Why does National despise the poor?

Two recent events reinforce an overwhelming impression that National despises poor people.

The first is news that the MSD thinks that food is a nice to have and not an essential need.

Yep read that again. This is how much we have descended into this weird alternative universe in the past few years.

And the question has to be asked, if food is a nice to have then what is an essential?

From Henry Oliver at the Spinoff:

The Ministry of Social Development has told thousands of people that food was “not an essential need”, in what it now calls an admin error, 1News reported last night. Documents obtained through the Official Information Act show MSD has routinely used that reasoning to decline Special Needs Grant applications for help with food over the last six years.

MSD has said that this was because staff chose the wrong option when they were selecting which option to choose when they were turning down requests for hardship funding. It seems that when a staff member received a request for money to buy food they should have turned them down using some other pretext.

But we live in an absolute food basket. We produce enough food to feed eight times our population. But we have people going without and when they reach out they are told that food is not an essential need. This suggests that we have a rather cruel way of distributing resources.

The second event was the release of the review of how the Government implemented a law change that managed to accidently reduce the benefits of tens of thousands of elderly kiwis.

From Lauren Crimp at Radio New Zealand:

More than 30,000 benefits and other payments were wrongly suspended with concerns continually raised for three months before being appropriately escalated, a government review has found.

The botch-ups affected more than 2400 main beneficiaries and some were left thousands of dollars out of pocket before they were backpaid, while the total arrears bill reached $2.5 million.

The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) on Thursday released its review into two major problems that surfaced following a law change last year.

The change required many beneficiaries to confirm their circumstances annually to ensure they remained eligible for their payments.

The Winter Energy Payment (WEP) should have been exempt from that process, but it was not, which meant thousands of pensioners missed out on payments they should have received.

Secondly, processing delays caused by a high volume of people confirming their circumstances meant some paperwork was not checked in time, so their benefit payments stopped.

MSD chief executive Debbie Power has formally apologised.

But Upston in particular should take the blame.

Smashing the law change through under urgency created this problem. It was not interrogated or reviewed properly and with the benefit of hindsight this was a very apparent problem and easy to fix. Making it subject to select committee review would no doubt have highlighted the problem.

And cutting back office jobs made the problem much worse not only in terms of analysis of the law change but also processing the increased workload caused by the problem.

The issue was first raised on 30 April by an MSD staffer. It was raised continuously for over three months and Senior leadership claimed they were not told until 13 August.

This is clear evidence of an organisation not functioning properly.

Labour has been scathing about Upston’s response.

The RNZ article contains this quote from Chris Hipkins:

The responsibility for this absolute fiasco rests with the ministers in charge, that’s Louise Upston and Christopher Luxon. It’s time they fronted up and apologised and explained why they were willing to let this happen.”

He said Upston “clearly didn’t even bother to read” the legislation, when as leader of the House it was her job to make sure the government did not make these kinds of mistakes.

Labour social development spokesperson Willow-Jean Prime said they were “hiding behind officials, letting them front for a mess National made”.

“The review is damning. It makes clear the root cause of this disaster was National’s rushed lawmaking and up to 700 jobs cut at MSD.”

Shame on National. Its complete indifference to the plight of poor people is palpable.