Hanna Wilberg, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
People on benefits are borrowing from the government to pay for essentials like power bills and car repairs. But repayments leave them with even less than before.
Welfare advocates in this country can now forcefully critique any government program that trades on stigma or vulnerability and ignores real-life suffering.
Beware those who offer ‘cultural’ fixes and non-binding reassurances. The government shouldn’t fall back on the very institutions that never fully acted until a royal commission.
People who have experienced domestic violence can have trouble finding and keeping jobs because of physical injuries and their abusers’ efforts to sabotage their employment.
Robodebt should never again be framed as a technological glitch or a legal oversight. It was the active and direct exploitation of people’s vulnerability.
ParentsNext requires the parents of very young children to perform monitored activities in return for Centrelink payments. Eve Vincent talks to single mothers about ‘the indignity of investigation’.
COVID-19 infection and death rates in former Eastern Bloc countries suggest the fall of communism was detrimental to the health and well-being of eastern Europeans.
It was vintage Morrison, as he gave evidence on a scandal that involved appalling treatment of people wrongfully pursued in the name of the “integrity” of the welfare system
As a woman living on the disability support pension put it: ‘You don’t have the flexibility that a rich person has to respond to crisis, so you have to beg for help. And you know you’ll be judged’.