Green Party social development spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March says the policy harmed children by punishing their parents. Photo: Phil Smith
The Green Party is concerned a policy that imposes sanctions on beneficiaries with outstanding arrest warrants is further widening the inequality gap.
It has obtained data showing when the sanctions were used on people with children, they were overwhelmingly used on women and Māori.
Greens' social development spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March said the policy harmed children by punishing their parents, and he wanted the government to scrap it.
"We know that reducing child poverty is one of the key goals of this government. And so to have a policy that effectively creates more poverty by depriving women with children of income just makes no sense, and contributes to hardship."
Menéndez March obtained the data through Written Parliamentary Questions to Minister for Social Development Carmel Sepuloni.
The data covers the quarter ending December 2022, and the quarter ending March 2023.
While the majority of sanctions overall were applied towards men, a separate set of data focusing only on people with children tells a different story.
In the quarter ending March 2023, 153 of the 222 sanctions were imposed on women. In the previous quarter, 107 of the 147 were also applied on women (the data is a count of sanctions, so a person may have received more than one sanction in the time period).
Māori were also over-represented in the data with 168 of the total sanctions applied to people with children in the March 2023 quarter on Māori, and 117 in the December 2022 quarter.
"The sanction continues to create a divide between women, between Māori, and the rest of the population when it comes to poverty," Menéndez March said.
Under the sanctions, someone with a dependent child's benefit is cut by half. Single beneficiaries get their benefit cut entirely.
Menéndez March said very few of the warrants were for individuals who posed a risk to public safety, and claimed the offences were mostly comprised of unpaid parking fines or speeding tickets. The sanctions were simply being used to convince the person to come to court, he said.
"All that it means is that we're just punishing people and leaving them without a legal means to feed their family because of things like parking fines, and effectively pushing them into criminal activity that eventually could become a risk to public safety. This policy was built on scapegoating low-income communities, and it hasn't shown to actually contribute to public safety."
Labour is no fan of the sanctions itself. When National introduced the policy in 2013, Labour voted against it. Even the social development minister has admitted she disagrees with the sanctions.
In November 2021, 1 News reported Sepuloni wanted to scrap the policy but was waiting for more advice from officials.
"We're always worried about the impacts that sanctions will have on children," Sepuloni said at the time.
Carmel Sepuloni said scrapping the policy was not a priority but it is in the government's longer term work programme. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
But 10 years on since it was introduced, the policy remains.
"It should not take massive government resources to get rid of it. It would be a matter of simply scrapping it from legislation. So it is political inaction, and that is unacceptable when we know children are being harmed by the sanctions," Menéndez March said.
But Sepuloni said it was harder to untangle than people might expect.
"Things are often not as easy as they look in the welfare system, and they always require more money than you'd expect. We have to make decisions on what we prioritise, and that's not priority right now. However, it is in our work programme for the longer term," she told RNZ.
A review of the warrant to arrest sanction is considered a 'priority area' in a recent cabinet paper on welfare overhaul, with work expected to begin over the next one to three years.
Sepuloni said the government had paused work on the sanction, in order to prioritise welfare reforms with a wider focus.
"If you think about the Working for Families changes when they come in, it'll have a broad impact, it'll affect a large number of families. Child support pass-on, which will come into effect in July, has been resource intensive, but it's going to have a huge impact, particularly on sole-parent households."
National's Louise Upston says National believes the policy should stay. Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
National said the government should not get rid of the sanctions.
"People who are on the run from the law should face consequences, and we don't think women or Māori should get a free pass," National Party social development spokesperson Louise Upston said.
"It does provide an incentive for people who are on the run to hand themselves in. We know it works because three quarters of those who get that sanction hand themselves in within a month."
In advice sent to the minister in 2019, the Ministry of Social Development said removing the sanctions would free up administrative resources, and allow clients to receive assistance and meet their basic needs.
But it also said the removal could create a potential misalignment with other government priorities, particularly from the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Police, and there was a public perception risk if MSD continued to pay benefits to those with unresolved arrest warrants.
"MoJ just needs to find a better way to engage with people who have things like fines to get them to show up to court. Depriving them of the only way to get an income legally is just counterproductive," Menéndez March said.
Sepuloni said the government had already removed two welfare sanctions, which had resulted in an 80 percent drop in sanctions impacting children since June 2017.