Today National announced another centrepiece of its election campaign: welfare "reform", shoving people between different benefits in an effort to force them, by pure bureaucratic unpleasantness, into work. Which probably sounds fine to the analysts in Treasury who see it simply as a matter of "incentives". Meanwhile, out here in the real world, there's an obvious question we should ask in response: where are the jobs?
Currently, we're in a recession. We have 154,000 unemployed, and thousands are queuing for a handful of jobs every time a new supermarket opens. This suggests that we have a mismatch between supply and demand for workers. And National's response is to try and increase supply even further? That seems to be getting things exactly arse-backwards.
If National wants to get people off benefits, then it needs to actively create jobs. If its just going to leave that to the market, in the mistaken belief that it will solve the problem naturally, then it needs to accept that logic for benefit numbers as well. Quite apart from questions of consistency, punishing people for being on benefits when there are no jobs to go to is simply a pointless exercise in sadism. But then, its so very, very National, isn't it?
