Is she useless, or something worse?
Since 2017 Sepuloni has driven a culture change at Work and Income. On the surface, treating clients with respect and care (if they weren't already) is laudable and hard to argue with. WINZ offices are brighter, security staff are less visible, there are water dispensers and play areas for children. Away from the coalface, thousands of clients are rung to ensure they are receiving their full and correct entitlements.
This is the policy of kindness in action.
Long-established rules are dispensed with or overlooked. The use of sanctions to enforce obligations has fallen away. Benefit reviews have been abandoned. Medical certificates too. Benefit fraud prosecutions have plummeted. COVID was a great enabler in advancing this change of approach.
Grants for all types of emergency assistance have sky-rocketed; denied applications have plunged.
New expectations have been established. Not just by visibly changing how WINZ looks and operates but by more insidious messaging.
The promotion of victimhood through claims that structural racism is rife, and colonisation is to blame for every failing imaginable, used to be the territory of extremists. Now it is routinely promulgated by academia and the public service. If not Maori, there are other excuses for disaffection provided by mainstream Marxism.
Apparently, people on benefits have every right to feel resentful and aggrieved. So much so that bad behaviour is understandable. It’s just a form of protest bound to become more prolific.
But some (often blameless beneficiaries) who live in or near emergency housing feel very unsafe. The protestors doubtless sleep all day and come out at night to wreak havoc; do drugs, do violence and do damage. These aren’t working people who have to get a decent night’s sleep.
They are anti-social miscreants who arc between apathy and aggression and wear their alienation as a badge of honour.
Instead of a system that refuses to tolerate their destructiveness, we have a system which rewards them with no-strings-attached cash and plenty of excuses for their defection from the rest of society.
Nobody has explained to them that the social security system was born out of shared values, shared compassion for genuine need, and shared commitment to fund it.
Certainly Sepuloni hasn’t bothered. And it is highly unlikely that the new compulsory history curriculum will cover what Mickey Savage envisaged when he created it over eighty years ago.
Green associate housing Minister Marama Davidson is appalled. The situation is unacceptable she says. Yet this is a leading proponent of an anything-goes benefit regime. Is she really surprised at what such a mushy modus operandi results in?
A much harder line must be taken with offenders. They will be breaking multiple laws and for the sake of those in closest proximity – those in genuine, unavoidable need – the very least that should happen is a threat to immediately end their benefit entitlement. Whatever ensues, we have a police force to deal with.
Someone needs to get – and someone needs to give – the correct message: you can’t keep biting the hand that feeds you.
Don’t hold your breath for that someone to be the person in charge though.
Lindsay Mitchell is a welfare commentator who blogs HERE.
3 comments:
The Left, in the past, had intentions that were at least understandable and they generally represented the working class. That still didn't stop them from trashing the economy with huge benefit handouts, funded by ever increasing taxes and inefficient state control. How short people's memories are!
These days, the woke Left prefer a more extreme Marxist approach and seem intent on setting every group against each other, whether it be by race, sex, gender, or any number of other basic human differences.
They tell us it's for our own good and that they want to govern for us all but they have a warped, ideological vision of what this means. Typically, as is the case in NZ, they pick the group that best fits their woke criteria and then redesign the whole country around them. Maori came out of the sorting hat first.
Now we are on a path to give a minority part-race huge power, legal privilege and assets that they have contributed very little to build. All because they were here a short while before the rest of us. The culture of the majority is being suppressed and diminished by an onslaught of pro-Maori promotion by the government, local councils, the media and the education system. Pol Pot would have been astounded! How to indoctrinate your population without killing them off.
Spot on again DeeM.
I have often wondered whether Maori would have progressed to their present position in society had it not been for the arrival of europeans. Certainly their development would have been much slower.
In every aspect of life here, Maori want to get control of everything other races have developed, built or provided. With the current drift to separatism, aided by our woke government, capitulation is near.
The often cited view that all Maori will benefit from settlements etc. is a fallacy, Maori had, and still have, a developed hierarchy that keeps the lower class Maori where they are. One only has drive around rural areas to see proof of it. One wonders when those Maori will see what is happening to them and take action.
As individual New Zealanders, we are virtually powerless to effectively challenge the undemocratic, divisive and covert activity of the current socialist regime - so much for open and transparent government for all New Zealanders (power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely).
From any perspective, it is incredibly difficult to comprehend how anyone could believe dividing a racially and culturally diverse nation into two identity groups only (ie. Maori 15% and The Rest 85%) and demanding that the majority group abandon or denounce its diverse cultures and forcibly assume the culture, language, history and authority of the minority group can possibly end well.
At best, a simmering and uneasy form of apartheid will result (which should attract the condemnation of the free world). At worst, I shudder to imagine but it will be a dreadful outcome. Sadly it is the minority group that will ultimately pay the price by way of the backlash that will result against anything and everything Maori.
Jointly, however, the 85% majority group has the power to reject (defeat) any and all attempts to promote separatism and Maori co-governance. The real issue is; will this group awaken from its complacent slumber and take decisive action before our democracy is destroyed?
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