Zealand’s welfare system

Opinion

Moves to reform New Zealand’s welfare system

David Barber

Welungton

By the end of this month, New Zealanders should have told the government how they want the country’s welfare system reformed.

Well, some will have - those who bothered to read the 30- page booklet on the subject sent to all 1.3 million households in the land in February and the attached questionnaire and mailed back their responses.

The worry is, of course, that those who will be most affected by changes in the system - the 362,000 New Zealanders who are receiving welfare benefits - are the least likely to participate in the government’s consultative exercise. And that, as we all know, includes a large number of the Pacific Island community and a lot of Maori. (While the overall unemployment rate is around 6.7 per cent, for instance, for Pacific Islands people it has long been above 15 percent and for Maori even higher).

At the heart of the issue is the government’s proposed “Code of Social and Family Responsibility”, which was published in Cook Islands Maori, Samoan, Tongan and Maori, as well as English and Chinese, so there is no excuse for a poor response from the island community.

Behind it is a clear message: The country can no longer afford the cradle-to-grave care the government once offered every New Zealander. It is time for individuals to take responsibility for themselves. That means everything from rediscovering the work ethic to looking after their kids, managing their budgets, keeping fit and stop smoking to reduce health costs.

“A consensus needs to be established about what the govern ment, on behalf of the taxpayer, can do and what New Zealanders and their families must do for themselves,”

Prime Minister Jenny Shipley told Parliament. When she launched the process, there was inevitably suspicion that she was using public consultation to try to build a mandate for sweeping welfare reform, confident that the silent majority of New Zealanders want a shake-up of the benefit structure.

Whatever the goal, it’s clear that something needs to be done.

The government’s bill for health, welfare, education and pensions has soared from $l2 million to NZ$6B.5 million a day in under two decades. More than half of this goes on wel

fare payments, now the main source of income for about one-in five of the working age population. Even more worrying, nearly 30 percent of children live in families dependent on benefits. Most of these are living in sole parent families, sadly a high proportion of them Pacific Island people and even more Maori.

“The government cannot continue to increase funding of pro grammes seeking to solve problems when the answers sometimes lie elsewhere in the complex areas of personal and family rela

tionships, responsibilities and self-discipline,” Shipley said.

New Zealanders, she rightly said, were worried about issues like children’s health, fatherless families, young people at risk, mental illness and unemployment, and she called for an “open, searching, honest and if necessary provocative” debate on social policy as a precursor to change. Critics certainly saw the proposed code as provocative. Shipley insisted it would apply to all New Zealanders, not just beneficiaries, and she denied charges that she was setting the scene for another across-the-board cut in benefits as she did in 1991 when Social Welfare Minister.

The code sets out 11 basic “expectations”, which few people could disagree with, though it is obvious many play lip service to them. They range from parents should love and care for their chil dren, to people should keep themselves healthy and beneficiaries should actively seek work. But a series of “discussion points” in the booklet provided pointers to the government’s thinking. They asked whether beneficiaries who don’t work should do communi ty service, whether parents who don’t make their kids go to school should lose their benefits, whether income support should be linked to child health checks and immunisation and whether peo ple who repeatedly sought emergency help should be made to have free budget advice.

And Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters, who dreamed up the idea of a code of social responsibility in the first place, fanned fears of a clamp down on benefits. “Every New Zealander knows of somebody ripping off the welfare system,” he told Parliament.

“Social welfare is crippling the taxpayers of this country.”

Opposition parties predictably attacked the code. Labour lead er Helen Clark saying it was draconian and would attempt to “rank people’s needs, playing widows, children, single parents and oth ers off against one another”.

Said her social welfare spokesman Steve Maharey; “If benefi ciaries do not meet these expectations then they are going to find their benefits cut. It is obvious that’s what they’re going to do, otherwise this whole exercise is pointless.

“The government has begun its war on what is left of the wel fare state.” Some reform is inevitable. The extent of it remains to be seen. The government may well have made up its mind. But if people don’t take advantage of the opportunity to tell the politi cians what they think, they have only themselves to blame if they don’t like the outcome. ■