Bradford Sue: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Bradford Sue: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:630;Page:2459] 
SUE BRADFORD (Green) 
: 
 As one might expect when dealing with one of the largest-spending Government departments the financial review of the Ministry of Social Development has as usual highlighted a number of difficult issues. The most urgent area of concern right now for the Green Party is the fact that just after the review process was completed the longstanding special benefit was abolished. As of 3 days ago on 1 April it has been replaced by the temporary additional support benefit otherwise known as “TAS”. This is no April Fool’s joke much as I would like it to be. I asked questions during the select committee review to try to find out more about how the department envisages the temporary additional support would actually work in terms of helping all those who will miss out now that the special benefit has been terminated. The answers we got then and continue to get do not in any way allay my fears that in fact what will happen constitutes a major benefit cut. 
Labour MPs should be very worried about what they are allowing to occur under their noses and I do acknowledge those MPs on the select committee who expressed their concerns about what is happening here. Up until now the special benefit has provided a third-tier level of last-ditch assistance for people for whom the gap between their income and the necessities of life is too big to bridge in any other way. Unfortunately because the 1991 benefit cuts were never restored and because income support and wages have been kept deliberately low since then anyway far too many beneficiaries and even some low-wage employed workers have needed the discretion offered by the special benefit just to survive. However from last weekend we will have the temporary additional support benefit instead. 
There is no discretion. The formula used is fixed and inflexible. Case officers appear to be left with no capacity to take cognisance of peoples’ actual or individual circumstances no matter how desperate they might be. The expenses that will be taken into account when calculating the temporary additional support benefit are extremely limited and even when they are allowed in most cases there are limits which means the beneficiary pays the rest of the gap no matter how badly off he or she is or how high the costs are. The people likely to be most adversely impacted are single people and couples who do not have children but who do have particular health and disability expenses. 
The maximum levels of payment are reduced. On top of that the temporary additional support benefit is as the name states a very temporary payment of 13 weeks and there are huge issues about what will happen for people once their time limit is up even if they get the help they need in the first place and even if there is a system where they are constantly turned round through review after review at each 13-week point. How long will that go on for? 
The current Minister and his predecessor the Hon Steve Maharey have reassured us over and over again that no one will lose out in the shift from the special benefit to the temporary additional support benefit. However that assurance applies only to people who are already getting the special benefit what is colloquially called “grandparenting”. For people who are in need of help for the first time or who have been out of the benefit system for even a short while only the new rules will apply as far as I can ascertain. 
As the Wellington People’s Centre stated in a report on the impact of those changes that it released just last Friday the new system will mean by its estimate that when the provisions are fully enforced the cut will affect over 50000 beneficiaries and other people on low incomes. The Wellington People’s Centre estimates that: “The axing of the special benefit will take $50 million out of the pockets of the poorest families in its first year of operation.” This saving is then being passed on in fact to some of our better-off families through the extension at the upper-income end of Working for Families as was discussed in the House earlier this afternoon. 
Is it fair that beneficiaries are losing out while higher-income people get more—and this on top of the fact that Working for Families discriminates against beneficiaries anyway through the in-work payment? Is this about social justice? Is this helping the 20 percent of our country’s children who are still living in poverty a vast number of whom are disproportionately in sole parent families and in Maori and Pasifika families? I think not. It is a total disgrace. Unlike the benefit cuts in 1991 which so many of us fought against openly even some Labour MPs if I remember rightly these new cuts are happening off the radar. 
The absurdly complex nature of New Zealand’s ramshackle benefit system is allowing that covert slashing of hardship assistance to happen and I call on Labour MPs and the Minister to look into the realities of what this will mean. Any members with a social conscience should be helping us to persuade the Minister that he must act quickly to ensure that real discretion is retained in the system for all beneficiaries who need it not just some of them and that tens of thousands of people will not be left in an even worse situation than they would be under the rules pertaining up until 4 days ago. 
A second major area of concern highlighted by the review process has been a big question for us about where the ministry is going with its work on moving towards what it has been calling now the single core benefit. The select committee was told that the ministry expected the single core benefit to be available from 2007. However there are still many questions about how precisely this will work about the extent to which it will really get rid of the current complexity of arrangements—up to 35 different income support arrangements—and whether it will mean the de facto cutting of benefits for some categories of beneficiaries. 
While the ministry keeps saying that no one will be disadvantaged a statement by the Minister in this week’s  
Jobs Letter 
 that: “We are not prepared to say ‘Well sorry no one will be worse off.’ ” and the projected impact of the loss of the special benefit do not give me any confidence that the planned new benefit system will maintain even modest benefit levels at the current rates. Again I think that the people who will most likely be adversely affected are those with disabilities and on invalids benefits who are more likely to be dragged down to unemployment benefit levels rather than having the reverse occur. 
Recent concerns raised by people in the blind community are the first signs of what may well happen. It is a great pity that those with profound impairment should have to be like the canaries in the mine when it comes to predicting this particular future. I am glad that I was not the only committee member who stated a hope that no one in need would be disadvantaged under the projected new single core benefit system but how all this will work and when remains a somewhat dubious and dangerous mystery. 
Finally a third area of this review I would like to briefly touch on tonight is around the supposed devolution of part of what was formally the Community Employment Group into the Ministry of Social Development following the Community Employment Group’s demise in 2004-05. At that time we were told that some of the community-based economic development function of the Community Employment Group would be placed into the Ministry of Social Development. As a number of us feared at the time it appears that in fact no such function has been transferred. What is left is a programme that is about working with local industry to address skill shortages and something else called Enterprising Communities which provides funding. That sounds interesting and possibly useful but I do not think that many groups working at grass roots level—at least the ones I worked with—know about it. I hope that the department will note the committee’s recommendation that any funding available through that Enterprising Communities scheme should be distributed in a transparent manner and in a way that organisations should know that it exists. 
However no matter what value either the Enterprising Communities scheme or the industry partnership programme may have neither can substitute for the loss of a genuine community economic development function within the Government—a loss that will only become fully felt and understood when unemployment starts seriously rising again which it inevitably will. 
The Green Party remains committed to working with groups in the community economic sector to try to ensure that one day we will once again have a viable community economic development function within government as we should if we are to hold our head high in communities around the world that work in this area and Governments in places like Canada which have made tremendous steps forward. We have now fallen even further behind which is a real disgrace. I hope that some of us here in this House will one day work together to restore a community economic development function to government.