Bradford Sue: Budget Debate 
Bradford Sue: Budget Debate 
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SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 As a number of church and community groups and as beneficiaries themselves have pointed out repeatedly and poignantly since last Thursday Michael Cullen’s ninth Budget suffers from a glaring deficiency in the way in which it deals with the most vulnerable people in our society: those who are dependent on the benefit system for survival and their children. Just a couple of weeks ago one of our Sunday newspapers extracted from the Ministry of Social Development a remarkable report entitled  
Pockets of Significant Hardship and Poverty 
. Published in June 2007 that confidential advice from the Government’s own people shows what many of us had already suspected which is that the gap between the incomes of waged workers and beneficiaries has become larger and larger and that beneficiaries are worse off now than they were in the wake of National’s 1991 benefit cuts. 
That is a damning indictment of 18 years of National and Labour Governments. With 9 years each at the helm neither party in Government has seen fit to redraw the acceptable limits of social and economic exclusion. Both parties have accepted—and in fact Labour has now entrenched—a philosophy that says the best way of dealing with beneficiaries is to force their incomes so far down that they will— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member but the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the evening meal break. 
Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. 
SUE BRADFORD 
: Labour has now entrenched a philosophy that says the best way of dealing with beneficiaries is to plunge their incomes so low that they will end up having to take on paid work at almost any cost to their own or their children’s health and welfare. That attitude is exemplified by Labour’s “work first” amendments to the Social Security Act which make the fundamental driver of our welfare system getting people into paid employment rather than the original 1930s-driven concept of providing an adequate safety net for people who are out of work. 
Dr Cullen’s 2008 Budget serves only to exacerbate the situation by focusing on giving $10.6 billion of tax cuts to those who are in work without giving any compensatory relief for beneficiaries. The gap pointed out in the Ministry of Social Development report I mentioned earlier will only get worse. When challenged by the Maori Party and the Green Party in the House this afternoon on that very question Dr Cullen responded that all beneficiaries receive annual adjustments as a matter of course on 1 April each year—something wage earners do not get—that beneficiary children will benefit from changes in the indexation of child tax credits under Working for Families and that single beneficiaries who work part-time will gain from the lower tax thresholds. 
In response I say to the Minister firstly that the annual April adjustment is a pittance that takes place up to a year after major increases in prices have occurred and some of it is often gobbled up by reductions in what people are entitled to by way of accommodation assistance. The Green Party believes that until beneficiaries are treated with the same decency as superannuitants and given annual cost of living increases that are linked to a fixed percentage of the average wage the gap between wages and superannuation on the one hand and benefits on the other hand will just keep growing. Secondly I say a small increase in assistance to beneficiaries through Working for Families goes nowhere near enough to make up for the fact that families where neither parent is substantially in paid work receive much less support than those where a parent works. That blatant discrimination against the children of beneficiaries continues and it is no wonder that a large percentage of the children who live in poverty in these comparatively well-off times are from beneficiary families. 
On top of that not one cent from this Budget goes to those beneficiaries who do not have children and who do not engage in part-time paid work. That group has been ignored by successive Governments for the last two decades yet it contains some of our most vulnerable citizens. They are often people with substantial long-term physical or mental illness or injury or with major impairments who have no opportunity of entering the paid workforce or they are people who are caring for someone else in their family who is in that situation. People in those circumstances continue to be condemned to a life of total poverty and increasing social exclusion in the absence of being able to take up the paid employment that Labour sees as the answer to all their woes. 
In justifying his approach in the House this afternoon Dr Cullen made the point that Labour clearly stands for labour—that is as he said in a Scoop interview late last week “From its history the Labour Party has always been about people in employment.” Well Dr Cullen certainly has a different understanding of labour history in this country than I do. I had thought that the first Labour Government under Michael Joseph Savage swept to power in 1935 as a result of the mass unemployment and poverty suffered through 6 years of the Great Depression. It was unemployed workers together with their comrades in work who helped to create and drive the great things Labour did in those early days including taking the first steps towards putting a decent welfare system into place. I see this generation of Labour’s approach to beneficiaries as representing a real betrayal of that proud history. 
Yes it is critical that everyone in our country should have the right to a decent job at a decent pay rate. The Green Party stands for full employment just as Labour does. But a commitment to full employment does not mean that somehow those who are not able to participate in the paid workforce at a particular time in their lives should be denied the means of sustenance necessary to support themselves and their children if they have them with dignity and without ever-increasing debt. Saying that the Labour Party is only about people in employment is a rejection of beneficiaries as people worthy of an equal place in society. It is no wonder that “work first” is Labour’s mantra. It is no wonder that the Government had no scruples about abolishing the special benefit which used to be available to beneficiaries who were receiving all their entitlements but who still did not have enough to meet their basic needs. It is no wonder that this Budget pays only very limited lip-service to that group of citizens who are now being expected I guess to shut up and get on with looking for a job no matter what their circumstances may be. 
On Sunday it was reported that Dr Cullen now plans to move with alacrity towards making some minor changes to help some beneficiaries—for example through increasing the maximum amount payable for grants for additional assistance for food. Although lifting the level of the maximum amount payable for food grants would be an overdue and a welcome improvement on the current situation it would do nothing to address the deeper systemic issues that face beneficiaries right now. Tinkering around the edges is not enough. At a time when the economic impacts of climate change and peak oil are starting to hit home through rising food fuel transport and housing prices we should be doing our best to ensure our country’s must vulnerable people can feed clothe and house themselves and their children. We should not be abandoning them. 
We should have seen in this Budget not a prioritisation of tax cuts including tax cuts for the very well off but instead a serious focus on a number of measures aimed at lifting beneficiaries out of the seemingly endless slide into deeper poverty. The Government should be lifting core benefit levels for all beneficiaries to amounts that individuals and families can actually and realistically live on without constantly going further into debt both to Work and Income and to private lenders. In the absence of that hopelessly optimistic goal being achieved at any time in the near future Labour should at least reintroduce genuine discretion into the benefit system so that Work and Income caseworkers once again have the power they used to have with the special benefit to top up people’s incomes so that at least their most basic needs can be met. The discriminatory in-work payment component of the Working for Families package should be replaced by a universal child benefit like the old family benefit paid in respect of all children regardless of their parents’ employment status or income and with the ability for families to capitalise on it as a deposit for their first home. And all benefit levels once raised to a liveable amount should be protected by annual adjustments linked to a fixed and sufficient percentage of the average wage. 
I find it deeply ironic that I am once again pleading with a Labour Government to pay attention to the needs of beneficiaries. Labour is supposed to be the party of workers. Well Labour should understand that unemployed workers and sole parents are workers too. Back in 1991 Labour MPs made speeches fighting tooth and nail against National’s “mother of all Budgets” benefit cuts. In the 1993 and 1996 election campaigns Labour promised to reverse those cuts. Labour also railed against National introducing income status into the taxation system. The year 1999 rolled around and what happened? There was no sign of any reversal of the benefit cuts and subsequently Labour also entrenched structural discrimination against beneficiaries through Working for Families and by reducing gross benefit rates so that beneficiaries get nothing from the tax cuts. Every day I hear stories of desperation and anger from people who are impacted on by both the continuing poverty they are forced to live in and the harassment they receive from Work and Income staff who try to force for example people with long-term serious mental illness or who are mothers of young children into paid work. 
This Budget and the attitudes it epitomises are simply not fair. If this Government believed in the right of everyone in Aotearoa to a decent life we would have seen quite a different Budget last Thursday. It is way past time that we had a Government that recognised that every child and every adult in this country deserves a fair chance at life not just some of us.