"Low Trust Clients" Meet "No Sympathy State"

The Implacable Face Of An Implacable Regime: Victor Hugo's unforgettable bloodhound, Inspector Javert (played here by Russell Crowe) pursued the redeemed hero, Jean Valjean, with a zeal bordering on fanaticism. The so-called "low trust clients" of WINZ who, like Valjean, may have broken the law simply in order to survive, must now feel as though they are living in the pages of Les Miserables.

EARLIER THIS WEEK the Associate Minister for Social Development, Chester Borrows, announced a new category of beneficiary. From Monday, 14 October 2013, he said, Work and Income New Zealand (WINZ) would be applying the new “low trust client” rules.

 

According to the Minister, “low trust clients” are people already convicted of welfare fraud, or who have “had overpayments established following a fraud investigation”.

 

He expected the new rules would affect around 1,500 people per year.

 

“Give a dog a bad name and you may hang him by it” runs the proverb. And it is certainly very difficult to think of a reason why politicians and bureaucrats would want to pin the “low trust client” tag on beneficiaries other than their wanting to “hang” them by it.

 

Of course the State doesn’t hang people anymore – at least, not literally. (Although I’m sure there are more than a few New Zealanders who would gladly string up all these “welfare cheats”!) But those who have made it their business to make sense of MSD policy (Sue Bradford, for example) are in no doubt that the true objective of these highly provocative new rules is to make “low trust clients” feel so utterly wretched and worthless that they exit the welfare system altogether.

 

From the point of view of the MSD and WINZ, purging the welfare rolls of low trust clients is a “win/win” solution. Not only is the state spared the expense of paying out legitimate entitlements, but the MSD’s new policy practically guarantees a sharp decline in all claims – fraudulent and legitimate.

 

Few New Zealanders would have any idea of how fraught the entire experience of signing-on for, receiving and retaining a social welfare benefit can be. The whole process is anything but straightforward and to a great many people seems calculated to belittle, stress and all-too-frequently humiliate the applicant/recipient.

 

The most vivid memory most people take away from their first visit to WINZ is how long they were made to wait. Even those who followed the rules assiduously: made appointments and arrived ahead of time; will regale their family and friends with horror stories of being made to wait for hours at a time.

 

Many people who live at some distance from their nearest WINZ office and are reliant on public transport simply cannot wait, and so miss their appointments. Predictably, missing an appointment with one’s WINZ case-worker is regarded as a serious misdemeanour: do it too often and one’s benefit may be docked – or even stopped.

 

Only rarely will these citizens encounter a WINZ staffer who clearly and comprehensively spells out exactly what they are entitled by law to receive from the state. The consensus view among those receiving WINZ “assistance” is that the MSD operates on the rule-of-thumb that if applicants don’t ask, then WINZ staff are not obliged to tell.

 

At the average WINZ office what you don’t know (and are not told) can prove extremely costly – both to you and to those who depend on you.

 

Even the much-decried “benefit fraud” isn’t always what it seems.

 

WINZ’s over-riding priority is to get people off welfare and into work. Unfortunately, it does not distinguish part-time and/or casual work from full-time employment. At WINZ, a job’s a job, and the moment you get one you’re no longer entitled to a Jobseeker’s Allowance. And if your job only lasts a month? Well, that’s too bad, because now there’s a “stand down” period lasting several weeks for you to get through before once again becoming eligible for state assistance.

 

In the meantime there’s rent, food and power bills to be paid. What WINZ calls fraud is often no more than the actions of desperate people doing whatever they have to do to keep themselves and their families fed and clothed and a roof over their head.

 

It’s what makes the note of smug self-righteousness in Mr Borrows’ latest announcement so very hard to take.

 

Like Jean Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, New Zealand’s beneficiaries find themselves pursued by a state as remorseless and relentless as the implacable Inspector Javert.

 

The great French novelist coined phrases like “social asphyxia” do describe the constricting effects of poverty and injustice, but even the mighty Hugo would have tipped his hat to a phrase so utterly suffocating in its unkindness as “low trust client”.

 

This essay was originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 18 October 2013.

Booking Beneficiaries Into Rehab

It's For Their Own Good: Equating beneficiaries with drug addicts has long been one of the Right's most potent rhetorical strategies against the welfare state. It has now been given the official imprimatur of the Ministry of Social Development's senior medical advisor. What's next: "Arbeit Macht Frei" ?

 

THE EVIDENCE is said to be compelling: “for most individuals, working improves health and wellbeing and reduces psychological distress.” In fact, so convinced of the health benefits of employment is the Ministry of Social Development’s (MSD) senior health advisor, Dr David Bratt, that he equates putting patients on “welfare” with putting them on “an addictive debilitating drug with significant adverse effects to both the patient and their family (whanau) not dissimilar to smoking.”

 

Just think about that for a moment. The MSD’s senior health advisor is telling his fellow doctors that helping their patients access the state assistance to which, as citizens, they are legally entitled, is the same as “putting them on” methamphetamine, heroin or some other kind of “addictive debilitating drug”.

 

The Right’s decades-long rhetorical effort to associate being on a benefit with being hooked on drugs has thus been given the imprimatur of settled medical science. Henceforth, going to the MSD will be the equivalent of checking yourself into rehab. Everything that happens to you there will be about getting you off your welfare addiction and back into the healthy lifestyle of paid employment.

 

Of course, as medically verified drug addicts, the “welfare dependent” citizens themselves have no opinions worth considering. Everybody knows that junkies lie, cheat, steal – even prostitute themselves – to feed their habit. It is, therefore, vital that they not be mollycoddled by their case workers at the MSD. What is required, and what will, from now on, be meted out to these “addicts” is the “tough love” they so desperately need – and which the failed policies of “welfare entitlement” have for so long denied them.

 

And, just in case there are people out there in the community who object to this characterisation of New Zealand’s pioneering Welfare State as nothing more than a government sponsored tinnie house, the Ministry of Social Development has instituted a regime involving compulsory drug testing for “jobseekers”; tough sanctions for those with outstanding arrest warrants; and mandatory attendance at classes devoted to imparting parenting skills.

 

Which is as clear a way of delivering the message: “these people are all drug-taking criminals who persistently neglect and abuse their children”; as the MSD’s bureaucratic masters are willing to venture.

 

The National Party-led Government’s dramatic reform of New Zealand’s social welfare system marks an ominous turning-point in the country’s history. Never before has the state been willing to satisfy so completely the most punitive, the cruellest and the most nakedly sociopathic impulses of its wealthiest citizens.

 

The people behind these reforms know that there are simply not enough jobs to socially integrate the tens-of-thousands of “jobseekers” currently registered on the MSD’s books. And yet, they have no intention of following the example set by previous New Zealand Governments, in which the state itself provided the jobs so necessary to people’s health and wellbeing.

 

What they propose to do, instead, is force as many jobseekers as possible off the MSD’s books. They will achieve this objective by turning the experience of being on the MSD’s books into a nightmare of bureaucratic harassment and social stigmatisation.

 

Before the rest of New Zealand could accept such callous brutalisation, however, the National Party-led Government had first to transform welfare beneficiaries into useless and undeserving sub-humans. Their poverty had to be presented as the consequence of their own lack of application and self-discipline. They had to become idle ingrates: drug addicts and criminals; totally unworthy of decent people’s respect or compassion.

 

And now, because it is not made up of monsters, and for the sake of their hapless children, the Government is insisting that these creatures somehow be “persuaded” to turn their lives around. This time, however, the persuasion is not going to involve the use of carrots. This time the MSD is going to use a stick.

 

And, just as they were in Germany 75 years ago, the doctors are being asked to help. We must hope that Kiwi physicians turn out to be less enthusiastic social-engineers.

 

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 19 July 2013.

Not So Great Expectations

A Victim Of Her Own Poor Personal Choices? Why are middle-class New Zealanders so eager to visit the sins of struggling working-class parents upon their innocent children? And why are the comfortable so blind to the social consequences of punishing the poor?

MY NEPHEW is a policeman. For the last two years he’s been part of the beefed-up policing effort in South Auckland. He has his share of “better work stories”, but most of the policing he does is “domestic related”.

 

When he told me this, I pictured him stepping between angry men and women. That’s certainly a big part of his job, but what shocked me were his stories about children.

 

“The first thing we do is check to see that the kids are all right. So, it’s: ‘Where’s the fridge?’ No fridge. You’d be amazed how many houses I’ve been in that didn’t have one. So you look for the pantry. Nothing. No food. And there’s five kids in the house.”

 

My nephew isn’t judgemental. He simply tells me: “It’s a totally different world. People’s expectations are completely different. If you haven’t seen it, you just can’t imagine it.”

 

Our failure, as a nation, to respond to the reality of poverty, especially as it affects children, is, overwhelmingly, a failure of imagination. There are hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who simply cannot conceive how a family could live without a fridge. How a pantry could be empty of food. How children could be left to go hungry.

 

Following an item on TV3’s Campbell Live showing the full lunch-boxes of Year 6 pupils at a Decile Ten primary school and the almost total absence of lunch-boxes (and lunches!) among children of the same age at a Decile One school, the letters columns of the daily press were filled with parental indignation.

 

This wasn’t evidence of child poverty, the letter-writers railed, this was evidence of parental failure and neglect.

 

The people who take this position aren’t heartless and judgemental right-wingers (as some of my hard-line left-wing brethren have been quick to brand them) they are simply working from a different set of expectations.

 

It is probable that they have never experienced a prolonged period without money. It’s equally unlikely that they have ever faced weeks or months without enough food to eat or a place to live. The chances are similarly high that they have never been forced to beg a state servant to provide these things for themselves and their family.

 

If no one you know has ever been penniless, hungry or homeless; if your expectations of an income, a well-stocked refrigerator and a warm and comfortable home have always been met; then it is actually very difficult to attribute the absence of these necessities to anything other than poor personal choices.

 

And if someone allows their children to depart for school hungry and without a full lunch-box simply because they’ve made poor personal choices, then that person is guilty of neglecting – even abusing – his or her children and deserves to be punished severely.

 

This is clearly the thinking behind the present government’s welfare reforms. Poor personal choices are being tackled head-on. Any repeated failure on the part of a welfare beneficiary to meet a very basic set of social and familial expectations is going to be punished – hard.

 

But self-righteous retribution is a poor substitute for empathic imagination. It does, however, allow us to kid ourselves that we’ve answered the biggest question arising out of the poverty debate: How does this happen? Once we’ve decided that poverty is the result of poor personal choices, then the search for evidence can cease. We all know the causes: time to concentrate on the remedies.

 

But we don’t know the causes – not really. We don’t like to think about the expectations that poverty hard-wires into children, or of its effects on the people attempting to raise them. We don’t factor in the consequences of domestic violence on childhood development, or the impact of poor nutrition and the diseases of poverty on the little human-beings growing up in houses without fridges, where the cold and damp weakens immune systems. We don’t grasp the effect on a child’s education of always being hungry, or having to move house every few months. We can’t imagine what it’s like: always being a stranger in the classroom; an outsider in the playground. We don’t think about the sort of person a child like that grows into.

 

Are these really “poor personal choices”? Did these children ask to be born into poverty? And do we ever stop to think what sort of people (with what sort of expectations and addictions) they will grow into? Because children do not remain children forever. As the sapling is bent, so grows the tree.

 

Only a handful of us: schoolteachers, nurses, doctors and, yes, policemen, move freely between the two nations that New Zealand now encompasses. If only our hearts and minds would open as wide as our eyes when we learn what they have seen in the nation of the poor.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 25 September 2012.

Glad Tidings, Or Cruel Game?

Un-Persons: National's welfare policies only work politically because there are a huge number of voters who instantly relegate solo mothers and their children to a place outside the circle of respectable citizens. Only when paid employment reclaims them from the ranks of "the undeserving poor" do welfare beneficiaries stand the slightest chance of being accepted as a "decent, hard-working New Zealanders". Such is the cruel reality behind Mr Key's Pollyanna-ish "glad games".

IN ELEANOR PORTER’S classic children’s novel, Pollyanna, the orphaned heroine startles her misanthropic guardians with what she calls “the glad game”. No matter how bleak her prospects, Pollyanna always finds something to be glad about.

Listening to the Prime Minister wax eloquent about his government’s new welfare policy, I couldn’t help thinking of Pollyanna. Forty-six-thousand New Zealanders are to be purged from the welfare rolls over just four years, and Mr Key is glad. Why? Because, according to the Prime Minister, unemployed, sickness, invalid and domestic purposes beneficiaries will have individualised care wrapped around them like a cuddly blanket.

It’s a lovely thought. Thousands of young solo-mums will have their lives sensibly organised by an army of highly-qualified case-workers. Job training will be made available to all, while their kiddies are looked after in top-notch child-care centres. New MSD swipe-cards will keep these eager job-seekers safe from the temptations of booze, tobacco and God knows what else. Their weekly rent will afford them warm and commodious accommodation.

And all of this will be achieved at the very reasonable cost of just 50 million additional dollars, spread over four years. Presumably, this “new money” will be added to the $130 million per annum already spent moving beneficiaries from welfare to work. So, let’s see: $50 million divided by four equals $12.5 million per year to be spent assisting 11,500 beneficiaries (46,000 divided by 4) into the paid workforce. Hmmm? That’s just $1,086.95 per beneficiary.

Can professionally trained case-workers, high-quality child-care, affordable and appropriate housing stock and effective job-training services really be provided for just $1,086.95 of additional resources per person?

And what about the Government’s boast that getting 46,000 beneficiaries back into the workforce over four years will save the taxpayer one billion dollars – that’s $250 million a year. Or is it? Don’t forget, the estimated annual cost of getting 11,500 people off the welfare roll is $130 million + $12.5 million or $142.5 million. Which means that the annual net benefit to the taxpayer isn’t $250 million, but a much more modest $107.5 million. The saving over four years is more likely to be $430 million – not $1 billion.

Not forgetting, of course, that for there to be any net benefit to the taxpayer at all sufficient new jobs will have to be created to: 1) absorb the normal number of school-leavers and graduates entering the workforce; 2) re-employ workers in businesses which have been sold, shut down or failed; and 3) provide jobs for the 11,500 “Jobseekers” the Government intends to purge from its rolls every year for the next four years.

That’s a very big ask – especially for a government recovering from a global economic recession which added 60,000 people to the welfare rolls. The Prime Ministers glad-game notwithstanding, New Zealanders’ employment prospects remain bleak.

Isn’t it more likely that the $1,086.95 per person of “new money” will be expended on the “services” of a vastly expanded army of “assessors”? Medical professionals (many of them, perhaps, retired, or holding overseas qualifications) who will be expected to tell thousands of sick citizens that they have been “re-assessed”, and that, overnight, they have quite miraculously become “job fit” and, therefore, ineligible for Mr Key’s new “Jobseeker Support” payment?

And, isn’t it equally likely that the Ministry of Social Development will hire scores of new, minimally-trained, case-workers to harry and prod, prod and harry solo mums and unemployed workers into taking any kind of work, no matter how intermittent or unsuitable, so that the number of citizens in receipt of state support can be shown to be trending downwards?

Or, perhaps, the MSD won’t hire any new staff at all. Perhaps the responsibility for managing those receiving Jobseeker and Sole Parent Support payments will be contracted out to private enterprise. The more jobseekers and sole parents they purged from the welfare rolls, the higher the profits of these private agencies would climb.

It’s what happens in Australia – and it’s what the Welfare Working Group set up by Mr Key’s government recommended.

Pollyanna transformed a whole town by refusing to be beaten-down by circumstances, and by unlocking in her neighbours an altruism they’d long been encouraged to repress. Is it a similar, altruistic, game Mr Key is playing with New Zealand’s beneficiaries? Or will he just be glad to see them gone?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 4 November 2011.