Greens wishlist for welfare

The Herald reports:

The Green Party is launching a campaign today to get the community behind changes to the welfare system.

And what would these changes be?

“Increasing the baseline amounts for benefits is pretty clear. That increase hasn’t followed wage increases or inflation for far too long.

Not a good start when she gets a basic fact wrong. Benefits do follow inflation. They are adjusted every year.

If you were to link benefits to wage increases, this would massively increase the cost to taxpayers – probably by over a billion dollars a year.

And removing sanctions which we’ve been very, very vocal about, which is about trying going away from that punitive or punishing approach.

Which means no work testing. You can remain on a benefit for ever and never have to even open a paper to look for a job.

“Changing the threshold for benefit reductions. There are so many people who want to work, even part time, while raising young children in particular. But those incentives are just really clumsy, confusing , messy, and they don’t make it worth it,” Davidson said.

This is a legitimate issue but means people on a benefit and working part-time could end up earning more than someone working fulltime.

The Greens would also look at combining the in-work tax credit and family tax credit and making them less discriminatory.

This means paying the in-work tax credit to people not actually working.

They also wanted Work and Income to stay out of people’s personal lives by “moving towards entitlements based on individual needs rather than a blanket policies around starting new relationships and losing entitlements”, Davidson said.

This means you could be living with a millionaire as a couple, and still claim a sole parent benefit.

She said the party had been working to get to a point where it could launch the campaign, and now was the time.

This is indeed the time. I want everyone to know what the Greens want the Government to do.