Bennett Paula: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Bennett Paula: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:674;Page:20440] 
Hon PAULA BENNETT (Minister for Social Development and Employment) 
: 
 I am sorry for my delay. I was expecting a call from the Opposition on Vote Social Development since the Government will spend $22 billion in this round which will affect about 1.6 million New Zealanders—981000 at any one time—who are on either superannuation or benefits. I quite wrongly obviously thought that maybe it would be a priority for the Opposition to stand up and speak about Vote Social Development and how $22 billion worth of taxpayers’ money is spent. 
Just to give the Committee a bit of an idea there are 300 sites around New Zealand within Child Youth and Family Work and Income Community Link and other offices like that. As I said there are about 981000 clients at any one time and of that number about 580000 are superannuitants. The Ministry of Social Development takes about 13.3 million phone calls a year which is 255000 calls a week. There are 2 million applications for assistance in a year and about 140000 student allowance applications and other applications in relation to that as well. As members know Child Youth and Family receives about 125000 notifications in a year which is about 12000 a month. So that is pretty massive and I do not know but I would have thought it was a priority and that maybe the Opposition would think about standing up and taking a call. 
We saw the unemployment rate peak in I think January 2010 and just over 63000 people were on the unemployment benefit; now we are at about 57000 people. For the month of June we saw nearly 800 people net come off that benefit which was pretty exciting. It was the first month of June in more than 4 years when we had actually seen a drop in the number on the unemployment benefit which was pretty exciting. Last month we saw the number go up again slightly which was not so exciting but it was nowhere near what we normally see. As I say the increase was not nearly what we would see in normal seasonal employment. In fact we cannot recall a time when a July total has not gone up slightly even in the best of times if you like which were squandered in that 2005 2006 and 2007 period when nothing was done. We are already starting to see that sort of seasonal employment bounce-around again. It has started going down and we had a week most recently where it went down again. So it just says to us that these are really interesting times as far as employment goes—people taking people on. What I loved about June was the fact that out of the about 784 people who came off benefits 91 percent of them were young people—91 percent were young. I reckon that is pretty amazing. 
We have heard a lot over the last couple of days about the Future Focus changes that the Government has made. We are obviously quite thrilled with some of the results of that. I will say that the results for the unemployment benefit have been better than I expected. I was certainly told by others that I did not need to do a reapplication process—you know the work test was such that we would not need to do it. But it proved to us that when people come to sign a form they might at times think differently about how they reapply for a benefit and what they do. Before we had Future Focus 75 percent of those on any benefit in the system were not work tested so there were no work obligations. They were not expected to be getting work-ready. They did not have to have a CV. Even after Future Focus we still have unfortunately 63 percent of people who go on to a benefit with no expectations of them. Currently we have about 327000 people on main benefits in New Zealand and for 63 percent of them there are no expectations whatsoever. 
In fact in most cases we put them on a benefit and leave them to sit there with no intervention with no support with no help and without looking at how we might support them to get off the benefit. I actually think it is a tragedy of our system and it was something that was identified by the Welfare Working Group. I think it is pretty appalling to see people sitting on benefits year after year. I am not particularly proud of the fact that we have intergenerational welfare dependence and that we meet children who have not known an adult in their house to work. They think that that is the norm. So I must admit I am pretty focused on finding out how we can do better by them how we can look at the support we give to people who need it the most and how we can perhaps front-load some of that support. I am interested in knowing how we can look at what people can do instead of the pretty appalling focus centred only on what they cannot do. Someone’s eligibility for the system is based on what they cannot do and I want to focus it on to what they can do. 
Vote agreed to.