Working Paula Bennett and her bigotry over in the debating chamber

WONDERFUL to see Paula Bennett getting worked over in Parliament today for appointing an Islamophobic fiction writer and corporate welfare proponent Peter Sunders to the working group on welfare reform.

As the ever brilliant Gordon Campbell points out, Peter Saunders, the former Director at the Centre for Independent Studies think tank in Sydney has been appointed as one of the experts the working group on welfare reform can call upon...

Saunders, if I can put this succinctly, is a nut job. He writes fiction as well as right wing opinion pieces for the press in Australia and Britain, even though it can be hard to tell the difference. Lets start with the opinion columns. In 1994, in his review of Charles Murray’s notorious book The Bell Curve on the alleged links between race and intelligence, Saunders concluded that social class, not race, was the real determinant of IQ

..so he claims poor people are just born dumb and blames social welfare for allowing more dumb/poor people to breed and in his downtime he writes hardcore Islamophobic fiction.

Oh he's a gem isn't he?

But it get's worse. Gordon also points out that National have also appointed members to this board who simply don't have any objectivity...

The welfare review panel, as has been widely noted, also includes Catherine Isaac (Judd) the former Act Party president. What also seems extraordinary is that some members of the working group – eg Adrian Roberts and Enid Ratahi Pryor – are also current contractors with Social Welfare. As such, they are involved in business relationships with the same state welfare system whose rules they are being asked to evaluate, with a view to change. How can they help to devise solutions to welfare dependency without being seen to be generating more business for their own enterprises? Answer: they can’t.

...so people with a vested interest in the privatization of welfare are the ones who will be advising the Government about the privatization of welfare, researched and supported by a Welfare hating, Islmaphobic fiction writer.

How will beneficiaries feel knowing Peter is making decisions on their future when he believes poor people are actually more stupid than rich people?

This isn't moderate, its hard right economic policy as social policy.