Labour’s year of delivery ended with way more welfare beneficiaries than when it began. Mike Yardley destroys the Prime Minister’s posturing on well being in just one article:
As election year dawns, one of the biggest credibility challenges this government faces is their failure to combat some of our biggest social ills. Hence the catch cry that Labour is soft on crime, gangs and soft welfare. With all these stats heading in the wrong direction, they are complicit.
The MSD’s latest quarterly update on benefit numbers is a sobering read. You’ll recall what grabbed the headlines last week was that total benefit numbers are up five per cent year on year. And Jobseeker Support benefit numbers have jumped ten per cent.
Labour isn’t working.
But it gets worse.
In the two years since Labour took power, there are now 15,000 more children being raised in benefit dependent homes.
And there are 7,000 more young people parked up on the dole, compared to two years ago. So much for Mana in Mahi.
But, but, we’ve eliminated child poverty, haven’t we? Oh wait, the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction seems to have made matters worse.
Over the weekend I dug deeper into MSD’s December data.
Just look at the growth rate in the number of people parked up on the Jobseeker Support Work Ready benefit, since December 2017. It’s a horror show.
Taranaki, you’re up 19 per cent. The North Island East Coast, up 19 per cent. Northland, up 20 per cent. Bay of Plenty, up 28 per cent. Take a bow Southland, you’ve got the lowest increase, up 10 per cent. The Auckland region, up 47 percent.
And in Canterbury, the number of Jobseeker Support work ready beneficiaries has exploded by 55 per cent, since Labour took power.
Not only are these numbers through the roof, but the proportion of people who’ve remained on the work ready benefit for over a year has also jumped by 20 per cent.
Rapidly expanding welfare is Labour’s record. It flies in the face of all of the posturing on well-being. Hard metrics don’t lie. Entrenching dependence and sapping the will to work by surrendering on sanctions and failing to enforce work-test obligations is simply indefensible.
NewstalkZB
If Jacinda Ardern is going to have a robust, fact-based election campaign then these facts are rather inconvenient.
Based on those figures I could see National running the famous Tory line from their 1978 election, “Labour isn’t working“
And there can be no one else to blame other than the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction. She stated that she was taking on that role as it was her reason for entering politics.
…where seeing “children without shoes on their feet or anything to eat for lunch” inspired her to eventually enter politics.
By all of the aforementioned measures, she has failed those children. By all of those measures she has made a lie of the so-called “well-being budget”. By all of those measures, she has shown that Labour isn’t working.
Instead of delivering houses to the homeless like they promised and better prospects for the poor from the “well-being budget”, the government is delivering higher unemployment and the resulting misery and increased crime rates that lack of work brings with it.
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