We don’t stigmatise and persecute people with mental illness anymore. But in my opinion, that’ll all change if Act has its way.
Suddenly, people suffering from stress will be subject to secret reports from their doctors to the Government, breaching doctor-patient confidentiality. Act would take doctors off the frontline to serve as “designated doctors”, double-guessing the decisions of the lead carers for people with mental illness.
Act, despite having no mental health experts in its caucus, blithely declares that mental illnesses like stress are temporary and don’t create permanent incapacity. Maybe they’ve never met someone who struggles with serious PTSD or other conditions that can spring from stress and trauma.
Nobody wants the indignity of having to go to their doctors and MSD to get their mental illness recognised so that they can get a pittance, less than $400 a week, to scrap by on. For many people who suffer from mate ā-hinengaro (a mental illness), so deep is their depression that I think they would not care about pūtea (payment). Next step would be being homeless. That, whānau, is cruel.
Act wants to spend $22 million a year on diverting doctors from caring for people to making them spy on mentally ill beneficiaries. They would need to find thousands of benefit fraudsters a year to make up that cost – but last year only just over $2m in benefit fraud overpayments were uncovered in completed investigations.
The idea there is massive benefit fraud is unfounded and the idea that mentally ill New Zealanders are really just work-shy layabouts is insulting and hurtful.
On top of that, both National and Act are committed to slowing the rate that benefits increase, taking hundreds of dollars a year off the most impoverished New Zealanders. That’s not even targeted at supposed benefit fraudsters – it hits everyone on a benefit just as hard.
It is cruel. But, maybe, the cruelty is the point.
Because if National and Act really cared about fraud, they wouldn’t be putting mentally ill people living in poverty under the microscope. They would be looking at the other end of town.
We know that billions in tax evasion happens every year. Estimates run as high as $7 billion a year. In fact, IRD doesn’t bother to investigate potential evasion unless it thinks it will recover $7 for every dollar it spends in the investigation – that’s how much low-hanging fruit there is in tax evasion.
Are National and Act proposing to go after wealthy rip-off artists with the same intensity as they attack the stressed? No. In fact, National’s tax plan calls for a 6.5 per cent cut to the Serious Fraud Office’s budget.
Let’s get this straight. A National-Act Government would cut the money for detecting white-collar fraud and, instead, spend tens of millions hunting for fictional benefit fraudsters and making the lives of mentally ill Kiwis harder.
How can that be the priority?
Do we want a government that expends effort and taxpayer money beating up on those of us who already have the hardest lives? I fear some of us do. I think Act knows exactly the mean and sad audience it is playing to with policies like this.
But most of us are better than that. We want a fair, compassionate society that holds out a hand in aroha to those who need help. We help our neighbours, our friends, and our whānau when they need it. We want the Government to be there for those in need too, and embrace them, rather than beating them down further.
Act might play to their fringe, but the question goes on National – will they reject the politics of cruelty?
Shane Te Pou (Ngāi Tūhoe) is a commentator, blogger and former Labour Party activist.
