KEY POINTS:
If National wins the coming election, one group of bureaucrats can breathe easily - front-line Work and Income case managers.
Judith Collins, the former Auckland lawyer who holds the party's welfare portfolio, says the Ministry of Social Development was wrong to cut its case managers in the past year by 450 (4.5 per cent) because of falling unemployment.
"It was pretty obvious even then that we had a technical recession. Now we know we're in recession," she said yesterday.
"I'd like to see that we have all hands to the deck to make sure that where there are jobs we get people into them, and where there are not jobs we get people into training, although understanding that that won't be an option for some people."
For the social services, this election takes place at a disturbing moment. New Zealand has come to the end of an extraordinary period of prosperity when unemployment beneficiaries fell from 5.2 per cent of working-age non-Maori people in June 1999 to an almost-invisible 0.5 per cent this June.
Among Maori, the dole queues have shrunk spectacularly from an appalling 18.3 per cent of the working-age group to 2.4 per cent.
But the recession has already begun to hit. As layoffs started in volatile sectors such as the building industry, unemployment beneficiaries climbed again from 17,871 in June to 22,262 in August. Last week's pre-election Treasury update forecasts a rise to 45,000 by 2010-11.
That would still be nowhere near as bad as in 1999 when there were 150,000 people on the dole. But the forecasts were made before the world financial crisis of the past few weeks.
Last time it was in power, in the 1990s, National and its then coalition ally, New Zealand First, introduced a work-for-the-dole scheme for the long-term unemployed. It also required sole parents to seek part-time work when their youngest children reached school age, and full-time work when their children were teenagers.
This time round, the party has abandoned work-for-the-dole and watered down its policy for sole parents. But it would still bring back a requirement for sole parents to seek work for at least 15 hours a week once their youngest children turn 6.
When the policy was announced in August, leader John Key said work-for-the-dole had been dropped because of the decline in unemployment.
But Ms Collins said yesterday that she had no plans to resurrect it if unemployment rises.
"It's too expensive for what we need. I think we can do other things."
She believes the extra front-line staff for Work and Income can be found by cutting the ministry's head office staff.
"I don't know why we have to have 350 policy analysts."
The ministry told MPs it had boosted that number from 200 in 2002.
The party would also give beneficiaries more incentive to work by letting them earn $100 a week before losing part of their benefits. The present $80 a week has not changed since 1986.
National would also order more medical checks for sickness beneficiaries and make those who can work seek work.
Labour has already started moving in the same direction, more gently. It changed the law in 2006 to let officials require sickness and invalid beneficiaries to draw up "personal development and employment plans" similar to the plans it introduced for sole parents after abolishing National's work requirements in 2002.
"Labour has introduced a proactive approach to case management. Individuals are no longer discounted from support due to arbitrary criteria," Social Development Minister Ruth Dyson told the Herald.
"[But] the use of sanctions for failure to meet requirements is very much a last resort and only occurs after every other possible avenue has been explored."
She said placing people on make-work schemes actually made them less likely to get real jobs.
Instead, a Labour Government would bring in further measures to help people into real jobs such as a new computer tool to match people with jobs, more health and rehabilitation services, and bringing state and community agencies together to work with individual job-seekers.
The Green Party would go further and create real jobs at full wages on public projects such as state housing and public transport.
Similarly, the Maori Party says: "The Government is in a better position to borrow than private businesses and individuals; accordingly, the Government should help."
New Zealand First chief of staff Damian Edwards said his party would make the Reserve Bank take account of employment when it set monetary policy and would tighten immigration controls to give New Zealanders the first right to available jobs.
Although the party pushed for work-for-the-dole in the 1990s and still advocates it on its website, Mr Edwards said: "We have to berealistic.
"If we are just doing make-work scenarios, they are not as effective as training and being able to put people on some sort of career path.
"So I would focus more on the training and encouragement to get back to work, as opposed to work-for-the-dole."
