It is becoming increasingly apparent that there are growing prejudices in our country targeted at those who receive a government benefit. Note, we’re not talking about subsidies in the agricultural industry, bail-outs for investors who took risks in finance companies that have failed or high income earners who shift their capital around in order to access government benefits – somehow they are exempted from the seething anger aimed at beneficiaries. The targets for the prejudices are those who access the unemployment, invalids and domestic purposes benefits. In many people’s eyes these are a different breed of receiver of government money than the others.

The prejudiced stereotypes paint such people as worthless bludgers – lazy people who do not want to work and are simply sucking on the teat of the state while the average, hard working tax payer funds their lazy lives and resents doing so. These people are seen as not wanting to work, having babies to access government money and wasting money on alcohol and cigarettes while watching Sky TV all day. Sadly people also often associate these images with those of Maori or Polynesian ethnicity. It’s believed they’re a huge burden on our economy that we simply cannot afford and that we need to cut their cord to the state. With that in mind, there are politicians who make political hay on the back of those prejudices, subtly feeding those stereotypes in the public conscious in order to pursue ideological reforms in the area of social welfare while forgetting how the taxpayer helped fund their way into their current positions through things like extremely cheap, highly subsidised university education, benefits while doing so and other avenues of funding.

The ill informed prejudices also target the Labour Party in New Zealand as the political party that most enables this ‘bludging’ and entrenching of the welfare system, making people dependent on the state. This particular inaccuracy is easily debunked by tracking the actual figures relating to those specific benefits over the last few decades – the reality may surprise some people. That said, there are benefit allocations such as Working for Families that are debatable, but this is not what the prejudices target.

I want to come straight out of the blocks to say that I am a white, middle class kiwi male who supports social welfare. I support access to the unemployment, invalids and domestic purposes benefits and I would have no problem with our country pumping more money into those areas to better sustain people who receive them. Do I think there are people ‘gaming the system’? Yes – I would be a fool to think there aren’t – but I don’t think they are the majority at all. I also believe there are people in every other income bracket ‘gaming the system’ for all they can get. I believe that beneficiaries at the bottom end of the income bracket are simply easier targets for the ill informed than those sucking off the teat of the state at the upper end of the income spectrum. For example, how many vultures climbed into SCF in its dying days because they sniffed a government bailout coming that would give them a significant return on their investment? Yet no-one hauls them to the ground and starts kicking them with seething rhetorical statements and metaphors like farmers breeding out bad stock, population control to limit the children coming from women breeding to get the DPB, zoning our citizens using welfare so they can kill each other, sterilization of poorer and ethnically targeted sectors of society and many other simply inhumane sentiments I have heard or read.

It would be a gross understatement to say that these prejudices make me angry.

I am a taxpayer. I have a good job and whilst my income is not huge, I have managed to climb up a small part of our progressive tax system during my working life – each time paying a higher percentage of my income in tax than previously. I understand a lot of people resent that but I do not and I would happily pay some more to sustain much of our nation’s social services. My wife and I also give to various charities and are teaching our daughter the value of doing the same. Tax is not something I resent so when people make the case about tax being stolen money, redistribution to fund bludgers or that in order to offer more/better social services, it will cost us more, the arguments fall on deaf ears. To put it in other terms, I have no problem with redistribution and I have no problem with people on the unemployment, invalids or domestic purposes benefits being the recipients of my redistributed income. I’m quite aware that often the money isn’t used in a way that someone like myself might consider ‘wise’ and that there are many areas where the system could be tweaked – that goes without saying when dealing with any major institutionalized system, but neither of those factors, in my mind, justifies or validates the poor prejudices or an argument completely against the system.

Let’s get personal in order to shed some light on my support of the system. I grew up as the son of a solo mum raising two children she had in two different relationships. I was the elder of the two. Both men made her promises and treated her poorly. The first, my father (a womanizing alcoholic), walked out on her, the second kicked her out because he found another woman he liked better. Both men were poor choices on her part, no doubt – but she didn’t know any better. In between the two men and with me as a baby boy she worked hard to pay her way – shifted town, worked any job she could get in whatever hours she could get that were able to fit. She stayed with another couple who never wanted to see her baby (me) outside of the room she paid for. I was laid in a draw to sleep and fed baby food for too long because she couldn’t afford the solids (whether that was simply poor money management is a side issue – it’s about what the actual capacity of a person is in a given situation). It wasn’t a life she could sustain so the second relationship was probably timely.

That second man kicked her out one day with two young children (I was 5 and my sister, his daughter, was 3). She had no job and therefore no income. She had the beds my sister and I slept in and our clothes and that was it. By the evening of the day he kicked us out she had an income (a government benefit) and had found a place for us to stay. The ill informed prejudices would easily label her as a lazy good for nothing who took advantage of some men so she could get the DPB and sponge off the system.

By then my mother was a broken woman with two children to look after – she was a terrible employment prospect as she wanted to actually raise us rather than putting us in care or having us look after ourselves when we got home from school so the benefit, rightly or wrongly became a long term thing. I grew up in a household paid for by the DPB and a housing allowance. It was a meager living but it was enough. Because of the social welfare system and those benefits I was able to get an education, access health care, eat and live somewhere dry. All along my mother suffered from clinical depression and mild schizophrenia. Those were only diagnosed a few years ago. Thankfully now she is able to access the invalids benefit and she receives a small amount of money from us. She is in no state to access meaningful employment and if you met her, you would agree.

I am who I am partly because of the provisions the state made for my family as I was growing up. Of course, I have also made decisions myself that have led me to where I am and those have largely been influenced by the people around me and life experiences, but the provision provided the means for me to be in a position to make choices that were about more than simply surviving. I cannot and will not turn my back on or scorn the hand that fed me. That system helped keep me alive and healthy.

The money does not and cannot solve all the problems associated with poverty and New Zealand’s ‘underclass’ but it provides, or should provide, for the basics at least – food and shelter, education and health. I am deeply committed to a country that makes sure everyone is provided for even when those being given the provision aren’t making the best and wisest choices with everything they have. Anyone who wishes to use poor choices as a reason to not provide, remember these words – ‘whoever is without sin, cast the first stone.’

The greatness of a society is not measured by the height of its GDP, the size and might of its military, the income of its wealthiest, how many are able to access its most coveted material status symbols or any other fleeting material measurement that comes and goes – it is measured by the compassion a community shares amongst itself, even for those who others may not consider worthy of support. Our greatness is measured in our ability to see beyond the prejudices to glimpse the real humanity of each and every person no matter what their socio-economic status or current state of well-being. Our greatness is measured by our ability to take what we may consider our own and to use it for the betterment and well-being of all. Our social welfare system is a way of doing that on a national scale.

When we heap scorn on social welfare provision, when we establish poor prejudices and stereotypes, when we judge, mock and berate from a distance those on the bottom rungs of our economic ladder then we have lost our moral and ethical footing and have begun championing economic status over and above human well-being. As soon as we consider those at the bottom of the economic ladder to be a needless and unwanted drag or burden on our community we have given up all that can possibly make us great – we have let go of our ethical and moral compass. I want a New Zealand that has a firm grasp on those things and so I want a New Zealand that values and sings the praises of its welfare system even though that system has bugs and problems that can always be improved. That system is a measure of our greatness not as an economy, but as a human society.

God defend New Zealand.