by Catherine Delahunty
It seems that National is using the confidence and supply agreement with its former MP John Banks acting as an ACT Party MP to push through some silly ideologically driven policies and hope that the terminal ACT rather than National cops the blame for them when the wheels fall off.
Among those polices are several of the more extreme recommendations of the Welfare Working Group:
6. Welfare
National and ACT agree that the two most important aims of welfare reform are the alleviation and prevention of child poverty, and a focus on work as the best route out of poverty and welfare dependence for those who are able to work. Both parties also agree with the broad thrust of the recommendations of the Welfare Working Group (WWG), and support their implementation.
In particular, National and ACT agree to implement in this Parliamentary term measures to promote the well-being of children in benefit-dependent households set out in WWG Recommendations 27: Parenting obligations, 28: Support for at-risk families, and 30: Income management and budgeting support.
They further agree to implement measures to improve the effectiveness of employment placement services for beneficiaries through contracting out such services to private sector and community organisations, as set out in WWG Recommendation 34: Employment services.
The United Kingdom adopted a similar contracting approach for job placement services, and it is nothing short of a corporate welfare scam. Last year, the Public Accounts Committee of the UK House of Commons reported:
The performance by the mainly private sector providers has been universally poor in relation to their main target group, those people who are required to go on the Pathways programme. The targets agreed with providers were over-optimistic, considerably exceeding the best performing Jobcentre Plus districts in the early pilot areas, and underestimated the difficulty of supporting this client group. Providers started from a low knowledge base with little direct experience of working with incapacity benefits claimants.
So contracting out employment placement services doesn’t get more beneficiaries into employment. It is the poverty pimps, rather than the beneficiaries, who benefit:
The woman appointed by David Cameron to help troubled families get off benefits and into work has a joint income with her husband estimated at more than £1.4m after building a business empire based on lucrative “welfare to work” contracts with government.
Emma Harrison, the chairman of A4e (Action for Employment), was celebrating another success that is likely to boost the company’s profits, after it won five out of 40 new welfare contracts from the Department for Work and Pensions. The 40 contracts, worth an estimated £3bn-£5bn in total, are part of the coalition’s new work programme, under which private companies will be paid by results for getting jobless people into work…
What a pity we don’t have a progressive Government involving the Greens that is actually interested in creating jobs for beneficiaries to go to, rather than the one that is currently forming which seems more interested in harassing beneficiaries to look for jobs that don’t exist while giving hand-outs to the already well-heeled.
Published in Economy, Work, & Welfare by Catherine Delahunty on Tue, December 6th, 2011
Tags: act party, corporate welfare, John banks, Welfare working group
More posts by Catherine Delahunty | more about Catherine Delahunty
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
Meanwhile, we have to import people from oveseas to do all the jobs kiwis won’t do.
And 60% of companies are reporting staff shortages.
But there’s many here who off the top of their head can think of 50 reasons why they shouldn’t get a job.
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“Half of Kiwi companies facing skill shortages”
(Herald headline from last week) see
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10769851
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Well Catherine, instead of ruling out working with any other particular party, why don’t you use my vote, use the 10% the nation gave the Green party to enter a form of deal with the Nats whereby you can curb this form of capitalist tripe and do something useful instead of yelling from the sidelines? This is what MMP was for – to mitigate the extremes of any one party. Instead all we get is bickering and no further social conscience in our politics.
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The skill shortages in industry you refer to have nothing to do with Work and Income (apart from the fact that Paula Bennett excluded degree courses from TIA eligibility).
They also have nothing to do with the supposed failure of beneficiaries to accept employment that you allude to in your earlier comment.
The skill shortages flow almost entirely from the failure of Government to adequately target post-compulsory education to evolving changes in employment needs.
And who is to blame for that? IMO, primarily the Bolger and Shipley led National Governments of the 1990s. Labour in the 2000s did only slightly better. So now we have a workforce with its skills mismatched to employment demands.
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The Nats chose to “negotiate” before engaging with the Greens with a couple of micro-parties that are effectively just rorts to give the Nats a couple of extra votes in Parliament.
The reality is that it is a numbers game.
If the Nats had got 3 MPs less, and the Greens 3 MPs more, what you are suggesting may have been possible. As it turned out, the Nats had their ACT and UF surrogates there to conclude pseudo-negotiations with, and the Greens didn’t have sufficient negotiating clout to do what you suggest.
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Low income
Life is hard
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I see frame the debate control arrived on the scene early on this thread.
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Basically the government has decided to run with programmes that failed elsewhere, not because they think they will work but because it speaks to the meme of downsizing the number of public sector workers and contracting things out tax paid business to profit making private sector – as part of an overall policy to increase the share of the economy available for profit making capital.
The Charter schools speak to this as well, and yes we are supposedly running these as trials despite no success with them anywhere else.
When certain groups advocated for subsidiarity (for their own reasons) they may not have seen how this would be exploited by the 1% to change society for the worse.
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Both this and the charter schools issue are part of the same privatisation process – dismantling the public sector in favour of control by corporates over whom the taxpayer has no control. It shows even more clearly that the Nact party has far more in common with the wealthy around the globe than they do with their own countrypeople. We knew this was happening, that governments are in thrall to corporates, but there is no longer even a pretence at democracy.
Yes, MMP should deliver a more constructive discussion, but it appears that JK and his cohorts are playing it like FPP: get the numbers and disregard the rest. By the time we all learn how to manage MMP it will probably be too late.
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I think the Key-Party are just showing their true colours.. they got another 3 years & they intend to move the country as far right as they can. Privatise Govt services & make everything user pays : Schools, prisons, hospitals & more importantly.. the welfare system:
I lived in Aust. several years ago & under the Howard Govt. they moved their Govt Depts. toward PPPs (private public partnerships). They brought the private job-seeker agencies under this system, then there were allegations that they were misrepresenting their job placement figures & ‘ripping off’ the Govt. for millions..
Then there was an ‘official review’ & they ‘tightened it up’.. enought to allay the publics concerns !
BUT one thing that came out later was that this new PPP system was actually costing the Govt. more than the system it replced. Howard assured the people that these PPPs were to save money & make things more efficient.. but the reality was it did the opposite.
Jobs were lost, as they slashed their costs in favour of profit to the private agencies..AND the wage gap between rich & poor widened as it is doing now in Aotearoa !
BEWARE the Key-partys next move !!
Kia-ora
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Zedd – on the money. Get ready for another two terms of more of the same, and maybe three or even four…
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Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
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