My brother-in-law has cerebral palsy. He is physically and mentally disbaled. Ruth Dyson decided a few years ago that everyone on a sickness or invalid benefit has to be reassesssed every year to see if they are able to work.

As such each year my b-in-law has to be re-assessed to see if he can continue to receive a benefit.

My partner was made redundant earlier this year yet we have continued to subsidise his care (he lives in CHCH we live in Auckland). BTW it is his choice to live in CHCH and not move up here. he knows the city, its transport and facilities. he has a motorised scooter and he lives in a flat situation with a care giver.

His disability was doctor’s error not a in-womb defect. Since he was born over 50 years ago his parents cared for him and took care of everything. No ACC, no assistance no doctor paid compensation… when his mother was dying, we went South to look after her, and made arrangements to gradually move him into a residential care unit. He has been living there since 2004. Plug for Lauara Fergusson, they take great care of him.

He operates at about the level of a 12 year old. We visit him several times a year and we always bring him up for Christmas.

I can only begin to guess what he would have cost the taxpayer had his parents, and now we, not decided to take care of him. Not a conscious decision, because he is our family, a natural decision. BUT the Government decides he must be reassesssed every year. I presume the Government thinks a cure is around the corner for CP???

Regarding these folks receiving $1000+ a week, I also read most of them are caring for large numbers of children who are not theirs. It seems to me those people are actually SAVING us money, and, potentially these kids will become productive members of our communities and not drug addicts, or thieves or worse… Money well spent

Jezza

For a start it is not a ‘tiny minority’, we have hundreds of long term dole bludgers who have no intention of ever getting a job, Philip Ure and Natasha Fuller being being just two of them.
Of course in a free society nobody should be forced to work, however, those people who choose not to work should NOT be paid by their fellow citizens to sit on their backsides all day.

The left see the dole as a right or entitlement, and work as an option.
Why not offer the tax payers of NZ the option of funding long term bludgers or not?, you people on the left can pay higher taxes while we can leave the bludgers to rot.

Yep, Drakula – “recession” is defined only by “economic growth”, or lack thereof. Unemployment is actually one of the tools of the right to promote economic growth. Keeping unemployment high diminishes wage demands by those who are employed. Lower wages, but the same level of production, means increased productivity. So all is good, according to the neo-liberals.

A strange, but unfortunately widely accepted, way of looking at economics. Unemployment can be spiraling out of control, but as long as GDP improves, we purportedly have a sound economy according to the neo-libs.

Should be Tui ad stuff, but unfortunately it has been sold well by successive governments to most New Zealanders – at least until they themselves become unemployed.

THE RECESSION IS OVER!!!!!!!

In Campaign Against Foreign Controls magazine Watchdog there is a very good cartoon by a Mike keefe?

There is a very long dole que outside the office that stretches for miles.
Half way down one fellow says to the fellow behind him ‘the recession is over pass it on’

Welfare dependency was invented in New Zealand by the 1980′s free market reforms which ended full employment as a government goal.

The RB Act making containing inflation the prime goal of monetary policy ensured that policy has never been challenged.

Blaming the victims of the end of full employment is designed to justify the free market system and associated attempts to reduce taxes on those with higher incomes and also business. The mantra is blame the people for not making the capitalist system work rather than blame the capitalist system for failing the people.

And let’s note we have had across most of this decade one of the lowest levels of unemployment in the OECD – because UNEMPLOYMENT IS NOW ENDEMIC in the western free market system. This means the problem is not bludging in New Zealand, but the economic policy that has been applied since Reagan and Thatcher across the western world.

Originally the DPB was set up because there were too many families headed by one parent who were in hardship because the other parent had “shot thru”. (No prizes for guessing the gender of the vast majority of those who absented themselves.)

I spent some time on the DPB in the early 1980′s when, just as I was about to return to work after a year’s maternity leave, our marriage broke up (for other reasons)and my partner returned to Australia.

I was left with the problems of having to return to a demanding full time job, a five year old who was being badly bullied at school, and a timid one year old who found it difficult to settle into Child Care.

I quickly found out that there is a very big difference between a family with two parents where both work outside the home (or a family where two separated parents share the child care), and a family with ONE UNSUPPORTED parent who works outside the home.

I ended up with very high stress levels and became ill.
After consulting with WINZ (who were excellent)I managed to reduce the number of hours I worked, and WINZ topped up our income when required. (That top up, even when minimal, would make our family a part of the WINZ DPB statistics.) WINZ also had the responsibility for ensuring that my children’s father contributed to this income as a “liable parent”.

Please don’t forget that the Government has had to take on this role because too many parents have not been taking responsibility for their progeny, and very many of those not taking responsibility are male.

(I hasten to add that my children’s father always paid his dues!)

There are already mechanisms to deal with abuse of benefits – why not focus on that so that the proportion of the 300 or so people on high benefits are scrutinised. Why punish everyone for the actions of a few?

Again, most of the invalid beneficiaries I know would LOVE to have work – but guess what, with the increase of unemployed civil servants as well as the able-bodied unemployed, it is almost impossible to find work. My daughter has had her name down with the kind of agencies that look for work for people with disabilities, but the only paid work she has she found for herself, cleaning houses and occasionally mowing lawns for private clients. Don’t get me wrong, she is very happy to do that, she would like more clients, but the number she has and the uncertainty (if they are away, no work that week) mean she could not support herself on that income.

She is NOT a long-term bludger but a young woman who wants to be part of society and earn her own living – unfortunately, society, and bigots like Big Bro, don’t see it that way. I hope you are not one of the people who find it amusing to jeer at her in the street because she looks ‘different’! Because that is what she has to put up with in addition to a rather lonely life with not enough work or companionship.

Actually, your comments make me sick!

On the surface this looks great, forcing LONG TERM bludgers to re apply can only be a good thing.
One can only hope they insist that sickness and invalid beneficiaries are subjected to the same scrutiny.

Next should be the DPB.

One of the constants in dealing with WINZ is the difficulty of getting the correct paperwork out of them to fill in and return … staff have been known to be so poorly trained that they don’t know what to do with a medical certificate, for instance.

Any funds a beneficiary has (savings, assets) count against being able to claim extra allowances such as for accommodation or medical costs, as Toad has already stated.

There have been howls of outrage regularly about the prospect of ‘beneficiaries owning homes being subsidised by WINZ’, but if you re-frame that to ‘abandoned family stays in own home until mother can find a decent enough job to pay the mortgage’, it doesn’t sound quite so bad.
If more ‘dead-beat dads’ were contributing child support, Winz wouldn’t be subsidising the rent/mortgage for so many newly separated families, especially at this time of the year.
(yes, it is apparently still legal to run off to Australia with your secretary/accounts clerk/receptionist and leave no trace of your employment for Winz to recover child support – so don’t beat up on the women who are struggling to keep a roof over their children’s heads)

Unemployment Beneficiaries should be the last to be getting undue attention, after the way John Key campaigned (just over a year ago) to ‘soften the blow’ of recession cut-backs in staffing – including the sundry public servants he has himself relegated to the job-seeking queues.

There are just too many tautologies in this outburst of self-righteousness from the Minister for me to continue enumerating them.

Must be time I sent her an update on the ministerial enquiry I started last February, which her staff have still not finished dealing with; if she wants to rave about the unemployed, perhaps she should start with her own head office policy division, who don’t seem to be able to answer simple questions about the difference between their website mission statements, and the frontline application of MSD service in local Winz service centres.

jh, I wouldn’t apologise to Harris – unless I had wronged him. As far as I am concerned, he is a scumbag.

But like everyone else, he has the right to be judged in any particular instance on the evidence – not on prejudice, which you seem to do.

Oh, and in case you haven’t noticed, the Greens are campaigning on things that keep house prices up, and on greed at the top end.

The Blind Toad says:

“I haven’t seen any evidence that he has received anything he is not entitled to.”

a martial arts expert getting a sickness benefit >>> addicted to cannabis.