Christopher Luxon accuses Labour of leaving a $200 billion hole in the nations transport plan and signals spending reductions to come in his State of the Nation address today.
Opinion by Sonya Bateson
Sonya is a regional content leader for the Bay of Plenty Times and Rotorua Daily Post
Luxon said those words at his State of the Nation speech on Sunday and, on Tuesday, he said he would be bringing back stricter sanctions for people on the unemployment benefit.
He later told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking he had spoken to frontline workers who felt they couldn’t apply existing sanctions when they were needed, and that people were “wilfully and knowingly” abusing the system.
“Look, there are these rules that exist already today, previous National governments used them, Labour sent out a message to not worry about them too much,” Luxon said.
“And we just sent a message to the CEO of [Ministry of Social Development] to say hey, listen, in the spirit of people holding up their end of the bargain, we expect those sanctions to be applied.”
I’ve got to admit, my initial reaction reading those comments was an eye-roll. When Labour’s in power, rules for beneficiaries tend to loosen up a bit, and under National they tend to get tightened. It’s part of the tidal flow of New Zealand politics at this point.
But, upon reading further, I realised something – I simultaneously want to make life easier for beneficiaries while getting a rush of anger at the thought of people choosing a benefit over employment.
It’s a weird dichotomy, and one I haven’t fully been able to reconcile.
To explore that feeling, I did what I usually do when faced with a conundrum – I researched.
Here’s what I learned.
As of December, there were 378,711 total people on some form of benefit, according to the Ministry of Social Development. Of those, 189,798 were receiving jobseeker support payments and 108,957 (around 2 per cent of our country’s population) had been receiving that benefit for more than one year.
About one in 50 New Zealanders have been receiving job seeker benefits for more than a year.
That seems like a lot, right? But then I thought about it a bit more. There were about 500 kids at my school growing up and, according to those statistics, about 10 of those kids would likely be a long-term beneficiary today.
Honestly, putting it like that, it’s actually a smaller number than I would have guessed, especially considering how much effort our politicians put into policing beneficiaries.
Next, I decided to see how much money my family would get if we were to lose our jobs and our home somehow and need to return to renting.
Rental costs may not leave beneficiaries with much left over, writes Sonya Bateson. Photo / Michael Cunningham
Work and Income has an online calculator to find out how much you may be entitled to, and my family of three would get somewhere between $555 and $1049 a week before tax.
When you consider the median rent in my suburb (one of the more affordable in Tauranga) is $668 per week, that doesn’t leave a heck of a lot.
Lastly, I looked at the (before tax) pay cheque of someone earning minimum wage over a 40-hour week – $908.
A minimum-wage worker would also usually be entitled to other forms of assistance like the accommodation supplement.
That does put things in a bit more perspective for me. I don’t think I’d call being on this benefit a “free ride” like Luxon. I’d call it “just scraping by”.
Let’s be real. Having a job can really suck.
I don’t mean the work itself, there’s a lot of satisfaction in utilising our brains and bodies to achieve something. But the daily grind can be just that – a grind.
Our jobs feel like a tedious and unpleasant chore.
Work can be a grind but most of us choose to keep at it. Photo / 123rf
But most of us choose to keep at it, because we appreciate feeling useful, we want to afford a certain lifestyle and, often, we like the cachet our jobs can bring. Having a job is a morale booster – our skills and/or labour are worth something. We are productive. We are self-sufficient. We matter.
Combine that with the financial realities of surviving on a benefit and I bet most beneficiaries would also choose a good job with a decent salary over the dole – if they could.
I will always, always support the existence of having a social net available for those who cannot work, temporarily or permanently, and it should be enough to survive on with a little dignity.
When choosing between the carrot and the stick, the carrot is almost always the most effective method. Sanctions are more of a stick approach. I say we should use carrots to help people transition back into the workforce in a happy and healthy way so they’ll want to stay there.
Each of us (except the very wealthy) are a few steps away from disaster.
We’re Jenga towers, we’re stable until those blocks begin to get pulled out. Remove just one of those blocks – a good job, an employed spouse, a healthy body, a house to call your own – and the tower starts to wobble. Remove enough blocks and the tower comes crashing down.
We need a social net for those times. And I think we need a helpful way to help people rebuild when their tower collapses.
Let’s not kick people when they are down. Rather, let’s do what we can to lift them up – right out of poverty and into the workforce.
A free ride to employment, if you will.
Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a Millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.
