From Whaleoil

Metiria Turei has admitted to large-scale benefit fraud while she was on the DPB.

Stacey Kirk discusses Turei admission of fraud:

That’s a risky admission from self-confirmed benefit fraudster Metiria Turei.

She’s revealed that while she was a solo mother on the DPB, studying law and looking after a baby, she was also lying to her WINZ case worker about how many people she was flatting with, and so, what her accommodation costs actually were.

Turei says she has no idea how much she could be liable for, and whether or not the Ministry of Social Development could still launch an investigation, more than 20 years later.

The Greens co-leader’s story is one of determination and hard work, however. It would be a mean-spirited person who accused her of intentionally set out to rip off taxpayers.

That makes me mean-spirited.

And now she, with the backing of her party, is seeking to pay it forward with a policy that would raise all core benefit payments by 20 per cent, and remove all obligations on a person or parent to receive it.

That’s not paying it forward, that is extending the rip off that she conducted to many more people.

That’s where the controversy will lie, because there’s a major section of society who would think, actually, she should be paying it back.

She should, with interest.

Turei said she believes benefit dependency doesn’t exist, and very few set out to defraud the system – their circumstances, constructed by the state, give them little option.

So why reveal this now after 15 years of being in Parliament?

Why indeed? Does she think she was and still is above the law?

It’s also likely that the Greens have seen the success of the campaign for medicinal cannabis from late union stalwart Helen Kelly, who also vocally admitted her criminal culpability by openly smoking marijuana in the late stages of an aggressive form of cancer.

She received little but sympathy for her plight, and if Turei can be held as an example of a beneficiary who broke the law to make life better for her child, it could help shut down inevitable criticisms that others will intentionally seek to rip off a system that carries virtually no consequences.

There should be consequences. There is now prima facie evidence of fraud committed by Metiria Turei.

As far as the party is concerned, this speaks to their core base. Where the Greens have tried for years to downplay their most left of leanings, play up their economic credentials, some core Greenies may have been getting concerned at just what the modern Green caucus was prepared to give up to get into Government.

The danger, however, will be whether this does work to scare some Labour voters – cautious of an alliance that could alienate most of middle New Zealand.

It will most certainly alienate middle New Zealand. They really dislike bludgers and especially bludgers who thumb their noses at the law.

In Turei’s startling admission and vow, to significantly bolster the role of the welfare state, she’s counting on New Zealanders to not only voice concern over inequality, but to collectively do something about it that may go against the nature of their very core.

She’s effectively drawing an ideological line in the sand and asking New Zealanders: “Which side are you on?”

The taxpayers’ side.

But here is the twist that she hasn’t thought about. She has called for Todd Barclay to be prosecuted for his indiscretions based on forced statements to the media. She called on John Banks to be prosecuted for his donations scandal.

So, using her logic she should now be prosecuted for her admitted benefit fraud. If one is going to point the finger at others and make calls for prosecution, then one must accept the same in return.

As it stands now she is a self-confessed benefit fraudster; that carries penalties. She should be at the very least paying back the taxpayer for those defrauded monies…plus interest.

From Whaleoil Blog

Self confessed benefit fraudster Metiria Turei, in a brazen case of self-interest has declared that she believes that benefit sanctions should be lifted.

Talk about self-preservation.

Benefit sanctions will be lifted, the poorest taxed less and the richest more, while a Green Party in Government would also seek to raise all benefits by 20 per cent.

In a bold new policy launch, Greens co-leader Metiria Turei has also revealed she lied to her case workers when she was a solo mum, studying a law degree, while collecting the Domestic Purposes Benefit.

Speaking to a fervent core base of party faithful, Turei told the conference of her parents’ struggle to find work and her own battle as a mum on the DPB, lying to the state about how many people were living in her house.

Her experiences have shaped the party’s welfare policy, dubbed “mending the safety net”, which will likely prove controversial and draw an ideological line in the sand over the presence of the welfare state.

Mending the safety net? More like building a hammock so bludgers can choose work or welfare.

The $1.4 billion policy would provide a suite of major changes that would effectively dismantle the Government’s welfare reforms introduced in 2012, that placed obligations for beneficiaries to prove they were looking for work, not taking drugs, and showing up for appointments and courses.

The Greens policy would lift nearly all penalties and obligations for beneficiaries, raise the amount they were receiving and keep the tap running for as long as they needed.

“Our plan will lift people out of poverty, and guarantee a basic liveable income for anyone working or on a benefit,” Turei said.

“We believe that poverty should never be used as a weapon, especially when children are involved.

“Our plan to mend the safety net will ensure that all families in New Zealand can afford to put food on the table, keep a roof over their head and pay their power bill.”

Yup a nice comfy hammock and a trampoline instead of a safety net.

The Greens would change the Working for Families “in-work tax credit” to a Children’s Payment that goes to all families who currently qualified for it. The current qualification thresholds would not be changed.

The poorest families could receive up to $72 a week extra as a result, on top of changes to tax thresholds and the minimum wage.

Those changes would include reducing the bottom tax rate from 10.5 per cent to 9 per cent for anyone earning less than $14,000, while anyone earning more than $150,000 per year will have their tax rate hiked from 33 per cent to 40 per cent – expected to generate about $605m in revenue.

More for bludgers, and higher taxes for the productive classes to pay for the bludgers. Vote Labour, get the Greens and higher taxes.

It won’t generate that level of taxation though, those people will seek to minimise their taxes as they are entitled to do under the law.

Talk about a venal, self protection policy from Turei.

I guess bludgers will always be bludgers.

From Whaleoil site

With an attitude common to Left-wingers everywhere a woman supported a huge pay increase for rest home caregivers but is very unhappy that she now has to pay more for her mother’s rest home care. She says that it is not fair that she should have to pay more. It is the same old story. People want more refugees, free university education, free medicine, free this and free that but they want other people to pay for it. They are very generous with other people’s money but think that it is unfair when it comes out of their pockets.

The impact of the pay equity settlement is massive and ongoing. The government claimed that they would be funding the difference but they are not funding it all so the cost of providing the difference is coming out of rest home owner’s pockets. Even worse they now are faced with having to increase their Nurses wages as the pay equity settlement means that caregivers are now earning almost as much as a nurse. The nurses aren’t happy so Rest homeowners are having to raise their hourly rate significantly in order to keep them. There will be no assistance from the government for that extra cost.

Overnight the cost of providing the service has skyrocketed and even worse it will apply to all holiday pay and leave that hadn’t been taken before the settlement came into force. This is a huge financial hit to the Rest home industry and it will put the smaller operators out of business.

Some rest home residents in Nelson are being hit in the pocket as the impact of the pay equity settlement for aged care workers takes effect.

The daughter of one woman in a Nelson rest home said the additional cost was a financial burden for those who were already struggling to meet the high cost of care.

From July, about 55,000 workers in aged residential care received pay increases from around $16 an hour to between $19 and $23.50, in what has been hailed as a victory for low income workers in the sector.

Her mother had entered rest home care after suffering a stroke last year. The woman said the care her mother received had been “fabulous” but it came at a cost.=

“As a person in this community I supported that increase, I thought the health care workers were due it.”

However she said it was unfair that cost had been passed on to some residents after the Government announced its $22 billion settlement.

The change meant her mother’s current monthly fee had increased by almost $400, from $4350.50 to $4744.70, which she said was an “enormous cost”.

As her mother is considered asset rich by the Government’s standards, she has to pay the full monthly cost for her care.

But the woman’s pension and the rent from the home she owned only covered half the costs so her family had to come up with the rest.

Her mother is one of the 11,070 rest home residents around the country who have assets worth more than $224,654 that will now contribute more than $42 million a year to the pay packets of aged care workers.

…”As rest homes, we are the meat in the sandwich, we don’t have any other option but to pass that cost on, we can’t absorb $90 a week for all the private paying residents and there are about 11,000 of them across the country.”

He said the association advised the Government there would be an impact on the private payers, and were told that those people could afford to pay, so they could afford to pay the increase.

He said for a number of aged care providers, the funding from the Government was not going to fully cover the increase in caregiver wages.

“Those most affected are smaller rest homes, those rest homes in rural areas and those that are run by faith-based organisations.”

He said the association was not against aged care workers being paid more and had supported the unions but the industry relied on Government funding and as the wage bill was up to 70 per cent of its costs, it needed to be adequately funded.

Wallace said it was implausible for the industry to absorb the increase in costs, while there were some big operators in the industry, the majority were smaller providers…

All the land claims must have been settled. That would explain why the Treaty of Waitangi gravy train is now being used to solve social ills….like the effects of alcohol on Maori:

A claim before the Waitangi Tribunal is calling on the Government to raise the price of alcohol in an effort to curb the impact of drinking on the health of Maori.

In his claim, Maori warden David Ratu said the Government had breached the Treaty of Waitangi by not implementing recommendations laid out by the Law Commission in 2010, which included increasing the price of alcohol, raising the drinking age to 20 and restricting alcohol advertising and sponsorship.

Ratu also objected to the Government failing to ensure the Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act was consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi.

Ratu, who works in south Auckland for the Turehou Maori Wardens ki Otara Charitable Trust, said he believed the sale, supply, and consumption of alcohol in New Zealand was actively driving health inequalities between Maori and non-Maori.

His Treaty claim is part one of the 140 claims that make up the Wai 2575 Health Services and Outcomes Kaupapa Inquiry.

He argues that Maori have poor health as a result of the sale, supply and consumption of alcohol.

The claim is currently before the Tribunal, which will examine breaches of the Treaty in health services and outcomes for Maori.

“Every piece of legislation out there has a treaty clause in it, except alcohol; except the one that has the biggest impact on and does the most damage to my people. That is simply not good enough,” Ratu said.

Alcohol-related issues affecting Maori would continue unless the Law Commission’s recommendations were adopted, he added.

This is easy to solve and in much the same way as John Howard attempted to solve the problem of Aboriginals and alcohol.

Simply put, if some one is a card-carrying Maori, a member of an iwi, or urban Maori group then alcohol can’t be sold to them. We may have to establish some sort of national identity card but basically anyone identifying as Maori should be forbidden from buying alcohol, if only to protect them from the white man’s firewater, but also from the wider health benefits associated with abstinence from alcohol.

The easiest way to curb the impact of drinking on the health of Maori is make it illegal for them to drink alcohol. Taxes will just make their affliction worse, so best it is removed completely from their grasp.

Problem solved, and I dare say it will solve al lot of the domestic violence and child bashing issues in Maori “families” as well. A win win situation.

Following the 1929 share-market crash an American observer recorded the outbreak of the word “fundamental”, by diverse authorities from the President down. The general assertion was there was no need for alarm and the market would soon be restored because, fundamentally…readers can fill in the variety of situations this word, in the event, was wrongly applied to.

Its usage emerged here with our mid 1970s Labour Party. No Labour politician then seemed capable of uttering a sentence without including it, usually before that other bogus assertion of human rights. Thus we were regaled constantly, how it was a fundamental human right, to have housing, jobs, breakfast in bed and free this, that and anything else the speaker could dream up. Not so however with the 1984 Labour government which abandoned such cornucopian absurdities and instead, to our enormous benefit, dealt in hard facts and reality.

Using ‘fundamental’ is a dishonest verbal device to imply something is so obvious as to need no explanation, which is why it only appears when there’s not a shred of actual evidence to back an assertion. Sadly its utterly bogus head rose a week ago, this time from Napier lawyer Alan Cressey.

Mr Cressey is acting for some layabout bludgers and seeks a court review of the city’s by-law against begging which he asserted, “is the most fundamental breach of freedom of expression possible.”

That goes without saying, is world-class cock, thus the wearying reappearance of “fundamental.” This nonsense was predictably backed by an academic which certainly won’t wash. I’ll wager I can find academics to back the possibility that one and one are three, that Shakespeare was probably a woman and Mother Teresa an axe-murderer.

Freedom of expression is, (the proverbial shouting fire in a theatre type exceptions) a critical element of western democracies. It applies to pro-active dissent, not the eye-sore inertia of bums despoiling our cities, lying about with begging signs.

To date this year to my knowledge, backed by the police in Henderson, Auckland, Hamilton, Napier, Palmerston North, Porirua, and Christchurch, the public have complained bitterly about these mainly Maori males around 30 years old, sprawled about our streets begging via signs. Numerous incidents have been reported of their threatening folk using ATMs. None have the gall to assert on their cardboard ‘fundamental expressions of speech’, that they’re hungry, given their common characteristic of obesity.

That said, all praise to the Napier city councillors who, rather than wringing their hands and mouthing platitudes, as with Wellington’s Council, have declared war on these parasites. And credit to the Napier police and also the judge who threw one of these no-goods in prison for a month for fraud, his sign falsely claiming he was homeless. Napier’s assertive approach is why Mr Cressey has popped up, this in a region annually importing vast numbers of islanders for market garden and orchard work.

The day following reportage of Mr Cressey’s nonsense the Dominion Post wrote the most gullible editorial I’ve ever read re this begging outbreak, and I say that as someone on record of admiration for the consistent quality of our newspaper editorials. It covered all of the issues fairly then spoiled it by asserting critics of this disgrace, despite their own (and the Herald’s) reader polls showing overwhelming support for making begging illegal, were “misguided and motivated by cosmetic considerations.”

The editorial rattled on about homelessness, therein forgetting its own report last year of the City Missioner advising in respect of beggars that this is rubbish; about mental health issues and such-like. In fact all of these concerns, apart from already being addressed by the state and many charities, are in most cases exaggerated and instead of writing from his or her lofty tower, the editorial’s author should talk to those at the coal-face, namely the police, about the true nature of these bludgers and in particular, that many are actually organised into shifts.

What specially irked me was the pejorative use of the word “cosmetic” for that is precisely the issue. In recent years, for a number of economic and social reasons, cities world-wide have gone overboard in their efforts to present themselves attractively for their citizens. These fat spongers now littering our streets completely negate those endeavours. If they want to degrade themselves, then that’s their business but they make it all of ours by doing this publicly.

A number of European countries, responding to public demand, have now made begging illegal, as it once was here. It’s long overdue to restore illegality, thereby removing the difficult burden from Councils. Judging by how many senior police have urged the public not to give money and also the true nature of these layabouts, they will, once legally empowered, eagerly put an end to this disgrace.

Evidently National will not act so not long ago I suggested this as a policy plank to a senior Labour MP. “Oh we can’t do that,” he said but couldn’t tell me why. I know why of course, namely fear of the fuss from the wet-behind-the-ears element Labour attracts. But as a party of purported concern for the underdog, the best way to help beggars is to ban them. It’s analogous to bans on smoking in public places and punitive taxes on smokers, all for their own good. Labour purports to be a caring for the underdog movement which is an excellent reason to support a ban, unless that is they consider begging a reasonable career choice.

Given the Party’s vote erosion to Winston, my Labour friend may well rue this hesitancy. On current polling NZ First is in line for a dozen plus seats and I have not the slightest doubt, given the public outrage, that that figure would rise at least 50% should Winston promise a ban. He’d certainly get my vote. Furthermore, should he, or more likely Shane Jones, a no-nonsense, non-handwringing realist do that, such is the depth of feeling, any young non-list Labour candidate who piped up in opposition would bear the brunt at the ballot-box.