Turei Metiria: Social Assistance (New Work Tests Incentives and Obligations) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Turei Metiria: Social Assistance (New Work Tests Incentives and Obligations) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:665;Page:13183] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I want to speak on clause 23 which concerns advance payment regulations but before I do I will address some of the comments made by Tau Henare. He made claims about people’s lives that were unjustified and plainly incorrect. I have been on the unemployment benefit and I have been a sole parent on the domestic purposes benefit. I had the opportunity to receive the training incentive allowance and I trained at university so that I would not spend the rest of my life working at McDonald’s on the minimum wage. As a young woman who did not have any school qualifications like many young Maori women of that time I had the opportunity to have a tertiary education. Many young Maori women still leave school without gaining any qualifications but none the less they have the opportunity to train in order to get a good qualification because they have the necessary support and can therefore get a good job and take care of their family. That is what I did and that is what thousands of sole parents do. They use the opportunity to train so that they can do better for themselves and for their families. 
But we would not know that from the rhetoric of the Welfare Working Group—the very right-wing and very radical anti-beneficiary Welfare Working Group—which supports faith-based legislation like this bill. The Social Assistance (New Work Tests Incentives and Obligations) Amendment Bill punishes sole parents and gives a licence to the community to denigrate sole parents. That is despite the fact that the Minister herself was a sole parent and understands the circumstances of women like herself and myself when we were younger and in need of support. 
Clause 23 is about the regulations relating to the granting of advance payments of benefits. This regulation effectively requires some beneficiaries who are considered to have become too reliant on advances to be compulsorily required on the advice of their case manager to seek budgeting advice. The advance payment of benefits is intended to meet the immediate needs of beneficiaries recognising that many beneficiaries will have exhausted their savings if indeed they ever had any because of the low rates of the main benefit paid. 
Since National slashed benefits in the early 1990s—I was working with beneficiaries at that time and I saw the devastation that that cruelty caused—there has not been a significant increase in benefits. Benefits are not able to be lived on. They are insufficient to enable people to care for themselves and for their families. The reliance on advance payments becomes more acute over time especially because it becomes more and more difficult to manage on a meagre income that is insufficient to take care of basic needs. 
This Government in proposing clause 23 has clearly not learnt from Minister Maharey in the last Labour Government. Minister Maharey abolished the special benefit which was a discretionary benefit and gave an opportunity for case managers to consider the particular circumstances of the beneficiary who needed extra support. It was replaced with the regulated temporary additional support allowance which removed a level of discretion from the third-tier welfare assistance programme. What this Government does not understand and what was unfortunate about Minister Maharey’s decision is that we cannot use regulation to deal with the totality of human experience especially when we are talking about very low incomes and when people have ordinary lives that they have to live and simply do not have the income to pay the power bill pay the rent and put decent food on the table. 
The discretionary aspect of third-tier assistance is a last resort because people are absolutely desperate when they come in for temporary additional support. But when we take that away people fall through the cracks. Those people are desperately in need of a little bit of extra money to cover the very very basic costs so that their power is not cut off in the middle of winter so that they can heat their homes effectively and so that their kids do not get sick and spend the next 3 weeks off school while they get medicines and care for them and cannot do the things that they normally do. This additional support is just for basic stuff so that people are able to get through their daily lives. People fall through the cracks because of the removal of the discretion around those benefits. They regularly become dependent on food banks and they get into debt perhaps to family members.