Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill
Mr Speaker, you can tell its election year, because everybody’s jumping on the law and order bandwagon, condemning the rise in crime and attacking the criminal justice system, and we have been witness to a number of highly charged political reactions to the shocking rate of homicides in 2008, including a whole toolbox of answers – from boot camps, to lowering the age of criminal responsibility, to keeping kids in school till they’re 18, to locking up the parents.
New Zealand’s youngest killer has once again been pushed into the media spotlight, because of his impending parole in September, after seven years incarceration in various youth institutions.
The victim’s mother has spoken out, and Victim Support says that the key focus for election year must be strengthening the rights of victims in the criminal justice system.
It would appear that everyone is targeting criminal justice as an issue to grab headlines and votes, and so it is that we come to this Social Assistance (Debt Prevention and Minimisation) Amendment Bill, which is using prisoners to trial a range of increased surveillance and monitoring strategies.
Why Prisoners?
Because they’re a captive audience, and because most people don’t like them anyway. And yet the truth is that the overall crime rate is actually dropping.
Last year there were 102 recorded offences for every 1000 people compared to 128 in 1997, but if you listened to all the doomsayers, you’d think Aotearoa was the most crime-infested den of dishonesty in the western world.
Mind you, the fraud statistics are nothing to shout about.
In 2005 there were nearly 20,000 cases of fraud brought before the courts, 12,000 cases of white collar fraud, and only 8,000 cases of benefit fraud, but this Bill is targeting benefit fraud, because beneficiaries are easier to dump on, and because within that group, prisoners are quite literally a captive audience.
The purpose of this Bill is to stop pay-outs to beneficiaries who go to jail, by hooking them into the big brother computer system that is matching information between Corrections, Customs, ACC and the Ministry of Social Development, and suspending any benefits, allowances and student loans immediately, if a data match is identified.
Well that all sounds OK, but it’s people we’re talking about here – brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, whanau members, in many cases the sole bread-winner of the family, and it’s whole families that are affected by snooping bills like this.
MSD confirms cases where the families of prisoners are hugely affected by a shock interruption to benefit payments. MSD says that the fault lies with families for not contacting them immediately; blaming the poor dumb victims again, typical behaviour from a government that doesn’t care about the poor.
As if WINZ never causes hardship themselves. The only difference being of course, that if you complain about WINZ, you get trespassed off the premises, they ignore your complaint, and you don’t get your money anyway.
A study released earlier this year, Improving Work-Life Balance for Domestic Purposes Beneficiary Sole Parent Families included a number of comments which confirm what we hear from people about the hassles they get at WINZ.
Like Amelia who said, “The way I have been treated at Work and Income is just shocking. They look down on you” or Beatrice who said: “It’s just the way they treat the person. They look down at you as…like a bludger. It makes you feel uncomfortable”, or Marie who said: “I actually feel sick in my stomach every time I have to walk in their door. Some of them make you feel unworthy”, and even a comment from the principal of our local Kura who told me that she went to WINZ to get an employee and felt so intimidated and shamed by the whole process, that she would never go back again.
Mr Speaker, this is a government department we are talking about here, an agency of the Crown who are supposed to be providing fair and just treatment to the beneficiaries that come through their doors, but aren’t, and we have a right to expect far better service, than the experiences I have relayed to this House.
Another issue identified by the Select Committee themselves is that income support may be improperly suspended as a result of data matching, without the families being notified, because of the policy that notification of benefit suspension will now happen AFTER the suspension has been enacted, and not BEFORE as happens at the moment.
That problem is already happening, and will simply get worse under this Bill.
We express our concern about upholding the human rights of all citizens of this great land, including those in jail, and we do not support the notion of targeting prisoners for increased surveillance simply because they are prisoners.
Being locked up is the punishment, and punishing them a second time by depriving them of their human rights is unacceptable in an open society.
We are also concerned about prisoners being deprived of the opportunity to study, given that student loans and student allowances are included in the Bill.
We accept that information sharing can reduce bureaucracy, and may help people from being saddled with debt while in jail, but inmates and their families should not be left in a worse position simply because of poor communication, and we support the call of the Select Committee that all efforts should be made to ensure that the potential hardship for family members is minimised, and that families are not saddled with debt when their family members get out of jail.
Mr Speaker, the Maori Party will support this Bill, but we point out again the invasive nature of data matching and the focus on the poor, when in actual fact the most significant fraud continues outside of prison walls.