Kahui case sharpens focus on beneficiaries

Helen Clark

Households with several beneficiaries living under the same roof are to come under added Work and Income scrutiny in the wake of the Kahui case.

Police are still investigating the killing of 3-month-old Auckland twins Chris and Cru Kahui, who lived their brief lives in a house with several benefit recipients.

Social Development Minister David Benson-Pope last week said he had asked his department to investigate whether all benefits paid to members of the Kahui household were legitimate. He promised action if any evidence was found that they were not.

Yesterday Prime Minister Helen Clark said Work and Income's scrutiny would be wider than just the Mangere East household where Chris Kahui snr and Macsyne King lived with their children and other family members.

"This case, where there appears to have been a number of benefits in one household, has caused the minister to say to [Work and Income], 'I want you to go and look at whether there are clusters of households like this that we can focus on and see whether benefits are being properly paid'," she said.

Government initiatives to target long-term unemployed and get them back into the workforce might have focused on individuals and missed households with large numbers of benefit claimants, Helen Clark said.

"The minister has directed the department to look at running through and analysing households so we can get clusters per address of how many benefits there may be in one place and then we can have a concerted targeting of those kinds of households.

"We are talking about an extremely small number of people ... who have always tried to rip off any system that's going."

Mr Benson-Pope later confirmed he had asked officials for a "concerted targeting" of such households. Once identified, officials would make sure no one was receiving a benefit to which they were not entitled and would put in place intensive case management and early intervention assistance to address the family's issues.

"These are not new initiatives; intensive case management and early intervention are already part of our work with many families.

"Record low unemployment means we can now increase our focus on making sure our services reach all the families that need them," he said.

Helen Clark also dismissed a call from Waipareira Trust head and former Labour MP John Tamihere for benefits to be paid to Maori social service agencies rather than individuals.

"We don't support putting another layer of bureaucracy and cost into the system and I think it runs the very real risk of actually increasing dependency for the very people that you're trying to move along the conveyer belt towards full independence.

"There's quite a lot of things to be dealt with, and they're not easy to deal with when you're dealing with third-generation unemployment."