John Pagani
Interesting that Act's agreement with National includes this:
The implementation in this parliamentary term of the Welfare Working Group recommendations 27: Parenting obligations, 28: Support for at-risk families, 30: Income management and budgeting support, and 34: Employment services.
Here's the welfare working group report. [pdf]
The sections National has agreed to are not especially obnoxious. The sections are mainly about intervention to have someone else manage household budgets or use a payment card when childrens' needs are not being met.
This isn't entitlement reform. It isn't slashing benefits. In order to disagree with them you have to construct an argument about entitlement to a living wage, and somehow also say that parents should be paid by the state to parent even when they're not doing their job as parent. The consequence of failure is more help rather than punishment.
The first Labour government made the welfare system universal precisely to get away from the tangled mess of welfare linked to good behaviour. Women in those days couldn't get benefits if they were seen at the pub or hooked up with men outside of marriage. There are plenty of people who would happily go back to that contingency as a test for welfare - I'm not one of them. But some measure of reciprocal responsibilities are harder to argue against.
It's interesting that National has allowed them to be branded as Act gains, which will provoke an automatic assumption that the gains are hopelessly right wing. But they will be highly popular if the public research into voter attitudes to welfare holds.
