Category Archives: welfare

What’s the deal with state housing, anyway?

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This morning I spoke to a lady in the Housing New Zealand call centre – or rather, my sister talked to her for me, which they did indeed quite happily allow, though they asked me to come on quickly to confirm I was okay with it. I learned quite a lot about how bad things have to be before they even set you up with an assessment, which still doesn’t guarantee you a place on the waiting list. See, my needs are “non-urgent”. You may recall that I’ll be in Wellington next week (eight more days) and don’t yet know where I’ll be staying, but we told her I have friends there and could even offer an address for mail (btw, Stacey, I borrowed your address for mail). She didn’t ask how long said friends would be willing to put me up or anything, but because my friends exist and I’m not planning to sleep rough, which incidentally accounts for only 17% of homeless people in Australia and I imagine it’s similar here, it’s “non-urgent”. My sister asked if I could make an appointment to see someone once I arrived or if I had to wait until I got there to make one and was told that first I have to make a clear effort to find somewhere in the private market. Fair enough, I guess, and I’ve already been doing that, but they want me to spend nearly two weeks doing that – only in July am I allowed to contact them again to ask for an assessment, even after my sister explained that I’d already been looking and was finding it difficult to come up with something affordable. (As a note, I actually wouldn’t mind sleeping rough if I had somewhere safe to keep my stuff. It’d be rather cold at this time of year though.)

So right now, I need to arrange where I’ll be sleeping from Wed 19 June to 1 July, maybe less if I find a private rental, maybe longer depending how long HNZ takes to do things. I don’t want to inconvenience anyone or kick them out of their own beds, I am fine with a couch or whatever, or if anyone wants a housesitter in exchange for some internet. I will be checking out the Taita bedsits, which were $130/week, but they’re pretty poorly located for supermarkets, shops, and – from memory, this might be wrong – the train. I’ll also be asking the agent how much other tenants are paying in power bills because if they’re so shitty that the default resting spot is $150/month, well, I can’t afford that even if the rent is lower than everywhere else.

I’m also willing to consider flatting, with caveats. Namely that a) I know at least one person in the house relatively okay and b) it’s flatting, not boarding. I hate feeling like I live in a room in someone else’s house. It’s what I’ve been doing for the last several years and it’s actually one reason I’m looking forward to moving. This is also why boarding houses are completely inappropriate for me. Wellington Central is out, as are properties with endless steps up to them. Lower Hutt is ideal but I’ll definitely consider others. Houses with pets get extra points. :)

eta: if you wanna contact me by a means other than Twitter my email is teina at the domain of this site.

Let them have tax

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There’s a meme that’s been around for a while, but which has been repeated frequently over the last day or two. That meme is that, in New Zealand, “People earning $55k per annum [or less] don’t pay tax.” Tau Henare said it on Twitter, John Key said it on Campbell Live, and apparently DPF said it on his blog as well, among others.

That statement, as you might suspect, is not true. To make it true you have to add numerous conditions and qualifications.

Firstly, this doesn’t apply to everyone earning from $0-55kpa. It applies to those who qualify for the Working For Families in-work tax credit. As the name suggests, that means you have to, well, have a family. Specifically, you need to have at least two dependent children. (I believe if you have a single child you can get a partial credit, but it’s not worth as much.) Additionally, it takes into account household income, not your income. Using the calculator for WFF, I entered an imaginary family with two twelve year old kids. I earned $40k and my partner was a partly stay-at-home parent who earned $15k. My tax credit came out as $136/wk. Then I went to IRD and used the same incomes to find out my income tax. Mine was $6020, my partner’s was $1645, for a total of $7,665. Weekly, that’s $147.40, minus the tax credit for a total of $11.40 – annual tax of $592.80.

However, WFF is complicated by a few factors. For starters, shared custody, or whether the number of dependent children changes frequently. For example, if my partner and I split up and we share custody on a week-by-week swapsies basis, my tax credit drops to $98, while my tax is at $115.76, leaving me with nearly $18/wk to pay – $923.52 each year on my $40k. It’s not six thousand, but it’s not nothing, and leaves me worse off than before my partner left.

So already, what we really mean is that “A household containing two children, earning $55k per annum [or less], pays only a percentage point or two of tax, depending on how many parents are in the household.”

Next we get to discuss what we mean by “tax”. There are many kinds of tax – in New Zealand the main taxes are income tax and GST. In other countries there’s also capital gains tax. This statement only discusses income tax.

Now, we’re at: “A household containing two children, earning $55k per annum [or less], pays only a percentage point of two of income tax, depending on how many parents are in the household.”

Why is that difference important? Because while our income tax system is progressive (placing more burden on the rich), GST is regressive (placing more burden on the poor). Low income people spend far more of their income proportionally on goods and services to which GST apply, sending 15% of all of that money straight back to the government. But you can only multipy household expenses a certain amount – someone who earns a million dollars is not going to be spending a third of that on food, for example, because that would be ridiculous – over six thousand a week! So richer people spend much less of their income on goods and services. Capital gains tax is also progressive, as low income people can’t afford the properties and shares that are subject to it, however New Zealand doesn’t have a capital gains tax, further advantaging rich people. Luckily I don’t have to get more into how this distinction affects the tax system, because someone else has done it already!

The Pantograph Punch post doesn’t take into account Working For Families, because you can’t. WFF is incredibly situation dependent, as already shown. So you take the situation I’ve mapped and the situation PP mapped and combined them and what you find is:

Middle-class two-parent families with dependent children pay the least amount of tax, over all.
Poor families without dependent children pay the most amount of tax, over all. (Yes, you can be a family without kids!) Poor families with a single parent don’t do as well as middle-class two-parent families out of WFF – notice that as the household income went down, the tax after WFF went up.
Rich families without dependent children pay the least amount of tax, over all. Rich families with kids do pretty well too, because even if you earn $100kpa you qualify for a certain amount of WFF!

However, there is one last thing to take into account.

Working For Families is a tax credit. It isn’t taken off your tax straight away, or even automatically. It’s a rebate. You have to apply for it. You can choose how you want it paid – ie, weekly or fortnightly, or as a lump sum. To get it weekly or fortnightly, you have to know pretty accurately what your annual income will be and if you get it wrong your tax will be adjusted at the end of the financial year and may leave you with a bill if you end up earning more than you expected. That advantages people with steady, regular employment and good job security, and disadvantages people who work multiple part time, casual or temporary jobs – respectively, middle class people and low income people, generally speaking (but not always of course – some people on a very low income have very steady, but very shitty, employment, while some middle class people are for example self employed and don’t know how much business they’ll drum up over the year). Someone with a low income that isn’t steady and regular would thus be much safer to opt to get it as a lump sum, after you know how much you’ve earned over the year and exactly how much you’re entitled to. That means you can’t actually afford more, week to week, unless you very carefully release the previous year’s rebate a week at a time over the next year. You could use the rebate on things that have built up and which now really need paying – and that often means that they’ve gotten more expensive while you’re waiting for it, because you know you’ll be getting that money soon, so you want to feed your kids in the meantime rather than avoiding the late fee or the extra interest or the extra power cost of your shitty washing machine that needs replacing or extra water damage to your house until you can get the plumber in.

Ultimately I’m not even sure what our final pronouncement is. Suffice to say, it’s nothing at all like “People earning $55kpa don’t pay tax.”

One accident away

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There is an opinion piece on one of the Australian news websites titled something like “$300? My wheelchair costs $22,000″. The issue, in a nutshell, is that the Aus government is proposing a $300/year tax hike for contributions to an NDIS fund which I gather is pretty much like our ACC – a public accident compensation program. Between a few different people, many of the comments were read, and it is one of the most heartbreaking displays of societal breakdown. Not in the conservative “divorce and abortions and gays, oh my!” sense, but the neo-liberal “look out for number one” sense, where no one has any obligation whatsoever to care about anyone else, no matter what. Being currently able-bodied, these people claim, means they should be asked to contribute absolutely NOTHING for the care of those who aren’t. No matter that a centralised fund is overall cheaper than everyone paying their own costs (or failing to, and then needing emergency care which is funded, but is much more costly). No matter that disability and poor health effect the health of the whole of society. No. These people don’t currently need the fund, so they shouldn’t have to pay.

The funny thing about disability is that it’s one of the very few minority groups in society which anyone could join at any point. It’s pretty fluid, since it covers such a huge range of conditions, but there are people who come in and out of it (discounting through death, generally more in than out), unlike race or sex or to an extent sexuality. Some people have lived with their conditions for their whole lives, some have them come on gradually, others have a sudden accident which results in short or long term or permanent disability, and it’s the latter which ACC and NDIS cover. I’m sort of in the second group. Right now, I’m closer to “physically unremarkable” than “completely paralysed”, but since my issues have gotten worse over time I also get to wonder how they’ll change in the future. Will they become significantly worse?

Interestingly, I can’t remember the last time I had a dream in which I could walk. It’s a little hard to describe, but usually it’s difficult for me to stick to the ground – my legs don’t work properly, it’s a pain-that-doesn’t-hurt, or maybe it’s just that it’s pain but I can’t feel it, because it’s only a dream – and instead I drift upwards a foot or two or even higher (power lines are much more prolific and a frequent concern in many of those ones). There’s usually this sense that for some reason this floating is a social faux pas that I shouldn’t be doing, that I’m drawing attention to myself and causing a scene, but often that doesn’t actually affect anything that happens. I can even cross the road against the lights, over the tops of cars, without any real consequences.

Occasionally, I can’t float at all, but I still can’t walk properly. I don’t like those much.

The poverty of excess (or why kids are like roads)

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Around the fifteenth century, something interesting happened: the philosophy of individualism was born. Until then the concept of individual rights wasn’t actually really a thing (and for much of the world wasn’t for quite a while longer), but over the next couple hundred years the idea became more popular for a lot of reasons – disillusionment with the government (particularly Britain’s monarchy, who were starting to become known for their excesses and bloodthirstiness) and church, especially. As the concept developed, a bigger variety of things began to be considered as rights that were held by individuals. Some meant physical protection from the government. Others meant political or economic participation. If you’ve played Civilisation, you know the name Adam Smith – he was one of the people thinking about this sort of thing and coming up with the ideas that became liberalism. Liberalism (the precursor to modern neo-liberalism and market liberalism) and individualism evolved together and pretty much go hand in hand. Each man, people were deciding (and it really was each man, as women were required to tend the home – the system doesn’t work otherwise), had the right to provide for himself, rather than relying on a lord who was responsible for the wellbeing of his people. (The quality of that wellbeing varied – some were terrible while others felt a real duty towards the families on their land and would provide for them relatively well even if they were sick or injured and couldn’t work.)

Fast forward, a lot, and skip to the other side of the world. In the mid twentieth century, the Labour government established the welfare state. Anyone who says we have a welfare state now? It’s nothing like what we used to have. The welfare state meant “universal” benefits, generous ones, like payments to families. State houses that were nice to live in. Full (male) employment – in 1950 there were about five people on the unemployment benefit. Targeted health services, particularly focusing on children’s health, with recognition that healthy babies make healthy kids make healthy adults who can join the workforce and contribute tax.

The dark side of this was especially evident when you look at Māori. When the welfare state was being set up they were still mostly living in rural areas, with their iwi or hāpu. Until 1945 essentially no Māori were drawing benefits; only after the war, when Māori began to move into urban areas and the government penetrated rural areas a little more, did they start engaging with welfare agencies. During this period, a big part of the welfare system was discretionary payments, because just saying that a family is a single unit doesn’t mean that families will always be good to each other, but the government didn’t want to be giving money to women who had unreliable husbands because it would encourage them to abandon them to an even greater degree. Discretionary welfare involved a relationship between the social workers and families over a fairly lengthy period of time and these relationships simply didn’t exist for Māori families because of the way they lived – on their traditional lands, in bigger family groups – and, frankly, because of racism. There was a lot of tension as Māori moved into the towns that was simply white New Zealanders complaining about Māori being Māori while, like, existing. When Māori did engage with the welfare system they were scrutinised to a much higher level, which is the problem with discretionary welfare. It’s discretionary. Subjective. Uptake of the non-discretionary family benefits (ten shillings per child at first, increased to fifteen in the late fifties) meant a lot to Māori and that was quite visible, with children getting clothing and more food (things that Māori used to be able to do themselves), which pissed white people off. They thought Māori were getting too much and spending it wrong, while in actual fact there were a lot of things that the family benefit just didn’t cover that discretionary welfare would be useful for – like transporting bodies home for tangi (food for the tangi was also explicitly not covered, even though it’s a pretty important aspect) and traveling to see what to Pākehā would be considered extended family.

The upshot of all of this is that Māori had to prove their need more than Pākehā, and behave “better” to get help. Which really meant behave more white. Even once they moved into the towns and had access to the welfare offices they had to be very careful how they behaved. If they had extended family visiting too much, that would piss off the neighbours. If they were too noisy, that would piss off the neighbours. If they ate food that smelled strongly, that would piss off the neighbours. And while obviously this mostly applied to Māori, discretionary welfare was a problem for other people too. Essentially it was a form of social control, one which encouraged the white ideal of nuclear families, placed in separate housing, breaking down the support systems that were considered a basic necessity for most of human history for raising children. While this was going on, too, there was active societal encouragement for people to start families of not just one or two children, but quite a few – for the Māori of course this is long-standing culture. Children are highly valued. And for white New Zealand, it was racial supremacy and government policy to support that.

The welfare state started to seriously fray in the seventies and completely fell apart in the eighties. Ironically it was Labour who both started and ended it, in their first and fourth occasions in power respectively. I know I have some friends who are a bit younger than me who may think this was quite a while ago, but particularly in terms of societal attitudes it’s really, really not. I was born in the eighties. I have siblings born in the seventies. My parents are at the tail end of the baby boomers. Social beliefs around, say, the un/desirability of children do not often change that quickly without severe external cause, which we have very much not had, here or anywhere in the Western world, in that timeframe. But liberalism has come back in a big way, and politicians and commentators have been talking up their philosophies in the media, something that has demonstrable affect on less deeply ingrained attitudes – I know I use this example a lot, but the rise in threats and violence against people with disabilities in the UK as politicians demonised disability beneficiaries is a really, really good one – and individual responsibility has really supplanted social responsibility as a major driver of public policy. (I know I used responsibility twice there; originally it said individual rights, but then I decided that was wrong.)

Basically what I’m saying is, the idea of individuals, as a whole (ie not counting the declarations that ethnic groups and the extremely poor have “too many” children), having to be solely responsible for the raising of their children and of children being a right tied to income and wealth, is pretty damn new, and not something that society has actually adjusted to. It’s actually pretty radical. It goes against thousands and thousands of years of basically every human culture. It also doesn’t really make sense, because the way nation-states are set up in the Western world relies on growth. We need a growing population, and we don’t have enough very rich to provide it, and it’s politically untenable to get it through immigration because of racism and xenophobia (just look at the news right now for evidence of this – you’d think there’s a flood of Chinese immigrants buying all the houses, and some of our politicians have been trying to convince us that “boat people” are on their way here right now). The middle class and, yes, even the lower class, need to have kids. Even if they need help with some parts of getting them to adulthood in a relatively healthy manner. Furthermore, the family sizes we currently consider normal are pretty small. Three children is not too many. Three children is replacement level and a spare. Less necessary now because of child mortality, happily, and more because more people are choosing not to have children at all (though this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon either; my history has a family with something like six children, none of whom had any of their own, and that was a good couple generations back). And it is entirely reasonable for people to expect social assistance in raising those children, because this is the first generation where anyone has been saying that that’s not reasonable. The universal family benefit wasn’t removed until the eighties! My own parents received that for their first children, and it could be capitalised to pay upfront for bigger expenses (in our case school uniforms, but it could even be taken advantage of by first-home buyers). That social assistance wouldn’t necessarily mean strictly financial transfers, however – tax credits, subsidised services, strong protections for employees that allow parents to keep jobs that pay well and also spend time at home, and, yes, parental leave, are all things that can be done to make it a little bit easier to have a family and which are not a level of expectation that is, really, unprecedented.

The really funny thing about me saying all this, actually, is that I did not used to think like this. Allowances for parents annoyed the hell out of me. I was a member (I’m ashamed to admit) of childfree on LiveJournal, though not cf_hardcore. I mean, it still annoys me that banks seem to think they can only market mortgages towards families and that people talk like only parents need or want a work/life balance, but having learned more about history and social policy makes me realise that, um, we do need allowances for parents. Because parenthood is not something that pays for itself despite the fact that it’s really, really important. It’s one of those things that just makes sense to receive public assistance, like how roads should be publicly funded because that’s much more efficient (Roads of National Significance aside) than expecting private citizens to be responsible for building and maintaining their own. That’s right, folks. Kids are like roads. We shouldn’t have to build and maintain them ourselves.

A relationship in the nature of marriage

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So the newest beneficiary bash involves extending legal responsibility for relationship fraud to the partner. So there’s been some discussion of abusive relationships, and in Question Time today Jacinda Ardern (I think?) asked about whether women in abusive relationships would have that taken into account.

In response, we were told that “an abusive relationship is not a relationship in the nature of marriage”.

This is an interesting position to take. There’s no specification of whether this means just for the purposes of this policy or in general, and if the latter, I would be extremely worried. In New Zealand de facto relationships have the same benefits as those who are legally married, for example, and especially regarding divorce and separation, many of the legislations set up were about protecting the partner who has been financially disadvantaged, usually the woman – especially in an abusive relationship. If abusive relationships hold a special category where they’re NOT regarded as similar to a marriage, does that leave grounds for someone to claim they don’t have to pay alimony? Particularly if the victim/survivor does not wish to lay charges, or if the abuse does not involve physical violence (or very little) – though I’m not confident about the government’s willingness to recognise the existence of emotional abuse – it seems like the main thing stopping people from doing this would be the implicit admission of abuse, but in my experience abusers are willing to do all sorts of seemingly self-destructive things purely out of bitterness if their victim finds a way to get away from them.

ETA: Further questions:

Does this mean that if someone is in an abusive relationship, they are allowed to tell WINZ they’re single?
What does this mean for the legal validity of abusive marriages? Does it render a divorce unnecessary?*

*This is clearly in a hypothetical world where an answer in Question Time is an accepted method of law interpretation rather than judges’ decisions.

When government fails

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Some months back, a seasonal Victorian firefighter was injured on the job. He suffered serious internal injuries and burns, bad enough that he was admitted to intensive care and had to spend months in rehabilitation. Then he was told that he would not be re-hired for the next summer. He was offered a week’s pay in settlement on the proviso that he not speak publically about the whole thing.

Money ran out and the ex-firefighter, Joe Brown, his partner Ben and their two cats became homeless. While the Fire Service claimed they were providing support, Joe says that he only ever had one meeting with Parks Victoria, that they underpaid him, and that he had been cleared to work by a doctor. He hasn’t been able to find work, and after losing their home it became a struggle just to keep up with living costs.

Here’s where Joe and Ben got lucky. Twitter user @Jamus_ set up a curation account in the style of @sweden, @PeopleofNZ and @WeAreAustralia, specifically to feature the homeless population of Melbourne. First Joe and then Ben each spent a week using the account to share their story. It helps that in many ways they fit into the model of the “deserving poor”, an ideal that has an extremely long history. Their situation was not of their own doing. Joe had held a frontline job in an extremely highly regarded profession, and was injured in the pursuit of that work. Neither of them have drug or alcohol problems or mental illness (with the exception of Joe’s likely PTSD, which he’s said is an effect largely of how he was treated while in recovery rather than the accident itself). They’re literate and well-spoken. In short, their problems couldn’t be attributed to any moral failing on their count – and if this could happen to a firefighter, a noble protector of the people in a country where fire is a seriously big deal, it could happen to anyone.

While tweeting from the account, Joe and Ben found an estate agent who’d let a flat to them. All they had to do was come up with the $600 bond. They went to Victoria’s DHS and it seemed they’d be able to get the money from them. However, the next week they were told that Joe had an outstanding $450 debt dating from 2004, and until it was repayed they wouldn’t be able to get any help. Joe says he’d repaid it, and even if he hadn’t they hadn’t heard anything about it in the nine years since, but short of getting the decision reviewed there wasn’t much they could do. There was an hour left on the deadline to raise the bond.

In New Zealand the banks were already closed for the day, and none of them would process a payment in less than a day anyway. I offered to repay anyone in Melbourne who’d be able to put up the bond money, but an hour ticked by with no response. It was too short notice.

Today, though, everything fell into place. The agent was still trying to find out if Joe and Ben would be able to pay, and now more people were becoming aware of the situation – even @Asher_Wolf, a well-established Australian activist, was tweeting about it. While I was still researching the best and fastest way to get money out of New Zealand on Waitangi Day, the internet was stirring, and shortly after I decided on Western Union Joe tweeted that someone had donated the $450 needed to clear the debt with the DHS. I still don’t know everyone who donated, but I know there have also been offers of further help and the word put out to source things like furniture and manchester. One person even said that when they got a fridge they’d be receiving a lemon meringue pie. They don’t have the power on yet, or cleaning products, but they have some money for food and are discussing renting a van to pick up the furniture they’re able to get through donations (whether directing or using donated money). With a home base they’re now much more employable, as well as under much less stress, not having to spend so much on nightly accommodation or sleep in their car, able to get out of the heat during the day and generally just in a much healthier environment.

This is a fantastic outcome. There is absolutely no questioning that. It does raise questions, though, of what makes one person’s crisis go viral when another’s doesn’t. It’s a question that applies on multiple scales, right up to human rights abuses and genocides. There is simply so much suffering in the world that we will never hear about all of it, and the processes that make certain narratives make it into the wider consciousness while others fade away with barely a murmur are somewhat less than transparent.

That is why we can’t rely on charity to form a social safety net. Charity has always been plagued by “morality”, particularly in the name of religion, which can be a very toxic kind of help – or, in some cases, refused outright on the basis of who is asking for that help. LGBT people (like Joe and Ben and I) are especially vulnerable to this. That’s where government should come in. And that’s where austerity fails. Victoria is fighting that oh-so-familiar battle against “bloat” in the public service – cutting public employee numbers by 4200, something that perhaps contributed to the decision not to re-hire a contract employee who’d been injured, no matter what the doctors said. Welfare is stretched thin and no longer nearly as generous as it once was.* For every Joe Brown there are countless more who aren’t as lucky, and it’s highly probable that we’ll never know their names.

*A disclaimer here that I’m far more well-versed in the history of welfare in New Zealand than in Victoria, or Australia in general.

Education in base 12

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Thanks to Shelagh at Ruth Dyson’s office, I’ve just had a call from a lady who works at Studylink who attempted to explain to me what the issues with my application were. First she told me that there were two different program codes, which was true in my first application. Massey explained the problem to me (you can’t get a student allowance using two different programs to get your 0.8 EFTS) and I sat there painstakingly withdrawing and re-enrolling in all my papers to put them all into a BA rather than a DipArts, then re-applied. I told her this and then she moved on to the problem of my EFTS values. You see, I’m doing 0.6something in 2013 and 0.2something over summer, which makes 0.69something and–

“Sorry, point-two or point-oh-two?”

She confirmed point-two. I pointed out that 0.2 and 0.6 add up to 0.8.

She put me on hold, where I languished for all of Bic Runga’s Sway and most of Slice of Heaven before she returned to say that yes, 0.2 and 0.6 do add up to 0.8.

Apparently the problem now is that they have two verifications of study from Massey, one for summer and one for next year (which I suspect may be more due to how they’re asking than anything else) and she needs to talk to someone with more experience to see if they can put them next to each other and add them up or not, even though she’d already added them up to tell me that it only made 0.69something. If not then either Massey needs to send one verification of study for the entire study period or I need to re-apply for limited full-time, despite being full-time.

On the plus side, when Massey asked what I wanted to do with the extraneous limited full-time application I had them send it back to me instead of destroyed, because it has a verified copy of my deed poll in it and I find it really tiresome to get those done. So if needed I can just re-envelope it and send it back again.

ETA: She’s just got back to me to say that (shocker) everyone’s gone home for the day so she’ll send an email to someone with more experience in this area and follow up on Monday.

Healthcare by numbers

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Today, Stuff featured two articles highlighting health costs – the first, which only on my third reading did I realise was confined to the Nelson-Malborough region, talks about the $125,000 in unpaid medical bills incurred by those ineligible for publicly funded healthcare. The second is on a study designed to guesstimate how much people are overpaying for prescriptions – the total being about $2.5 million. (Incidentally, there are 20 DHBs in New Zealand, of which Nelson and Marlborough are included in one – if the unpaid bills were the same in each that $125k would come out to about $2.5m nationwide. Obviously that’s a big if, but the prescription study isn’t a particularly firm figure either – the article actually notes that it’s probably higher.)

It’s always sort of interesting when the news has two sides of a similar topic in the same day, or even the same week, particularly if comments are enabled. I haven’t been bothered refreshing the pages so this is based on when I first read them about half an hour to an hour ago, but at that time there was only one comment on the unpaid bills article saying it was good that people weren’t getting a free ride. At the same time there were 13 comments on the prescription article, a rough mixture of “I had no idea there was an exemption on prescription charges after 20 items”, and “it’s not free everyone else has to pay academics are so stupid we can’t afford socialised healthcare!” Apparently academics also earn about $180k a year, which makes me seriously think I should reconsider my career goals. Screw policy, man, I should just study the shit out of things for cash. That’s more than most MPs earn!*

Based on those comments, I think it’s somewhat bold to say that the exemption scheme isn’t working. I think it would be fairer to say that not telling people about the exemption scheme isn’t working. I knew about it only because I happened to hit the 20 item limit once when I managed to go to the same pharmacy for an entire year somehow and they handed me a card – once, in the many years I’ve been faithfully turning up to get my medication once a month and getting a new prescription every three months. On that note, there was also a comment saying that it’s the patient’s fault for not always going to the same pharmacy. Well, at the moment I don’t have a main pharmacy because the most convenient one was destroyed in an earthquake. There are three others I can go to – one is by the doctor’s office but there’s no longer a bus that takes me straight there, one is on my way home from work which is where I’ve taken the last couple of scripts, and one is about ten or fifteen minutes walk away and also on a bus route that I wouldn’t otherwise take. And even before the earthquakes, I tended to dither between the one by my house and the one by the doctor, because it’s easier to fill the initial prescription at the doctor pharmacy, but then I had to bus out there for the next two months to get the repeats. Sometimes, there just plain isn’t one single pharmacy that’s convenient to go to. And particularly when you’re talking about the people who are most likely to need exemptions for high use – low income, either prone to illness or medication-dependent or struggling to raise kids, often with poor rates of literacy – fairly often these aren’t people who are knowledgeable enough or have enough free time to pick one pharmacy to consistently use, especially if they haven’t been properly informed of the exemption.

As for the idea that we can’t afford schemes like this, I think everyone knows where I stand. We can’t afford not to have them. When the people who need this shit don’t take their medication, costs skyrocket. Rheumatic fever, heart attacks, diabetes complications, pneumonia, bronchitis, the loss of productive output, loss of jobs, uncontrolled mental illness, emergency welfare payments, swelling benefit numbers, rises in crime, communicable diseases that affect even the nice comfortable middle classes that think they’re so much better than the poor and shouldn’t have to help pay for their healthcare.

The DHBs are happy to send debt collectors after people who don’t qualify for that nice funded healthcare. But they don’t send debt repayers after people who haven’t been informed of their rights – instead, they increase the cost of prescriptions to make the problem worse.

 

*I don’t actually think academics earn that much. That’s just ludicrous.

Two days to submit

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The deadline for submissions on the Social Security (Benefit Categories and Work Focus) Amendment Bill is Thursday. This is the bill that contains all the nasty stuff MSD has been telling the media about – sanctions and hoop jumping and payment cards and consolidating the sickness and unemployment benefits and all of it. It’s big and it’s bad and you need to speak out against it.

Auckland Action Against Poverty has a fantastic guide to writing a submission that you should definitely check out. It tells you how to write a submission in general and also goes through the bill outlining what the proposed changes are with suggestions on what you can say about the effects of them on beneficiaries and their families.

I’ve just submitted mine – it clocked in at just a shade under two thousand words, which is a short essay (a long essay if you stopped doing Humanities in high school), and it still didn’t cover everything I wanted to say and which AAAP comments on. I didn’t even touch on the bullshit of requiring your partner to engage in “pre-benefit activities” (the hoops you have to jump through to even get onto a benefit), for example, and I only gave one piece of personal information about my own interactions with the welfare system. Unfortunately I have a Social Policy essay on Saturday and writing a thesis on the ways in which this bill sucks donkey balls does not give me course credit (though I will count it as study, sort of, though I’m supposed to be revising social policy concepts eg freedom/equality/justice/need rather than analysing specific policy itself). Yours does not have to be that long. You can just say it sucks donkey balls if you want, though you may wish to be a little more formal. Just say something. Even if you don’t intend to submit, please read the AAAP’s submission guide, because it really shows you how fucked up this thing is and we need to know this shit.

Got a question? WINZ has the answer.

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Damn, guys. Remember the fuss when ACC had that major privacy breach? The Ministry of Social Development has a worse one. More information, much much more, and it wasn’t wrongly sent to one person -

Anyone who wanted to could walk straight into a WINZ office and get it.

@keith_ng released this about half an hour ago. This is going to be enormous, and if it’s not, something is seriously wrong. (Although, relatedly, I wonder what kind of distraction is going to hit the news soon in an attempt to focus attention elsewhere? How fucking big a distraction would that need?)