The Post: The election’s great beneficiary-vanishing act

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Like a strange and awful conjuring trick, this year’s election has made disappear over 350,000 people: the New Zealanders whose incomes rely largely on benefits.

Political contests are almost always won and lost on the centre ground, but never more so than in 2023. Everything in the Chris and Christopher show is aimed at the “squeezed middle”, the working families whose grocery and petrol bills dominate all debate.

But here’s an irony: no-one is squeezed more by the cost-of-living crisis than the very poor. Work published last year by Statistics New Zealand showed that, over the last decade or so, inflation had risen around 25% for average households but 35% for poor ones.

Yet who is campaigning to advance the latter’s interests?

Labour, admittedly, can claim stored-up credit, having poured $16.5 billion extra into welfare and raised the unemployment benefit from $215 to $340 a week. This makes a marked difference: the number of children in households where food runs short, for instance, has fallen from 20% in 2019 to 13% today.

Labour’s approach is a compassionate one. No-one sensible wants people to remain on benefits longer than necessary, but while they’re there – caring for kids, coping with illness, looking for paid work – they should enjoy lives of dignity.

Most remarkably, Labour’s reforms have happened without anyone protesting much, or indeed really noticing. The ugly beneficiary-bashing of the Paula Bennett years has melted away.

The secret of Labour’s strategy has been to lift benefits bit by bit – a rare triumph for its largely inept “radical incrementalism”.

But victory-by-stealth is a flawed strategy: it leaves even a party’s keenest supporters in the dark, dispirited and unable to rally the troops.

And reform remains unfinished. Official calculations show many beneficiaries are still somewhere between $36 and $136 a week short of being able to meet basic costs, let alone participate fully in society.

Only the Greens have a plan to fix this. Their guaranteed minimum income, funded by a wealth tax, would ensure every beneficiary had a base income of $385 a week ($770 for a couple), plus $355 a week in a child’s first few years. Beneficiaries would also get more support to (re)join the paid workforce.

Good luck, though, to anyone trying to get such a plan past a Labour Party that should really rename itself the Sensible Centristing Trust, such is its dedication to swing voters.

Its election campaign largely ignores beneficiaries, or offers them little. The signature pledge of taking GST off fruit and vegetables may not even make those items cheaper, official advice suggests.

Another key Labour promise is to increase the in-work tax credit – a payment from which beneficiary families are specifically barred. National would match that increase, equally keen to surgically remove the “undeserving” poor from the state’s renewed largesse.

National’s clampdown on beneficiaries would go further still. One of Labour’s big moves was to link benefit increases to wage rises not inflation, since the former greatly outpace the latter long-term.

National would reverse that decision, leaving people on – for instance – the disability benefit $19 a week worse off in 2026 than they’d be on the current trajectory. And in a move both baffling and unkind, Christopher Luxon would eliminate half-price public transport for beneficiaries.

Worse still is ACT, which would remove benefits from people struggling with drug addiction if they didn’t turn up for counselling sessions. National would likewise use more sanctions, alongside tailored support and “job coaches” for the under-25s.

All this is based on a flawed model of how beneficiaries live. They are not, by and large, lazy and incapable. In my experience most are, metaphorically, battling up a steep slope with a backpack full of rocks, weighed down by addictions, poor physical and mental health, low self-esteem and a lack of qualifications.

Chaos is brought to their lives by exploitative employers, discrimination and bad housing: some move constantly in search of adequate accommodation. They have few reserves to draw on when disaster strikes. So if they don’t turn up for a doctor’s appointment or a job interview, it’s not – generally speaking – from lack of motivation but because of a sudden life shock.

No surprise, then, that the evidence is clear: sanctions don’t work. Multiple British studies have shown they don’t get people into paid employment more quickly. If anything, they slow down that process.

Adding chaos to already chaotic lives, sanctions force people to suddenly cope with even less income than usual, and to focus on meeting often-arbitrary government targets rather than their own stability and wellbeing, both prerequisites for employment.

Sanctions, in short, increase the misery of their recipients – and in turn their children, a form of collateral damage that leaves conservatives seemingly unmoved.

Beneficiaries have largely been forgotten in this election. But if National and ACT win, they may wish they’d been even more forgotten.