The expectation that if you're getting a jobseekers' benefit you should be looking for work is perfectly reasonable - until you step into the chaotic lives of some beneficiaries
Social Development Minister Louise Upston. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
To middle New Zealand, or someone who's never been stuck on a benefit before, it may seem fair enough that people who survive on taxpayer-funded cash should at least be making an effort to look for work.
And if they don't do that, surely it's not unreasonable to apply sanctions to them?
That's only fair to the hard working New Zealanders who are helping them out.
These were the words being pounded out by Prime Minister Chris Luxon - "right and fair"; "we're not asking much"; "not difficult obligations"; "responsibility to do the minimum" - as he announced the government's new benefit sanction regime. The traffic light system of punishments for transgressions is already in place; there are other measures which will come into effect next year.
"It's not rocket science," Luxon told Morning Report.
But it is social science, and experts in this field who've spent their lifetimes working with beneficiaries say there's no evidence that the new regime will work.
Journalist and inequality and poverty researcher Max Rashbrooke has spent a large part of the last decade interviewing people living in poverty about their situations.
"I think there's a big problem that this government has come to power making a big play of the idea that its policies are going to be much more evidence-based than the previous government's were, and it's spent a lot of time touting social investment, which is supposedly at least going to be an evidence-based approach whereby only the things that work are funded and the things that don't work are de-funded.
"And the problem here is that there's not a huge amount of evidence, to put it mildly, to support the idea that a much more punitive approach to the benefit system actually works."
Rashbrooke says poverty and welfare are both very complex issues, and people who are receiving benefits are a complex population.
He says it's typical of National governments that a benefit crackdown will happen once it gets into power - "the classic suite of policy options", as Rashbrooke calls them.
Paula Bennett did much the same in 2010; Jenny Shipley did it in the late 1990s.
"The approach is to essentially imply that a lot of beneficiaries are lazy and need a kick up the backside, so it's important to have more sanctions for them. I guess what's a little different this time is there's a greater focus on, rather than just cutting people's benefits, sanctions like maintaining the level of people's benefit but removing their power to manage it. So, having MSD manage their money on their behalf, or forcing them to do community service."
Rashbrooke says there's room for a range of views here.
"There's never any one story that's absolutely true," he says. "If you want to believe that being punitive, that being tough on beneficiaries works, you can always probably find some examples of people who are abusing the system. And you can probably find a small number of examples where getting tough on people has worked. So there can be a very limited evidence basis for a National Party that wants to do this kind of thing.
"But I think also living at quite a fundamental distance from the lives of a lot of beneficiaries means that a lot of people in the National Party just don't understand what is going on in that end of the spectrum.
"There was a survey done about 10 years ago that suggested the majority of National supporters don't know anybody who lives on a benefit... so it becomes very easy to imagine that everyone on a benefit is lazy and exploiting the system.
"And I think that's true even though someone like Louise Upston, who's the minister in charge (of Social Development) here, has previously been on a benefit herself... the same was true of Paula Bennett... even then that seems to lead to a desire, as Louise Upston has put it, to make sure that no one is on a benefit if she can possibly help it."
Rashbrooke also says that research commissioned by the last Labour government found that people who were forced off benefits during the 2013 - 2014 reforms often went to low paid, low quality, temporary or casual jobs - and 18 months later only about half of them were still off the benefit.
He says making things harder for people at WINZ is also one of the ways that benefit numbers typically come down - people disconnecting from the system, or the introduction of hoops that make it harder to get into the system in the first place.
"What I don't think the government recognises sufficiently is there may be a lot of actually quite reasonable reasons why people who are on benefits wouldn't be able to do something superficially simple like turn up to a job interview. And I don't think that taking a punitive approach to that actually resolves any of the real problems that are going on in those people's lives."
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