On The Crackdown On The Beneficiary Poor

For the past 50 years, the centre-right has been using beneficiaries as a political punching bag. This was (slightly) more forgivable during the Muldoon era, when unemployment in New Zealand was still something of a post war novelty, and could readily be blamed on the handful of people on the welfare rolls. Not now. We are living through an economic slowdown engineered by the Reserve Bank to crush household spending, which – perversely – the RB blamed for inflation. As a result, unemployment is at a three-year high and rising, helped along by the government’s deliberately trashing the jobs of thousands of public servants.

Weirdly, this climate of a slowing economy and job scarcity is the very moment when National and ACT have decided to crack down hard on the victims of public policy. Under the threat of losing the only means of subsistence for themselves and their children, more and more people are to be put on the mouse-wheel of chasing fewer and fewer job openings, and regardless of the added costs this will impose on them.

Those added costs will include transport fares to and from repeated “ management” sessions at under-staffed WINZ offices, and repeated trips to and from interviews for vanishingly scarce job openings. The resulting competition needless to say, will put downward pressure on wages. Our already low waged economy is being pushed down the stairs and into the basement. Young people should think about escaping to Australia while they still can.

The contracting social contract

PM Christopher Luxon talks up the “obligations” on those receiving taxpayer support. Yet in his version of the social contract, all of the obligation is on one side of the table, and all of the power is on his side. Luxon and his Cabinet colleagues seem to feel themselves to be under no obligation to fulfil their side of the social contract, by managing the economy in a competent way that creates enough jobs for the people looking for employment.

Instead, the systemic harassment of the poor by the welfare police is being pursued in culpable ignorance of the consequences. On RNZ this morning, Luxon admitted he had no idea how much those on the Jobseeker allowance are expected to live on. Nor can Luxon or Social Development Minister Louise Upston offer an answer to what they think will happen to people (and their families) who fail to comply with the new conditions and get their benefits cut off, or halved, or diverted onto a payment card usable for only a limited range of purposes.

Here’s a clue: people who have no job, and who have been effectively excluded from the welfare safety net will have only one means of survival open to them. Ultimately, the cost of locking them up will far exceed the cost of taking a less punitive approach to people and families in need.

Footnote One: As Luxon also admitted to RNZ this morning, most people on benefits actually do comply with the existing conditions. So why impose draconian new compliance measures on all Jobseeker recipients – including the need to re-apply for support after only six months, presumably with a stand-down period while the paperwork is getting processed – when only a tiny minority of people are exhibiting the behaviour being targeted?

Footnote Two: As mentioned, there is much talk of beneficiaries having an obligation to meet strict compliance conditions, because most people get up every morning and go to work etc. The slur is unjust. Often it is luck, lifetime privilege and connections that deliver access to paid employment, as much as talent and perseverance.

But to take Luxon’s logic at face value for a moment... most people dutifully pay their tax, too. So where are the draconian compliance conditions, the public shaming and the sanctions for firms and individuals who don’t pay their full share of tax, on time? Why are people dodging their tax obligations not having their income commandeered, and put on a card restricting what they can buy ?

Why is the government enacting a selective crackdown on the beneficiary poor – who are disproportionately Māori – and not on the disproportionately white collar offenders dodging their tax obligations?

Push, Meet Pull

There’s a perverse pattern behind all of this. Repeatedly, people are being pushed by government policy in one direction, and then yanked in the opposite direction. For example: in the midst of the cost of living crisis, the coalition government scrapped the public transport subsidies that were helping families to get all of their kids to school. ACT leader David Seymour then ranted on about the poor levels of school attendance. Duh.

Similarly… prescription charges have been re-imposed, with the government calculating that it would “save” $14 million from the people unable to afford the cost of paying for access to their drug treatments. As a result though, many of the same people are now turning up in the already crowded and understaffed emergency departments at our public hospitals... on which government health funding policy has now imposed a hiring freeze.

In more of the same perversity... GPs on the frontlines of primary care are struggling to keep their practices afloat, let alone cope with the more complex health needs of an ageing population. In response, the coalition government has offered them further state funding only at below the annual rate of inflation, while telling GPs they can always meet the shortfall by raising their fees for doctors’ visits by another 8%. Obviously, this will further deny access to preventative care, and send still more people off into those emergency rooms at public hospitals.

You get the drift. Vulnerable people are being buffeted with cross currents of policy. One of the outcomes will be a general loss of faith in the public provision of essential services. This may well be the Luxon administration’s underlying goal. Because as the American author Thomas Frank once said, bad government decisions tend to be a by-product of rule by those who believe, on principle, that government is bad at this sort of thing.

Song for Palestine

While we’ve all been soaking up the Olympics in a welcome holiday from reality, Israel has continued to systematically slaughter innocent men, women and children seeking shelter in Gaza. The latest bombing of a school in Gaza killed over a hundred Palestinians and injured dozens more. According to CNN, a US-made GBU-39 small diameter bomb was used in the deadly Israeli attack on al-Tabin school. The US has just agreed to send an extra $3.5 billion worth of weapons to Israel.

Around the world, public protests against Israel’s genocide in Gaza - and against America’s unquestioning support for it – have increasingly used the song “Leve Palestina” as their rallying cry. This song was written in the 1970s in Swedish, by the Swedish-Palestinian singer George Totari for his band Kofia. Since October 7, “Leve Palestina” has been revived, and its influence has spread globally.

Yes, the lyrics do include the phrase “ crush Zionism.” To state the obvious, Totari was referring to Zionism as the racist ideology of colonial oppression, and not to the Jewish people. Over the history of the Jewish diaspora, it has been the Zionists who have claimed that their project is synonymous with the Jewish people. Right now, millions of Jewish people at home and around the world reject what the Zionist extremists in the Netanyahu government are doing in their name. Leve Palestina. Long live Palestine.

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