Kerre Woodham: A tough but fair change to the benefit

On the face of it, it seems tough. Telling young people to get out there and get a job when the economy is tanked and unemployment is high, is you'd think, unrealistic.

From November of next year, young people wanting to get job seeker support or the equivalent emergency benefit will have to take a parental income test to see whether their parents can support them instead of the taxpayer. 

About 4,300 18 and 19-year-olds were estimated to become ineligible for support, with 4,700 remaining eligible in the 27-28 financial year. As I said, this kicks in from November of next year, so from 2026. As of June, there were just over 15,000 18 and 19-year-olds on job seeker support. 

It's a lot of young kids. There is no doubt it is difficult right now for young people to find work, to be taken on as apprentices. When the economy contracts, young people tend to be the first laid off, having fewer skills and less work experience. Last on, first off kind of thing. As well, they can be in casual or part-time employment, jobs that are more easily dispensed with. 

But of course, look beyond the headlines. They're not being told to go out and find a job in a really tight labour market. They have to find a job, they have to be studying, or they have to be training. They have three options. What they can't be, according to this government and the Prime Minister, is reliant on the taxpayer. 

The bigger issue here is we're trying to reset expectations with young people that you just can't partially attend school and then just drift on into unemployment benefit. And it is a bit of a reset for under 25s to say, I'm sorry, you're expected to get connected with work or employment or training or education.  

$65,000, where do you why how do you land on that? 

It's basically the income cut-out point for the supported living payment. And so it basically says if you're coming from very low-income families, we're exempting you. But we know it's quite low, but the reality is it puts the pressure back on parents to say get those young people into work or education. 

That was Chrisopher Luxon, Prime Minister, talking to Mike Hosking this morning on the Mike Hosking Breakfast. 
A youth worker who was spoken to in relation to the story, to the announcement, said, and I quote, "I've never met a young person that doesn't want to find work." Really? You need to get out more.

I think the vast majority of young people do want to work. They want to study, they want to train to be able to work so that they can become self-determining, to stand on their own two feet. Not all of them. We have had young people say as much on this show. Nature boy, anyone? 
  
And you'd have to wonder about Barbecue Man, whether his children are fine upstanding productive citizens, because generally welfare dependency leads to welfare dependency and further down the generations it goes. 
There are fantastic stories of young people who were struggling, who got the kick up the bum they needed and managed to achieve beyond their wildest expectations. 

One of the owners of a New World supermarket started life as a trolley boy in Whakatāne when his mum said, "If you're not going to go to school, you are getting a job. You are not staying under my roof and not contributing." "Oh, I can't find an apprenticeship." Well, get any job, she said. And he started life as a trolley boy. And one thing led to another. He discovered not only did he actually like work, he was actually productive and respected by his peers, he was really good at it, to the extent that he ended up owning his own supermarket. 

And I could not agree more with Rod Bell, Chief Operating Officer for Blue Light, who spoke to Mike too this morning. 

The big danger is if a young person starts down the track where a benefit becomes part of their life, as the stat shows, that they end up probably at least a minimum of 18 years of their life on the benefit. 

That's amazing.  

Yeah, we want to break that. You break that once and you've actually paid then probably for 20 people. So financially it makes a huge sense, but for anybody, they want to have worth and worth is doing something positive and proactive, whether it's work or training or education is what will make people feel better about themselves and make a difference to the young people. 

Absolutely. And it's that stat that's really really hard to read that if you are a kid that goes straight onto a benefit out of school that you might have been attending haphazardly, you've got no habit of getting up and being somewhere presentable, ready to go, because you haven't been attending school. It's been a very haphazard, spotty, patchy attendance record. 

The number of people I've spoken to in the Far North who want to give young people jobs to the extent that they kit them out in the clothing they'll need for the job, they'll drive to their house, they will get them out of bed, get them into the shower them, get them into the van, take them into work, pay well above minimum wage, and the kids don't last a week. I haven't heard of one success story. This is only anecdotal, but not one success story in the Far North. It didn't used to be like this. 

If you come from a family where work is what's expected of you, then you work. I could no more have imagined going on the DPB than flying to the moon. 

When I found myself pregnant, I wasn't unable to work, I was just pregnant. When I had the baby, I worked. You know, it's tough and it's it's tough for two parents and it's tough for one parent, and not everybody can, but I worked because the idea of not working is completely alien to who I am and where I've come from. 

But for people who think that it's actually legitimately okay to leave school or sort of drift away from school, I don't think it's anything quite so dramatic as leaving school, and not do anything, not study, not train, not volunteer, not work, that's come from somewhere. 

And you have to take a long hard look in the mirror if you've got kids that think they can go onto a DPB or onto a benefit and that's the level of their aspiration. 

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