Collins Judith: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Collins Judith: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:624;Page:19395] 
JUDITH COLLINS (National—Clevedon) 
: 
 The financial review of the Ministry of Social Development takes some reading because most of it is pretty depressing. In particular a large amount of the review is taken up by the sickness and invalids benefits and the so-called strategy surrounding them. What we know is that under this Government sickness and invalids beneficiary numbers have gone through the roof. We know that at the end of January this year 120000 people were in receipt of the sickness or invalids benefits. For a country of this size that is an awful lot of people to be sick. It indicates a 38 percent increase in numbers since 1999. We know from that that the Labour Government under Helen Clark clearly makes people sick despite the huge amount of extra taxpayer dollars that goes into the health budget every year. Clearly that strategy is not working. When we have asked the ministry why those numbers have gone up so much its response has been that it does not know why that has occurred but that apparently it is halfway towards finding that out. How does the ministry know it is halfway towards finding that out if it does not know what the answer is? The ministry has gone on to say that it thinks that a recent cause of the rise has to do with the reclassification of beneficiaries. In other words the ministry is taking people off the unemployment benefit and putting them on the sickness benefit. That is acknowledged by the ministry. The Minister never acknowledges it but the ministry staff have. 
We know that there are 547 unemployed beneficiaries who have been unemployed for over 10 years. That is 10 years of those people’s lives wasted on the unemployment benefit and 10 years of taxpayer dollars wasted on keeping them and their families when they should be doing that themselves. That is 10 years of wasted life. We know that some people who are currently receiving benefits should not be receiving them because they are not available for work. They are working in their family dairies or on little schemes that they have arranged with local collective organisations. People have those sorts of rorts going on and we know that is happening because the people at the coalface of the Work and Income offices tell us so. They have a Minister who does not care enough to go in to bat for them and help them to do their job better. Their job is to be the gatekeepers of taxpayer dollars not to dole out money time and time again and ask no questions. 
The Minister has talked about a universal benefit and that is referred to in the financial review. The universal benefit as we found out today in the House will have a multitude of add-ons. So far there are four that the Minister can remember but we know there are more to come. The universal benefit will not do a scrap of good. This comes from the same Minister who took away the work test for people on the domestic purposes benefit whose children had gone to school. It is the same Minister yet here he is talking about the universal benefit. It is supposed to fix the problem but it will not do so. 
We know that there is a huge amount of benefit fraud in this country. Again we know that from the Work and Income staff who tell us that they are seeing it. We know it from the doctors who tell us that they are being approached with demands for sickness benefit forms. If they do not comply with those demands the people will simply up and go to another doctor who will. The doctors know that if patients do that they will lose the income from those patients’ families. The doctors know that their own kids can get attacked at school and also that they themselves can be blacklisted. We have seen it happen. We have heard on the Social Services Committee about what happens to doctors who stand up and do the right thing. 
Recently I trotted around the country and visited various doctors listening to them and asking them what they were finding. What I heard came as a shock. I heard of one particular town that had 19 doctors. Eighteen said no to one particular sickness benefit applicant and the nineteenth said yes. The signal that sends out to those doctors is that they should not bother to try to do the right thing because someone else will not and the doctor who tries to do the right thing is the poor mug who will not get paid and who will have to wear it next time. 
Hon Steve Maharey 
: Tell us who it is then. 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: It is all very well for Government members to ask who the doctor is. We know what happened last year when doctors came out and said that was happening. It was on the front page of the  
New Zealand Herald.  
The first thing that the Minister said was that those doctors were complicit in fraud. That is just not good enough because doctors are not actually trained to be the gatekeepers of taxpayer dollars; they are trained to be patients’ advocates and medical doctors. 
The Minister said that he would fix the problem. But the first thing that he did when he came in was to get rid of the designated doctor scheme which did fix it. Under the previous National Government sickness and invalids beneficiary numbers were going down but under this Government they have skyrocketed. We have found that that is not because suddenly everyone has become old which is what the Minister has told us. It is not because suddenly everyone has a bad back. We have looked at the numbers and seen that we are talking about people in their 30s and 40s who are suddenly sick. We in this party do not believe for a moment that suddenly 38 percent more people than 5 years ago are so sick that they cannot work. We do not believe that for a moment. We taxpayers are being told to believe that this country is suddenly sick. As I have said before it clearly must be either the Government or the conditions that it has brought in that has caused that situation. 
We have also been hearing about the amount of staff fraud that goes on. With regard to that issue I say that the culture comes from the top. When we have a Government that goes around spending other people’s money willy-nilly with absolutely no understanding of accountability we can expect that sort of culture to come on down. The culture is not set by the person in the lowest-paid job in an organisation; it is set at the top. The top happens to be the Prime Minister and the Minister. Their every word causes one to wonder what it is that they are saying because one is never quite sure whether they are telling one exactly what they are supposed to. 
There is also the issue of seasonal work which has to be one of the biggest jokes around. The Department of Labour has told us that it will sort out the issue of seasonal work by bringing Thai fruit pickers into the Northland area so that they can pick the fruit that all the unemployed people who are on the dole in Northland cannot pick. The department told us that Thai fruit pickers would come in and do the job and that it would be a great thing. It is a great thing if one happens to be an orchard owner with whom many people in the Opposition sympathise. But when I ask orchard owners whether the Thai workers can speak and read English so that they can comply with the occupational safety and health requirements the answer I receive is that they cannot but that they are supervised. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: I would like to come back to the issue of seasonal work and the difficulty that orchardists and market gardeners have found in getting anyone to pick fruit and asparagus over the last year. The ministry’s view is that the problem does not happen in Nelson or Hawke’s Bay. That will be news to orchardists who happen to be located in Nelson or Hawke’s Bay! The ministry says that it does happen and is a problem in Northland. Before the dinner break I was advising the Committee that the ministry felt that what it was able to do was to bring in Thai fruit pickers to work in Northland. But when I look again at the reasons given by the ministry as to why it is a problem in Northland I see the reason is not that people have no encouragement to get off their bottoms and go to work nor is it that people cannot be bothered. It is not for any of those sorts of reasons which most of us would probably think were the reasons. The reason is that fruit pickers do not have good pay and employment conditions such as—members should listen to this—the provision of toilets which may cause difficulties. Apparently that is not a difficulty for the Thai workers. We are also told that transport is a difficulty. Well it is obviously not a difficulty for the Thai workers who come all the way from Thailand to pick fruit in Northland. It is obviously not in fact a difficulty that those workers do not speak or write English very well. Of course the occupational safety and health requirements clearly cannot be met if people cannot speak or read the language. But we were then told in the select committee that that is not an issue because the Thai workers are supervised. 
What that means of course is that we are supposed to expect that New Zealanders who have spent all their lives in this country and who have spent huge amounts of their time on benefits are not to be supervised but that the Thai workers are. We say that that is not one law for all; it depends on where one comes from. 
Jill Pettis 
: They work in sweatshops. 
JUDITH COLLINS 
: Is the Labour member who was interjecting about sweatshops saying that it is OK to have sweatshops in New Zealand? We are not talking about that at all. What we are saying is that people can come all the way from Thailand to work here under New Zealand conditions yet we cannot find anyone in New Zealand to do the job.