paid jobs, nor do they have particularly high prestige, but if you have to pay the rent, who cares?

So I'm all for a little light welfare reform as announced by the Government this week.

There are some people who are third- or fourth-generation beneficiaries and others who've started out on the dole, moved on to the sickness benefit before reaching the apex of their career on the invalid's benefit.

If Paula Bennett wants to make it a little bit tougher for people to rort the system, all well and good.

But having listened to some beneficiaries plead their case this week, I do wonder where they're supposed to find jobs.

One woman who said she was on the DPB told me it was important for society that she remain on the benefit because of the volunteer work she does for St John.

They were training her up to be a paramedic, she said. After talking with her for some time, it became painfully obvious there was no way she was ever going to cut the mustard as a paramedic. The thought of her looming over me with an oxygen mask would make me take my chances with a cardiac infarction.

Some people are just plain unemployable. They're the ones who would have been the biscuit packers in the factories of yesteryear.

Capable of little more than stacking packets of biscuits inside cartons, they were still part of a working community, paid taxes and had a reason to get up every day.

But automation has taken away a lot of the jobs done by the less able amongst us. So too has the streamlining of government departments from monolithic job-creation schemes into lean, mean SOE machines.

We have to accept that although there are people who are fraudsters who would rather suck off the taxpayer teat than work, there are also those amongst us who have been victims of modernisation and economic policies.

Helping them into any sort of work will be a greater challenge than cracking down on the fraudsters.