Members of the 2019 Welfare Expert Advisory Group have rejected National's claim their report backs up the party's harsher sanctions for some jobseekers.
Speaking to Checkpoint on Tuesday, National's Social Development spokesperson Louise Upston was defending National's proposed policy, saying it would make the system easier to understand.
The policy would put progressively stronger restrictions on beneficiaries who failed to meet jobseeking obligations, give increased support to community providers rather than the ministry, and provide a $1000 bonus to long-term beneficiaries who stay off the benefit for more than a year.
"If there's an issue, for example if they then move into orange, they will get additional support," Upston said.
Asked to provide evidence sanctions could help support beneficiaries into work, she referred to the WEAG's report: "One of their comments in their conclusion says they can be effective in encouraging movement from benefits to work".
The report itself does not appear to say this, however.
Asked later to point to this evidence, Upston referred to a 2018 summary of evidence prepared for the WEAG by the Ministry of Social Development, which said studies of "regimes less severe than New Zealand's show they can be effective".
Upston said the "evidence that sanctions work is that 60,000 fewer people were on a Jobseeker benefit at the end of the past National government's tenure.
"The lax application of sanctions under Labour has entrenched welfare dependency. Even though businesses have been crying out for staff for two years, welfare dependency has skyrocketed under Labour."
Former members of the group, which produced its final report in February 2019, told RNZ National's claims did not match up with the report's findings.
This included social policy researcher Charles Waldegrave, who said what Upston was referring to was a summary of evidence - and the support for sanctions was a small minority.
"What she's referring to was definitely a minority of the views that were put forward. By far the majority of research on sanctions has shown that it's counterproductive when you use it with low-income families."
He said National's policy, which proposed to keep benefit increases in line with CPI inflation - rather than whichever was higher between inflation or wage growth - would be "counterproductive".
"[Inflation] doesn't actually pick up all the costs of housing. And housing is a is a huge item for any New Zealanders at the moment - especially low income people."
Labour did not remove all sanctions, but it did remove some - and reduced the number handed out to beneficiaries.
Waldegrave said sanctions "humiliated" people on benefits, and often meant they could not get work.
"Especially if you have stand-down period, I mean, it basically means people go, and children go without income in that household.
"There's a lot of costs in actually getting a job and people need that opportunity, and most of the families that we see actually, really, really struggle - want to work and really struggle."
Another group member, Child Poverty Action Group's Innes Asher, said National's policy was "an awful thing to be doing, because it'll harm children".
She said Upston had taken a single line out of context, and most of the report disagreed with National's approach.
The WEAG report mentions sanctions dozens of times, saying:
- That the "empirical literature provides no single, overarching answer to whether obligations and sanctions in welfare systems bring about the desired forms of behavioural change" (page 41)
- There was "even less evidence that non-work-related obligations and associated sanctions achieve the stated aims of intended behavioural modification" (p41)
- The "application of obligations and sanctions in New Zealand (and elsewhere) is problematic" (p41)
- That it did "not support the continued use of a financial sanctioning regime" beyond 10 percent financial loss
- That there was "little evidence in support of using obligations and sanctions (as in the current system) to change behaviour; rather, there is research indicating that they compound social harm and disconnectedness"
- Sanctions over time had "contributed to the hardship faced by many in the welfare system".
"A high number of obligation failures are disputed (46 percent) and almost all (98 percent) of these disputes are upheld with the failure being overturned," the report said.
RNZ
