Well, THIS Is Fair, Isn't It?!

Following an  ongoing case of Ministry of Social Development victimisation and discrimination through, here's just one of the unsavoury elements of this latest update:

Last Friday, The Platform’s Michael Laws (commenting on a case study by Radio NZ) spoke at length about a working age Maori man from Whangarei who reaps $832.23 per week for sitting on his backside in his comfortable waterfront townhouse. He has no obligation to work, only to “look after” his 13-year-old (normal, healthy, assumedly school-attending) son. (The man is, in turn, the adult child of long-term beneficiaries.)

Contrast this with the (also real) case of the lone female Pakeha disability beneficiary, who lives in a “whiter” area and receives a total of just $472 per week, with no assistance for any expenses whatsoever, including substantial medical expenses (many of her expenses being legal entitlements and certainly readily paid to other, more favoured, beneficiaries).

How does that work? How is it that staff of a government welfare agency are at liberty to lavish funds on one beneficiary, while at the same time withholding and denying the legal entitlements of another, based on pure and obvious favouritism and/or personal ideological motivations?

The Impotence of the Human Rights Commission

The Ministry and its bully boy (and bully girl) staffers are such a law unto themselves, that – when the broader case of discrimination and victimisation of which this matter was part, was brought to the Human Rights Commission – even the Commission’s mediator was unable to achieve any lasting cessation of either the financial discrimination or the conduct-related victimisation.

And so this particular case of deep attitudinal and financial injustice continues. On and on. No explanation. No corrective action.

In fact (unlike the fully able, working age Maori man luxuriating comfortably on his $832 per week in his harbour view townhouse), when the single white multiply-debilitated woman (who had spent two years begging MSD fruitlessly for access to the readily-available (to anyone else) minimal “Start-Up Grant” to allow her to return to earning in a way that accommodated her disabilities) finally expressed her frustration, her “punishment” was to have her benefit first slashed by a third, before a couple of weeks later finding it completely cut off. It remained that way for a full six months, after which it was only ever partially restored . . . with a continued refusal to provide any explanation for the only partial restoration (which remains only partial well over a year later).

So – the Far North able-bodied Maori man of working age with no intention or desire (but full ability) to work enjoys the treatment of royalty by MSD and a whopping obligationless $832.23c per week – continuing on a long and proud family tradition.

Meantime, a disabled white woman (who has been actively and continually denied any assistance to re-engineer her circumstances to allow her to work) is paid a sum total of $472 per week and denied all legal entitlements to what should be a variety of additional support funding, including for medically-related expenses.

I was - and continue to be - so utterly disgusted by this ongoing case study of MSD targeting and discriminatory behaviour (which has since lapsed into severe psychological abuse of its target), that I personally wrote to each and every Minister and Member of Parliament.

I asked them:  As a representative of the New Zealand people, as you are, are you OK with that?

Not one replied. So I can only conclude the answer is a resounding, "Yes, we think that's fair. And so what? We don't care, anyway."