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Documents show that Maori are roughly half as likely as Pākehā to obtain Covid-19 income support from Work and Income.
A poster for the Ministry of Social Development. Source: rnz.co.nz
By Hamish Cardwell for rnz.co.nz
The Covid Income Relief Payment, which starts at $ 450 per week, is roughly twice the support benefit for job seekers, and Maori are much less likely to get it.
Information from the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) between June 8 and August 28 shows that applications from those who identify as Maori were unsuccessful at almost twice the rate compared to Europeans from New Zealand.
More than a quarter of the more than 5,000 unapproved applications were from Maori, even though they represent only 17.25% of the total submitted.
Applications from people from the Pacific were also less likely to be successful.
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A Salvation Army report surveyed more than 500 people in Rotorua, Johnsonville, and Queenstown. Source: Breakfast
Khylee Quince, director of the TUE law school for Maori and Peaceful Advancement, said advocates for the beneficiaries warned early on that the new benefit would have unfair results.
“Unfortunately, the poor dark people got the worst of it.
“There is a reason why many called the payment ‘double subsidy’ or ‘Karen subsidy’ … because … it just so happens that … he tried to maintain the income of middle-class Pakehā New Zealanders.”
He said it was an example of unintentional systemic racism.
“This is just a continuation of long-term government policies that have continued to ignore the highly racially and ethnically biased outcomes of welfare policies basically since the early 1990s.”
The Social Development Ministry said that nearly 466 or 8.5 percent of the more than 5,423 applications that were counted as unsuccessful went on to get more money over the main benefit.
He said staff have no discretion on whether the 12-week pay is awarded – people are eligible or not.
Disqualification criteria include continuing to work part-time or losing your job for reasons other than Covid-19.
Beneficiary advocate Kay Brereton said she suspected one cause of the disparity was that Maori and Pasfika were more likely to work part-time.
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John Fiso spoke to Breakfast about the Covid-19 situation in Auckland. Source: Breakfast
She said that the ethnic disparity was also probably a consequence of the tunnel vision of the policies of the Pākehā bureaucrats.
“The Covid Income Relief Payment is a very good example of people who work within their own cultural paradigm, where their reality is they and their friends have a job, they do it full time and if they lost it, the world would be a terrible place .
“But not recognizing that many other people are in a different paradigm where they have two or three jobs and simply losing one of them makes the world a terrible place because it will be the one who puts food on the table.”
Brereton said that Covid’s income relief legislation was hastily drafted under emergency conditions.
He said that MSD needed to take the time now to analyze the statistics so that history does not repeat itself.
“Let’s say in the future we have another Covid lockdown, or we have some other incident that locks jobs like this, and they need to design a [similar payment].
“If they haven’t been able to collect the data to assess this properly and see why the ethnic disparities exist, then there is a great chance that the same thing will happen again.”
Kay Brereton of the Beneficiary Advocacy Federation says it is sad when political parties seek to punish a certain percentage of people with inadequate incomes. (Teresa Cowie) Source: rnz.co.nz
Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon said that sometimes hasty policies do more harm than good.
“The disparities are causing injustice and a violation of human rights in the Pasifika and Maori communities.”
Foon said he wanted all parties to meet as soon as possible to fix it.
“I would love to see the [Minister for Social Development] Y [the ministry] and other partner organizations come to the table and talk to iwi, and they talk to Pasifika in terms of how we can all improve.
Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni said she had asked MSD to analyze a sample of rejected applications “so that we can better understand this discrepancy.
“This sample will include people who chose not to complete the CIRP application because they could have been better off receiving other support.”
MSD said in a statement that the reasons the applications were unsuccessful were based on individual circumstances.
He said that he has proactively contacted more than 30,000 customers who may be eligible for the Covid income payment.
Payment requests close on November 13.
