Lindsay Mitchell
Lindsay Mitchell has been researching and commenting on welfare since 2001. Many of her articles have been published in mainstream media and she has appeared on radio, TV and before select committees discussing issues relating to welfare. Lindsay is also an artist who works under commission and exhibits at Wellington, New Zealand, galleries.
Benefit numbers always rise in December, driven mainly by the influx of students into the system.
Taking the seasonal rise into account, and comparing apples with apples, December 2024 nevertheless saw numbers exceed 409,000 – the highest absolute number ever.
There has never been this many individuals on a main benefit in New Zealand before.
Even in the 1990s the total never reached 400,000.
Of course, when population is accounted for, the picture changes. Nevertheless, 12.6 per cent of the working-age population dependent on a benefit is higher than at any time since the Global Financial Crisis.
The 12.6 per cent represents one in eight people who rely on an unemployment, sole parent or some form of carer or disability benefit.
There are 232,000 children supported in these families. If their experience isn’t short-lived, they will learn habitual dependence from their parents.
Little media attention is paid to the problem of benefit dependence – not since ACT MP Muriel Newman doggedly highlighted this problem during the 1990s/2000s.
The latest December number was released [on Friday]. Despite being the highest absolute number ever, the media has either ignored the development or is ignorant of it.
This deep dependence is a massive problem because it fuels so many other social ills.
But New Zealand’s longstanding love affair with social security (at its inception a benign and worthy institution) prevents a dispassionate assessment of its evolution.
Once driven and sustained by people with common values, it is now too frequently abused by people whose values are an anathema to a shrinking majority. That is the unfortunate trajectory of welfare states over time – they become too much of a good thing.
The genuinely needy probably form no fewer than the two to three per cent that relied on benefits between the late 1930s and early 1970s.
But today New Zealand is carrying hundreds of thousands of people who are quite capable of carrying themselves. And would if such an easy alternative wasn’t presented.
Minister for Social Development Louise Upston put out a release [on Friday] highlighting the traffic light system that National has introduced and reiterating their underwhelming goal:
These changes will help achieve our target of 50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support by 2030.
What about sole parents and their children? What about people who can’t access the health treatments and operations that would enable them to return to work? What about those who cause their own incapacity through drug and alcohol addiction?
The numbers on all main benefits are growing – not just unemployment.
Perhaps after 40 plus years of over-reliance on welfare the phenomena is now just part and parcel of Kiwi culture. You could be forgiven for thinking so.
This article was originally published on the author’s blog.
