Dialogue: Benefits are often of meagre benefit

By CHRISTINE RANKIN

For the past few weeks we've had our heads in New York and Afghanistan. Commentators tell us that we cannot understand these events using the old good-versus-evil, left-versus-right categories.

Hijackers are supposedly not religion-crazed youths but educated, thinking and mature people.

The level of hate of the United States and the West is palpable. The old ways of seeing things just don't fit. We are told the world has changed forever, and our thinking about the world must change with it.

That doesn't apply just to the international stage. I suspect we also need some new thinking around pressing issues on the home front.

As a start, we need to get old-style politics out of welfare and then we might get something meaningful done about exploding dependency.

Apparently if we make people work for the dole or peg their benefit in relation to the minimum wage we are engaged in heartless new-right economics.

If we give them higher benefits or relax rules around special needs grants we are left-wing wets.

Neither label is helpful and does nothing to address the problems.

The fact is that our welfare bill for such a small country is enormous and the thin veneer of economic activity and public funding that keep welfare at manageable levels might be blown apart if a recession strikes, created by events on the other side of the world.

We need to see the more than $7 billion spent on working-age beneficiaries as an investment in people and not what serves one or other political philosophy.

Welfare was my life for 23 years, since the day I applied for the DPB. My feelings about it are very intense, and when I close my eyes I can still see it, smell it and taste it.

From the moment I was on it I wanted to be off it. I have met thousands of work-age beneficiaries. Most want to work - life on a benefit is tough.

What keeps people on benefits is not too much or too little money but a lack of basic skills that sustain a working lifestyle: cooking, cleaning, budgeting and organising children.

New Zealanders would be shocked at how many people live from takeaway bar to takeaway bar until the money runs out.

Foodbanks provide basic staple foods. Clients would often tell us that they didn't know what to do with the porridge or rice.

These are basic facts about welfare dependency that New Zealanders don't know or understand and of course it is not politically correct to talk openly about them because it might be seen as judging people.

But that's only the start of it. Lack of literacy is a major problem - many thousands of people in this country, many of whom are on benefits, cannot read or write.

It's damned hard to get or hold down even a basic job - say, driving a truck - if you can't read signs or street names.

In addition, a distressingly high number of young people have drug and alcohol problems. Some of our best, life-changing courses for young people cannot cope with these issues. The numbers are frightening.

Employers naturally don't want these people either and the politicians don't want to talk about them. We're led to believe that it's all about left versus right, haves versus have nots.

Where does this argument get us? Absolutely nowhere. It's a burned-out issue that has meaning only to the politicians who use it to market themselves to an electorate caught in a time warp.

Let's stop doing what is politically correct and start doing things that work.

Why don't we decline or partly decline benefits for young people with drug addiction, and invest that money in their rehabilitation?

Sometimes we all need a prod to improve ourselves. Why can't a condition of a benefit be a literacy programme?

We should bring all this together in a binding contract that has rights and clear obligations. This would provide value to the money received and ensure progress for people.

There are individuals out there who are full of talent. They need incentives built into the system to give them encouragement, support, care and real investment in improving their skills instead of trapping them into a go-nowhere life without hope.

The welfare system design is essentially the same as it was 20 or 30 years ago yet the environment is dramatically different. We need to re-invent it.

The re-invention by this Government has simply been to increase dependency. That might be good politics in the old categories, but it is actually neglect.