Sickness benefit: Temporary stop-gap?

new-zealand-national-party

Mon Apr 16 2007 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)

Sickness benefit: Temporary stop-gap?

Monday, 16 April 2007, 1:36 pm
Press Release: New Zealand National Party

Judith Collins MP
National Party Welfare Spokeswoman

16 April 2007

“David Benson-Pope should explain why more than half the people on the ‘temporary’ sickness benefit have been there for more than a year,” says National Party Welfare spokeswoman Judith Collins.

“National has no problem providing a genuine safety net to those who are genuinely too ill to work, but the sickness benefit is supposed to be a short-term stop-gap.

“Given that about half the people on the unemployment benefit have also been on it for more than 12 months, David Benson Pope’s sales pitch for the New Service Approach that supposedly ‘focuses on helping people into the right job at the right time, right from the start’ looks very empty.”

According to the MSD website the sickness benefit is for people who are temporarily off work because of sickness, injury, pregnancy or disability.

However, answers to parliamentary questions show more than half of the people on sickness benefit have been on it more than 12 months.

The figures show 18,097 have been on the benefit for between one and four years. Some 5,798 have been on the sickness benefit for between four and 10 years and 996 have been on the sickness benefit for more than 10 years.

“All of these people are working age which doesn't really support Work and Income’s claim that ‘an aging population and the increase from 60-65 years for Super are among the main contributors to growth in health and disability benefits'.

“When nearly a thousand people have been on a ‘temporary’ benefit for more than a decade something’s going horribly wrong.”

ENDS

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