Bradford Sue: Financial Review Debate — Procedure In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
Bradford Sue: Financial Review Debate — Procedure In Committee Speaker Recalled In Committee 
[Volume:616;Page:11869] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 As usual there are a number of critical issues arising from the financial review of the Ministry of Social Development and I simply do not have time to go into all of them here. However one of these is the ongoing problem around third-tier benefits and in particular the seeming ongoing inability of Work and Income across the country to implement the supposed nationally applied edict that staff “ensure clients receive their full and correct entitlement”. In his comment to the Social Services Committee this time around the chief executive explained that the ministry was still striving to achieve more geographical evenness in terms of the special benefit and that the budget for the total expenditure was not capped. 
It is good news that we have a Government that acknowledges the problem and a chief executive officer who is committed to overcoming it but what is not so great is that tens of thousands of beneficiaries continue to miss out on what they are entitled to. All the statistics I have seen continue to show a massive regional variation in how the special benefit is applied with very low rates proportionately in places as diverse as Te Awamutu Dargaville Taihape Marton and Timaru. 
I also note the Gisborne special-benefit impact initiative that was carried out by a number of beneficiary advocacy groups in the Tairawhiti region late last year. People queued up literally for days to get assistance with applying for their benefits. As with similar previous exercises in Rotorua and Hawke’s Bay the department suddenly and once again found its way clear to pay a whole lot more to people in terms of their full entitlements. 
I congratulate the beneficiary groups on their extraordinary commitment in travelling to the East Coast from all over the country to help local people simply get what they are entitled to but they should not have to do that. I believe that if the Ministry of Social Development is serious about implementing its avowed commitment to paying income support at the rates the Government itself sets there needs to be a lot more done to support and train all its staff to make that happen where it counts—at every front desk in every office around the country every single day. 
The second area I will touch on quickly today is the Jobs Jolt policy which was developed by the Ministry of Social Development during the period of the financial review. Numerous measures were included in this package and one of them was the introduction of work testing for unemployed people aged 55 to 59 years. The reason given for this extraordinary step was that this group of people “may become impoverished” and “confront significant barriers to employment”. Both of these factors are all too true but I would seriously question whether imposing the same work-testing requirements on 55 to 59-year-olds as are placed on unemployed 18-year-olds is actually the solution. If the Government had chosen all the services of the department in terms of vocational guidance and support benefits could have been offered without the imposition of work testing. 
On top of this of course so-called limited employment locations or remote areas—more colloquially referred to as no-go zones—have been introduced. It is interesting to note that in its report to the financial review committee the department states that ancestral links to certain areas are considered. This refers to the question of whether tangata whenua who are living in or returning to their papakainga districts should be treated the same as all other unemployed beneficiaries. Subsequent to the completion of this review Minister Maharey has made it clear in the House that in that situation tangata whenua will not be treated differently from others. Like a number of groups around the country I would welcome a clarifying statement from the Minister on this matter in the not too distant future. 
I also continue to question the necessity of identifying 259 limited employment locations at all when the department already has many means at its disposal—including what it calls intensive case management—to make sure that everyone on the unemployment benefit is meeting all the department’s work-testing requirements. I would much rather see the department focus on the good work it does in helping people into sustainable employment than engaging in a very odd kind of social and economic engineering that only serves to tar 259 separate localities as being somehow economically hopeless.