To New Zealanders who have never received benefits, it might seem reasonable that people living on taxpayers' money would at least make an effort to look for work.
And if they don't, then isn't it unreasonable to impose sanctions on them?
That's only fair to the hard-working New Zealanders who help them.
These were the words of Prime Minister Chris Luxon – “fair and just”, “we’re not asking for much”, “no onerous obligations”, “responsibility to do the minimum” – as he announced the government’s new benefits sanctions regime. The traffic light system of penalties for breaches is already in place; there are other measures that will come into effect next year.
“It's not rocket science,” Luxon told RNZ Morning report.
But this is social science, and experts in the field who have worked with benefit claimants all their lives say there is no evidence the new regime will work.
Journalist and inequality and poverty researcher Max Rashbrooke has spent much of the past decade interviewing people living in poverty about their plight.
“I think there is a big problem that this government has come into power by making a big point that its policies are going to be much more evidence-based than the previous government’s. And then they’ve spent a lot of time pushing social investment, which is supposedly going to be an evidence-based approach where only the things that work are funded and the things that don’t are dismantled.
“And the problem here is that, to put it mildly, there isn't a whole lot of evidence to support the idea that a much tougher approach to the benefits system actually works.”
According to Rashbrooke, poverty and social security are both complex issues and people receiving benefits are a complex group of people.
He says it is typical of national governments to take a tougher approach to benefits once they come to power – “the classic set of policy options”, as Rashbrooke calls them.
Paula Bennett did much the same thing in 2010; Jenny Shipley did it in the late 1990s.
“The approach is to basically imply that a lot of beneficiaries are lazy and need a kick up the backside, so it’s important to have more sanctions for them. I think what’s a little bit different this time is that there’s more emphasis on, rather than just cutting people’s benefits, sanctions like maintaining the level of people’s benefits but removing their power to manage it. So, having MSD manage their money on their behalf, or forcing them to do community service.”
Rashbrooke says there is room for different points of view here.
“There's never one story that's absolutely true,” he says. “If you want to believe that punishment, that being tough on beneficiaries works, you can probably always find some examples of people abusing the system. And you can probably find a small number of examples of people being tough on people, that has worked. So there may be a very limited evidence base for a National Party wanting to do this sort of thing.
“But I also think the fact that we live at a fundamental distance from many of the beneficiaries means that many people in the National Party just don't understand what's going on at that end of the spectrum.
“There was a survey done about 10 years ago that showed that the majority of National supporters don't know anyone on benefits… so you can easily imagine that anyone on benefits is lazy and exploiting the system.
“And I think that's true, even though someone like Louise Upston, the minister responsible here (for social development), has been on benefits herself before… the same was true of Paula Bennett… even then that seems to lead to a desire, as Louise Upston put it, to make sure that no one gets benefits if they can help it.”
Rashbrooke also says research commissioned by the previous Labour government found that people forced off benefits during the 2013-14 reforms often moved into low-paid, low-quality, temporary or casual jobs – with only about half of them off benefits 18 months later.
He says making life harder for people on WINZ is also one of the ways that benefits figures tend to fall: people cutting themselves out of the system, or introducing barriers that make it harder to get into the system in the first place.
“I don’t think the government is recognizing enough that there are a lot of really reasonable reasons why people on benefits might not be able to do something as superficially simple as go to a job interview. And I don’t think a punitive measure is going to solve the real problems in people’s lives.”
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