Delahunty Catherine: General Debate 
Delahunty Catherine: General Debate 
[Volume:669;Page:15748] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. He mihinui ki te whanau whanui o Te Tai Poutini tena koutou katoa. I give acknowledgment to the West Coast families. 
Today is the day that the Government-appointed Welfare Working Group reported at 2 p.m. this afternoon. The theme of that report is: “Any work will set you free even if you have a full-time job already as a mother of a one-year old baby.” The Green co-leader Metiria Turei and I were keen to engage with this group but after registering at its national forum we were told that we had to be deregistered on the grounds that the group was too full although many people who attended this event said there were empty seats. However despite being marginalised at this juncture we have closely engaged with the debate. 
Like all citizens of any status we were more than welcome to participate at the Alternative Welfare Working Group established by the community. The Alternative Welfare Working Group heard submissions on what it was like to be out of work poor and stigmatised and on what might be done to improve people’s lives and job opportunities. 
Meanwhile the Government’s Welfare Working Group in its new report suggests that it is not listening to the voices of community advocates who have long-term experience of youth unemployment and other forms of unemployment the domestic purposes benefit the sickness benefit and the invalids benefit and other challenges. Paula Rebstock from the Welfare Working Group has made some strong statements that suggest that cost cutting is driving this agenda. Of course she has not said that the Government has asked her to cut costs but she has constantly made statements about how many billions of dollars welfare will cost us if welfare numbers continue to rise. 
This working group appears to assume that benefit numbers rise because people become benefit-dependent. Its numbers appear to be based on the nonsensical assumption that no one who goes on welfare benefits ever comes off them. Its unspoken dog whistle is that beneficiaries and the poor are the problem. It fails to recognise what many people who already know they are poor know—that there is a job shortage and that is not their fault. We have up to 60000 people out of work. That is an increase of up to 44000 people in the last 2 years. Benefit numbers rise in a recession and they also rise with an ageing population. When one in five people experience disability there will be more people spending some time on a benefit. 
However most people spend less than 1 year on a benefit. Most people would love to have a job that paid more than the benefit and that they could manage as well as their family responsibilities. Nobody feels great on a benefit because even if they are unwell or doing the best possible job as a sole parent they are stigmatised and that is as demoralising as their poverty. The Welfare Working Group is not helping to resolve any of the pressures on those people by making them the problem. 
In every recession as regularly as clockwork the Government initiates a review of welfare focused on blaming the poor. In the United States it is called the Wisconsin Model and now David Cameron in the UK is bashing the poor as well. Both models involve cost cutting and beneficiary bashing. They use sophisticated 21st century language to do so. They involve the Orwellian double-speak of “helping” solo parents into work by cutting food to their children and sanctioning the sick and the disabled as a burden to society. The role of the Welfare Working Group is to dog whistle the message to the general population that many beneficiaries are the undeserving poor who through a lack of moral fibre have fallen into dependency and are staying there by choice. All rigorous socio-economic analysis tells us that this message is trotted out in every recession and that it is nonsense. 
The big spin today has been about a small part of the report which looks at investing in youth. We applaud this approach; we believe in investing in youth and no one will dispute that. But the solution the Greens have for youth is education training and job creation. That is why we in the Greens developed the Green New Deal to help address the recession and create meaningful jobs. In practical terms the Greens are also keen to restore the training incentive allowance eligibility criteria for tertiary courses so that solo parents—especially younger ones—can get education and training to help them find quality work rather than being shunted off the benefit to a lifetime of stacking supermarket shelves. The training incentive allowance worked for Paula Bennett; why can we not have it back? 
We would remove all threats against sick and disabled people. We would provide genuine support and encouragement to them to show that they are valued members of society and are entitled to a benefit that supports them.