Ne’er-do-well nephews give Uncle Shane grief

New Zealand First’s Shane Jones had to reach for the Shakespeare to try to lay to rest his latest belch. That belch was his premature declaration of a “Work for the Dole” scheme to push the North’s young unemployed into service planting his trees.

Even as Jones announced this on Q+ A on Sunday, he was adding the disclaimer that it wasn’t actually Work for the Dole since they would earn more than the dole. They would get the minimum wage because Labour frowned on Work for the Dole.

But Working for the Minimum Wage didn’t have quite the same tough love ring to it so Work for the Dole it would be.

Those who would be working for the dole which was actually the minimum wage would be those Jones described as his “ne’er-do-well nephews from Kaikohe”.

These nephews would apparently be enticed by a life in the gangs if Uncle Shane didn’t give them pine saplings to plant.

Pressed on these ne’er-do-well nephews, Jones said he meant it in the figurative sense rather than actual nephews. By mid-week he had worked out how many rhetorical nephews he would need — 1250 would have to work for 100 days a year to hit his target of 100 million trees a year.

Given the purported aim of this scheme was to resolve the plight of 70,000 young people not working, in training or in education, Jones may need to revise his tree-planting goals.

But for now the name was the main point of contention. Labour’s preference was Ready for Work while Jones ended up settling on Working for Your Country.

This made it sound rather like the ne’erdo-well nephews were the Land Girls of World War II, but never mind.

It was on Tuesday that Jones had to call on Shakespeare for help when he was quizzed about the different names being bandied about.

“On matters of nomenclature, what is a name?” he mused. “A rose by any other name is just as sweet.”

In this case, the nomenclature is down to perception.

Jones’ aim was to titillate the NZ First support base by painting the scheme as press-ganged renegades being re-forged into good, reliable young men by hard, honest labour.

Labour wanted it to come across as a bucolic scene in which strapping youth eagerly skip about planting seedlings between lashings of ginger beer and ham sandwiches until they are deemed Ready for Work and emerge a biologist or digger driver or some such useful occupation.

National was targeting Labour’s vision rather than NZ First’s because it hoped to paint Labour as going soft on beneficiaries who made no effort to get into work and cheated the system.

So for it the nephew debate was a chance to push for answers on whether Labour would penalise those nephews who refused to take up Uncle Shane’s kind offer to slog away on a hillside planting trees under the Northland sun.

National had extended the sanctions regime under which benefits are cut for those who miss job interviews, do not take a job offer, or fail a drug test.

The Greens have called for all sanctions to be lifted.

Labour has indicated it will peg back some of National’s extension to those sanctions, such as removing the sanction on women who refuse to name the father of their child.

But Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern made it clear Labour would not go too far, however much National wants it to.

As for Jones’ ne’er-do-wells, life is already improving for them under the Labour-NZ First Government. Back in October when Jones first raised Work for the Dole, his ne’er-do-wells were “sitting on their nonos [bums]”. This week they had graduated to the more comfortable position of “sitting on the couch”.

Jones later also clarified that one of his cousin’s actual nephews had contacted him to advise the appropriate slang these days was “nephs”.

That nephew, it should be added, was not a Ne’er-Do-Well from Kaikohe but rather a Do-Well from Kaitaia.

Another nephew, perhaps possessed of a similar fondness for troublemaking as his Matua Shane, also tried to tell Jones the slang for women was “mumsies”.

It perhaps shows Jones has learned some judgment from his time out of politics that he decided against introducing that into his already florid lexicon.