Toxic culture at Winz must go: Beneficiaries

Watch the video at nzherald.co.nz Beneficiaries are urging an end to a “toxic” Winz culture and raising benefits hundreds of dollars a week.

Advocacy group Auckland Action Against Poverty has produced a video giving beneficiaries a voice on issues which have been largely ignored by both major political parties in the election campaign so far.

The beneficiaries say Winz is “coercing” them into precarious jobs which don’t allow them to look after their children, nor pay high-enough wages to lift them out of poverty.

One man on the video says a man in a wheelchair was sent to work unassisted in a booth in a mall and found it difficult to get out to change his colostomy bag, as required every two or three hours: “He was under such stress that he died . . . because he was forced to go to work.”

Benefit rates for families with children were raised by $25 a week last year, the first increase in basic benefits above inflation adjustments since the unemployment benefit was cut by $14 a week and sickness benefits were cut by $27 a week in 1991.

But average rents have risen even more. An unemployed family of two adults and two children under age 13 receiving the maximum accommodation supplement in Manukau gets a net $701.51 a week including family tax credits, but the average Manukau rent in July was $470, leaving $222.51 a week to live on.

A mother of four told the advocates: “You are only guaranteed work if you are available 24/7, own transport and even then it changes weekly . . . It’s very frustrating living at the whim of these [temping] agencies. You can’t arrange kids and daycares or sitters at the last minute.”

Beneficiaries on the video describe the attitude at Winz towards them as “toxic”, “very cold” and “humiliating”.

“You are made to feel like scum,” a solo parent said.

Auckland Action Against Poverty co-ordinator Vanessa Cole said benefits would need to go up by “hundreds of dollars” to offer a decent life. The agency is campaigning in particular to end the penalty on sole parents who can’t or won’t name the other parents of their children. Labour, the Greens, NZ First and the Maori Party have agreed to abolish it.

But Cole said only the Greens had “come out in solidarity with beneficiaries”. Former Green co-leader Metiria Turei promised in July to lift core benefits by 20 per cent and scrap all sanctions, including the rule that cuts off benefits when a sole parent enters a new relationship.

National has promised increases in family tax credits and accommodation allowances that would lift the net income of the unemployed Manukau couple with two young children by $91 a week to $792.57 from April.

Labour would raise family tax credits by an additional $11 a week for the first child and pay beneficiary families an annual $700 subsidy (averaging $13.45 a week) for power bills, raising the Manukau family’s income to $817.09 a week.