Who’s afraid of the big bad ‘Winz’?

Work and Income’s role is to help people who are often at their lowest point. People who can be upset, angry and despondent.

This is hardly news to the people involved. Or Work and Income. In fact those were the very descriptions Ministry of Social Development regional commissioner Te Reiha Papesch has used. She was seeking to provide fair context while still emphasising the unacceptability of the 211 threats made to Work and Income staff last September alone – the month that began with the horrors of the Ashburton shootings. Putting aside whatever may have led to the shootings themselves, the fact that so many people would in the following weeks have darkly invoked the carnage was in itself startling and concerning.

Now we have a Canterbury Community Law investigation which concludes the social welfare system has beneficiaries uniformly scared stiff of case managers who have such huge powers over their basic rights to food, clothing and shelter. This, says lead researcher Kim Morton, means it’s really essential beneficiaries have access to legal help. It’s a tad too easy to dismiss this as a group of lawyers concluding, sure enough, that it’s important for people to be able to lawyer up. The specifics of the report do give cause for unease. People required to discuss often traumatic events in open-plan offices, with lines behind them. No public toilets available, in spite of long waiting times, unless people are prepared to ask to make emergency-only use of staff toilets, and a security guard is on hand to take them.

Unacceptable. Particularly as Work and Income is operating under a clear directive to more assiduously reduce beneficiary numbers. It’s true that many a taxpayer will be pleased that the welfare reforms introduced in 2012 to ‘‘support and encourage’’ people off work and into employment have led to 38,000 fewer people on benefits. And that Social Development Minister Anne Tolley points to a review by the Auditor-General last year, concluding that most people found their claims were ‘‘resolved fairly’’. All of which invites the conclusion that this talk of people scared stiff by their case workers reflect the grizzles of a minority of malcontents – a conclusion that would be less difficult to embrace if the unhappy campers didn’t so conspicuously lack a collective voice and there wasn’t discomforting evidence of meannesses and disrespect in Work and Income offices.