Mackey Moana: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Mackey Moana: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:22011] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I am very pleased to stand up to support the estimates for Vote Social Development. I am a member of the Social Services Committee and I can say categorically that this area has been one of the true success stories of the Labour-led Government over the past 6 years. It just kills the National members. It absolutely kills them that no matter how hard they try to spin the numbers and no matter how hard they try to re-jig and re-evaluate everything they cannot get away from the fact that under this Labour-led Government there are almost 100000 fewer working-age people on benefits than there were when we took over from the previous National-led Government in 1999. 
One of the things that has been raised with me at home by local Work and Income workers is that they are sick of the Opposition parties standing up and saying that somehow they are fiddling the numbers. Somehow those parties do not believe that all the people concerned have come off benefits. They believe that somewhere in the system the Work and Income front-line people must be shoving people off an unemployment benefit and on to a sickness benefit and that somehow their dishonesty somewhere along the way is causing the numbers to change. 
Dr Wayne Mapp 
: It’s the Government. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Mr Mapp agrees. Mr Mapp is calling out and he agrees. Well I say to Mr Mapp that there are 100000 fewer working-age people on benefits now than there were in 1999 including sickness beneficiaries. I ask Mr Mapp to try to spin that one—he cannot. I feel for those front-line workers because they do an amazing job. They are doing active individual case management which is working because people are moving from the unemployment benefit into work. Since 1999 I believe only 7 percent of people have moved off the unemployment benefit and on to the sickness benefit. The rest have gone into work and that figure speaks for itself. 
What does the National Party have to offer? Its members sit over there bleating but what do they have to offer? I was looking on the Internet the other day and I thought that I must have hit an archived file. What I saw was Work for the Dole. Work for the Dole is the National Party’s answer to unemployment in New Zealand. National did that in the 1990s and the scheme was an abject failure. Earlier today we had Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith stand up in the House seething and spitting over the announcement today of Labour’s tertiary education policy for graduates who have student loans. He claimed that we must have ignored Treasury reports and the reports from officials because why else would we have done that? He said the officials could not have said that policy was an OK thing to do. Of course in the 1990s when the previous National Government reviewed the Work for the Dole scheme—or Work and Income reviewed that scheme—Work and Income said it did not work. It said that people who were on the Work for the Dole scheme were less likely to move into real jobs than people who were not on the scheme. Did National listen to the officials? Obviously not. Treasury said that for every four Work for the Dole jobs created one genuine private sector job was lost. That is what Treasury said. Has National listened to that? Obviously not. 
The reality is that it is all very well to say we will make people who are on the dole go out there and do jobs in the community but there are people in our communities now who do those jobs for a living. That is what they do. They are the small business contractors and the small business owners who cannot compete with the State-sanctioned Work for the Dole scheme. They cannot do that and I think that is an important point. The people who provide those very important services in our communities should be very worried that business could be taken off them and given to people on the dole. That is the reality if National implements the Work for the Dole scheme—and the experience in Australia has been exactly the same. I hear the National Party members talk about how in Australia a similar scheme has been a great success but it has not. The evaluation in Australia also stated that participants in the work for the dole scheme were less likely to move into real jobs. In fact it stated that they were markedly disadvantaged and could not get real jobs. 
What kind of employment scheme is Work for the Dole when it actually disadvantages people? It would be bad enough if the Work for the Dole scheme with all the money and the investment that goes into it produced no measurable outcome. But to make things worse—I have to wonder why National has resurrected that policy. To do it once might have been OK. National did it once and people said they thought that when people did not have time to look for jobs they would not get jobs and said they also thought the scheme would take work away from many of the small contractors in their communities. It might have been fine that National did try Work for the Dole because it thought it sounded good. Admittedly it is a good sound bite—it sounds good to be tough on beneficiaries in order to get them out there. But to have the scheme reviewed and shown to be a failure and to bring it up again is pure foolishness.