Bennie Bash Season is open!

Group proposes radical welfare reform
Strict time limits on benefits, work-for-the-dole and forcing solo mothers to work based on the age of their oldest child are among a raft of radical suggestions for reforming the welfare system.

Each month in the small windowless creche under the Beehive where the children of National and ACT play, the kids get to bash a pinata in the shape of a beneficiary with little 'Paula batons' so they can scoop all the creamy welfare out of their bennie brains. The hatred the Right wing have for those on welfare is the sort of hatred Israeli settlers have for Palestinian pan flute peace festivals.

Bashing the dirty filthy bennie is a cultural tradition in NZ, it's up there with rugby, alcohol and domestic violence as one of our nations most treasured paua shell encrusted hobbies. The redneck talkback reactionary knee jerks over solo mothers would suggest that solo mothers are some sort of carcinogenic societal tumour that can only be dealt effectively with by napalm.

The hilarity is that the ideologically stacked Welfare Razor Gang are using voodoo math to justify sending solo mothers, the sick, the crippled and the mentally unwell back to work. The ideologically stacked Welfare Razor Gang says welfare will cost $50 billion, how did they get to that number? They claimed that if every single person currently on welfare remained on welfare for the rest of their life (ie NONE OF THEM ever got a job) THEN and only THEN would it cost us $50 Billion.

So let's remind ourselves who was on this ideologically stacked Welfare Razor Gang?

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?

Other than Islamaphobic fiction writers who connect intelligence to wealth and advocate corporations run social welfare, who else is on this Welfare razor gang?

Surprise, surprise - the former president of ACT, Catherine Isaac. A day after the Welfare Working Group first met on April 30th, Roger Kerr, the Executive Director of the Business Roundtable published an opinion piece in the Dominion Post claiming unemployment is a political choice, as in the poor choose to be poor.

Roger rages against the welfare machine by claiming if only we dumped the minimum youth wage and weaken unions, then employers like him would hire and Ayn Rand would come back from the grave with Adam Smith and they will lay the foundations of a pure free market city state with a weirdly overt militaristic Police force.

The kicker is, Rodger Kerr is married to Catherine Isaac, he’s writing hard right send-the-kids-down-the-mine-to-work-social-policy the day after his wife’s first meeting for the Welfare Working Group.

Cough-cough

I could have saved us the million dollars spent on this ideologically stacked Welfare Razor Gang to give National the scare mongering bennie bash crap they wanted to hear...

Bludgers will be rorting the system
Bludgers will be causing cancer
Bludgers may be attracting aliens
Bludgers will be using your taxpayer dollars to buy booze and drugs as they rob you while you are out of your house while you are working hard to pay your mortgage and pay your bills and look after your kids and all these bludgers will want to do is piss on your mothers grave.

PISS ON YOUR MOTHERS GRAVE

Etc etc etc, we have every button pushing welfare stereotype exploited mercilessly to make us angry enough to justify whatever draconian solution these corporate vultures vomit up.

One question though about forcing solo mothers, the crippled, the mentally unwell and the sick back to work - where are the jobs going to be in a 6.4% unemployment rate with the global economic crises proving to be as dangerous as the 1929 crash...

Credit rating threat 'more of a warning' - English
The downgrade of New Zealand's outlook from stable to negative reflected increasing concerns internationally about external debt rather than a worsening situation here, Finance Minister Bill English says.

...oh, so there won't be any jobs. I'm not sure implementing neoliberal low tax, deregulation free market dogma domestically will solve a global economic crises caused by neoliberal low tax, deregulation free market dogma.

The weakest and most vulnerable in society are being asked to do with less by an ideologically stacked Welfare Razor Gang using voodoo math to justify sending solo mothers, the ill and the crippled back to work because of a global economic crises caused by greedy corporates who treated Wall St like a casino?

If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.