There’s an old, apocryphal story about an international visitor touring infrastructure projects in Maoist China. Watching thousands of peasant labourers sweating to dig a dam with pickaxes and baskets, the puzzled visitors asks his CCP guide why they don’t just get a few bulldozers. “Because then we wouldn’t have full employment!”
But it’s not just communist regimes which resort to such subterfuge. New Zealand’s own socialist regime is proving just as handy at using bureaucratic prestidigitation to hide unflattering data. For once, the normally somnolent New Zealand mainstream media are actually noticing.
Minister of Social Development Carmel Sepuloni is strutting about, pointing to a significant quarterly drop in main benefit recipients, for the December quarter. Still, she’s not entirely wrong that the government’s work “is reflected in these figures”.
It’s just that her chest-beating is like saying you’ve quit smoking because you only had three packets yesterday, when you normally have four.
The quarterly fall is a drop in the bucket of the surge in benefit dependency under Labour’s watch over the past four years.
Currently, 368,172 Kiwis are the recipient of a main benefit, 11.7 per cent of the working-age population, whether it be Jobseeker Support, Sole Parent Support or Supported Living.
When Labour took office, there were 289,788 on a main benefit, or 9.7 per cent of the working-age population.
The further you drill into the data, the worse it gets. Pare away the single parents, pensioners and disabled, and you’re left with an unambiguous picture of unemployment benefits in New Zealand.
The bulk of today’s beneficiaries are on Jobseeker Support, which has rocketed from 123,042 four years ago, to 187,989 today. That’s a 53 per cent increase. As a proportion of the working-age population, it has leapt from 4.1 per cent to 6.0 per cent.
Even further fudging the truth are the extremely self-serving definitions of “unemployed”. Not even looking for a job at all? Congratulations! You’re not unemployed! Working just one hour a week? You’re not unemployed, either!
It’s an abject nonsense. And it explains why our “official” unemployment rate of 3.4 per cent bears no correlation to the billowing number of New Zealanders parked up on Jobseeker Support and dependent on the state, at 6.0 per cent […]
The number of recipients of Jobseeker Support who had drawn that benefit for over 12 months totalled 69,087 four years ago. That’s since rocketed by 69 per cent to 116,634.
All of this is a foreseeable consequence of stupid government policies. Not that New Zealand’s unique, there. When governments on both sides of the Tasman panicked in the face of covid and effectively told people to stay home and get paid for it, what did they think would happen?
More than 200,000 Australians who took up welfare in the first round of Covid-19 lockdowns nearly two years ago remain reliant on state support.
Yet on both sides of the Tasman, virtually every industry and sector is reeling from labour shortages and unfilled positions. Last week, Stuff reported on the dire shortfall Canterbury employers face in ready, willing and available labour across so many sectors, high-skilled and low-skilled.
Stuff
Ronald Reagan was right.