Delahunty Catherine: Social Assistance (New Work Tests Incentives and Obligations) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Delahunty Catherine: Social Assistance (New Work Tests Incentives and Obligations) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:665;Page:13133] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Chairperson. Kia ora tatou katoa. I am really glad to take a call on the Social Assistance (New Work Tests Incentives and Obligations) Amendment Bill. Last week in Whanganui I launched a leaflet in support of the rights of beneficiaries. I launched it with the Whanganui People’s Centre and the Whanganui Disability Resources Centre. The people there were very glad that for once somebody was getting up and saying something positive about their human rights and about the fact that they pay taxes the fact that they contribute in their local economies and the fact that many of them are doing a great job as volunteers caring for elderly family members and children. They are very tired of being told that there is something very wrong with doing that. We never talk in this House about wealth dependency which is another issue but we talk a lot about what is wrong with the poor. 
But I will be quite specific and talk about the bill today because that is what we are here to do. I agree with David Garrett the previous speaker that the real debate is not being had. I would not agree with his conclusions or with his rhetoric perhaps but the real debate is whether we can get outside blame and look at the causes of poverty in a realistic way. If an economist like Gareth Morgan can talk about the need for a universal basic income as a possible idea I ask whether we can talk about something like that and whether that would be the best way to deliver it instead of insisting on finding out who is to blame for the fact that the welfare system costs me as a taxpayer money. I am happy to pay because I want to live in a decent society a civilised society where the vulnerable and the people who are looking after kids are worth something. I ask why we do not put the benefit up if we think that people are too poor instead of starting to attack beneficiaries. 
After 4 years in Tai Rawhiti dealing with Work and Income I am afraid I must say that the Minister for Social Development and Employment’s description of what Work and Income might do with this bill is a fantasy. The reality is that on the ground we have overworked staff and many many people coming through the door who suffer from beneficiary abuse—and that is not always the fault of the staff. We have to change the culture in our society if we want Work and Income to deliver fairness and justice. 
But let us get on to the specifics of the bill. Sickness beneficiaries in particular are under the gun. In clause 31 the bill provides for reduction of a work-tested benefit by 50 percent if a beneficiary fails to comply with a work test. The Minister said that of course that will be the case if someone is not seen to be looking for work. How on earth will that be defined by a case manager? If people say they are looking for work will the case manager disbelieve them? If there is no work to be found as in places like the East Coast what will they do? How will they decide whether a person is the deserving poor or the undeserving poor? We already have a punishing culture towards beneficiaries; anyone who has worked in the field knows that. 
Other provisions of the bill will apply to sickness beneficiaries who are assessed as able to undertake part-time work. If those people fail to meet Work and Income’s requirements they will be in trouble. If we take 50 percent away from sickness beneficiaries who are already struggling especially when GST is about to go up what are they left with? A young man came into our office when I was an advocate and asked whether we could help him get some kind of benefit otherwise he would go out to do a burglary. That was how desperate he was. We can romanticise the Work and Income experience and say the staff are there to facilitate people getting appropriate work but I am sorry that is not what happens on the ground. Now that we have 60 percent of the total unemployment figure coming from Maori unemployed on the East Coast we know that that is not what happens to people. 
We also know that doctors are being encouraged to see sickness beneficiaries as work-ready and if they make one statement that they could do a few hours a day do members know where those people can end up? I do because I worked in this field before this bill was introduced. We end up with people who have epilepsy working in the fields picking capsicums and having epileptic fits; and people who have morbid obesity being told they can stand all day on a cool-store floor. That is what part-time work-readiness means on the East Coast in Work and Income. 
Let us be honest: if we cut the income of people who are sick we will not make them better. If we do not find the right work and do not invest in disability—as we do not—we will not be able to create the right environment for those people. Those people do want to work because who wants to be called a lazy bludger loser bottom of the heap beneficiary? No one does because it has no status even though some of us try to give respect to those people and even though some of us work to gain that respect for those people. They would like to work but not at the expense of their families and their health. 
As we have seen with accident compensation medical opinions about a person’s capacity for work can vary. They can vary from practitioner to practitioner from day to day and from week to week meaning that people with chronic illnesses have good days and bad days just as politicians do. We may wonder how many good days we have in this place when we start talking about punishing the poor further. A designated doctor sees only a snapshot of a person’s health on the day of the consultation and is more likely to get it wrong. That is the designated doctor who has a bias towards saying it is great for people’s health to go out to work. That is not true if people are sick. 
Suppose the designated doctor gets it wrong because even a person’s regular general practitioner especially when under pressure of suggestion from Work and Income’s regional health adviser as to the individual beneficiary’s capacity for work can get it wrong. Who will pay for that? Everybody in the end will pay if we send unfit people into a workplace where there are no jobs or if we say they are not working hard enough and cut their benefit by 50 percent. If the medical assessor gets it wrong the beneficiary is subject to the work test and will fail it not because of any fault of his or her own but because the assessment was wrong in the first place. 
I say “Track it back.” It is all very well for the Minister to say that the beneficiary has the right of appeal to a medical appeal board over the decision to work test and a right of review to the subsequent decision but the medical appeal board and benefits review committee hearings take a long time to organise. Frequently they do not happen within a month of the appeal. The beneficiary may also need to obtain a second opinion from a specialist to support his or her contention of being unfit to work. Sometimes it might take a month to see a specialist so in the meantime what are people living on? And what is happening to their state of confidence about their ability to pay their bills not to mention to care for their children? 
The appeals process is good for people who know how to appeal. Sometimes the most vulnerable beneficiaries are not literate so what is their capacity to appeal? I know there are not advocates all over this country because there are only a few of those people who can advocate for beneficiaries. Will an illiterate person fill out an appeal form and then wait to see a specialist? Hello! That is what will happen. In the meantime under clause 31 of the bill the person’s benefit will have been reduced to zero not because he or she did not comply with the work test but because the work test was wrongly imposed in the first place. 
I ask the Minister what she will do to prevent that from happening. Will there be directions that sanctions are not to be imposed on sickness beneficiaries who are contesting the imposition of a work test? That would be really interesting to know because otherwise we are penalising those people before they have had a chance to establish whether in fact they are ready for work. Or are we content to sit back and see beneficiaries lose their homes sell off their possessions or be forced into crime and prostitution? That is what clause 31 will do to sickness beneficiaries who are wrongly subjected to a work test. 
We have to go into the minutiae here to look at what happens on the front line every day. We have to walk into Work and Income. Outside the Ruatoria office of Work and Income my organisation saw 50 people who were too scared to walk through the door and that was before this bill was introduced. Those people were intimidated because of the risk that if they said the wrong thing if they had not brought the right paperwork or if they were not sufficiently literate they could lose a benefit they needed to survive because there were not thousands of jobs at Ruatoria. 
Hekia Parata 
: You’re so unfair to the staff there. 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY 
: The staff at the Ruatoria office might do their best but in the end those people were intimidated by the system and that system is not set up to support those people. 
There are many people who go into Work and Income with a multiplicity of issues and they need to be defended and protected by the law of the land—just as the staff do too. They are all victims if we have a punishing and blaming system. We can do it differently. We can do it a lot differently. We can start creating real work that is appropriate to people but it will not work if we start from the premise that punishment and sanctions inspire change. They inspire despair manipulation and anger. It does not inspire the idea that all of us no matter what our economic status our state of health or our well-being are valuable. We need to live in a society that values all people and allows us to have time to do things that do not always bring in money. 
As parents it is so important that we can be home for our kids. On the one hand we are saying to parents they should get their kids off the street and on the other hand we are saying we will cut their benefits if they are not showing a sufficiently relentless focus on finding a job. We cannot legislate those contradictions and expect to have the respect of the people of this country if that is how we approach this issue. We need a new and fresh debate about how we will create real living wages affordable benefits and affordable jobs. 
To get a job people need to have resources. They need to have the ability to travel in rural areas and they need clothes that are suitable for workplaces. In order to get there they do not need to be punished; they need to be inspired and supported. If people think that the culture of Work and Income is about inspiring and supporting the vulnerable they have not been there lately. Believe me a lot of us have and we are saying that ever since Christine Rankin there has been a culture of negativity towards beneficiaries.