Circle the couches, guys
Health researchers really should investigate the problem of chronic illness and fatigue in NZ First.
The party and its supporters are almost perpetually pronouncing themselves ‘‘sick and tired’’.
Most recently, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones rails that he sick and tired of dolesucking, going-nowhere couch dwellers.
He proposes making young people undertake what he would like us all to understand is a Work for the Dole scheme backed up by sanctions, though he winkingly says it isn’t being called that because the very name would generate an ‘‘allergic’’ response from Labour and the Greens.
So Working for Your Country it would be be – a more accurate name anyway, since Jones himself acknowledges they’d need to be paid not the dole, but the minimum wage.
His rhetoric is part pugnacity, part prevarication. There are reasons for both. Jones is hardly imagining a problem where none exists.
And public support for his thinking can only be strengthened by the simpering warnings being mounted against it – that if these people are forcibly bestirred, they would rather turn to crime than start shovelling for The Man. As if taxpayer-funded indolence is the price we just have to pay to prevent this until a comprehensively better scheme comes along. Which it hasn’t, for ages now.
In his tough-talking moments Jones vows and declares he’s not going to ‘‘tolerate’’ the couched classes any longer.
Moments later he’s describing his methodology as ‘‘advocacy’’ within Cabinet, and reminding us that he’s one voice among 20 ministers. OK, but he is a minister with a $1 billion fund to spend on regional development projects that will surely to some extent harmonise with his couch-clearing agenda.
His National counterpart Simon Bridges says Jones’ proposals will divide the coalition. But then doesn’t Jones have an alternative source of support? It’s not as though the Nats, for their part, shudder at the very thought of benefit cuts.
We seem to recall Bill English announcing on the September campaign trail that National would cut the benefits of under-25s who had been six months on the job seekers’ benefit if they didn’t get on board with what would have been a new package of guaranteed work experience or training, financial management training, drug rehabilitation and oneon-one case management.
This raises the thought that if NZ First was sufficiently motivated, it might be able to look outside the coalition and strike up something of a couch-clearing deal with the Nats.
And as Parliamentary types are themselves given to ask: If not, why not?