Beneficiaries come from all walks of life: the solo mum; the transitioning student; those with mental health issues or freelancers between jobs. Yet beneficiaries are often negatively branded as lazy, unmotivated, good-for-nothing bludgers. New web series NZ Idle is out to challenge stereotypes of those on the dole, while having a laugh.
NZ Idle follows Buckford Aquarius Muldoon, aka BAM, an unemployed creative who’s far too busy to get a job. WINZ has rebranded to the Labour Office of Sustainable Employment (LOSE), where BAM (played by Louis Tait) finds himself at odds with his case manager Jacqui (Emily Keddell), and Able Twerk (Aidan Grealish), a creatively-suppressed middle-manager who is determined to thwart BAM’s artistic pursuits.
The series is the brainchild of Linsell Richards and Lake McKenna, who wrote, directed, and produced the show with the help of a wider voluntary team. They are the duo behind the Poor Sailors Arts Collective, under which they have done various theatrical projects – often with political themes – since late 2009. The web series is their most recent endeavour. Both 31, McKenna is a working artist, making music as the Wellington Sea Shanty Society and Urbantramper, and Richards works at Victoria University running scholarship programs for students from developing countries.
Both have experience with the unemployment benefit. The series is in part based on their personal experiences as well as those of the NZ Idle team. “A lot of people involved in NZ Idle are artists in one way or another and have been on the benefit at different times,” Richards says.
The idea for the series had been brewing for a while. “I remember having an idea for a sitcom years and years ago, about somebody who was really busy on the dole,” McKenna says. “And everyone liked him because he was engaged and he was creative. And his flatmate worked really hard and was envious of him for being on the dole and doing what he wanted. I wanted to change people’s attitudes and to say: these people, they actually do stuff,” he says.
It’s about how people value other types of work or types of activity that’s not paid employment but is still a really valuable contribution to people’s lives or society.
This is the main aim of NZ Idle: to get people thinking about their attitudes toward beneficiaries and to reassess where these attitudes are coming from. “People have these ridiculously stereotypical attitudes towards beneficiaries ... that they’re all lazy, good-for-nothing, they’re bludgers. It’s a very reductionist attitude.”
Richards says social welfare – the way we look after the people at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum – was once something New Zealand was really proud of. “People point to these amazing things New Zealand did, and that was one of them! But now that’s out the window.”
The benefit reforms of July 2013 further spurred McKenna and Richards to make the series. The reforms transferred people receiving the Unemployment, Sickness, Domestic Purposes and Widow’s Benefits to Jobseeker Support.
Richards and McKenna first began to talk about the series in March 2013, around the same time benefit reforms were being discussed. The changes dovetailed perfectly with the stereotyping McKenna and Richards were exploring.
Yet the series is more humorous than political. McKenna and Richards chose exaggeration for comic effect to approach the issues facing beneficiaries. “You’re not going to see the rocky progression of a realistic guy,” Richards says. More serious issues, like mental health or solo parent situations, are left out.
“The artist is probably the least hard done by and we fully acknowledge that,” says Richards. “We really hope that it doesn’t trivialise these issues for those people.”
They also chose the artist as a good way to reprise the Kiwi dag/battler figure, which Richards and McKenna see as a very natural fit for an artist taking a DIY approach. “The Kiwi dag is a very New Zealand trope and one that people like to talk about. Yet people fall back on these negative stereotypes of what a person on the dole is and they don’t equate the two,” Richards says.
So are they saying it’s a good idea to be an artist on the dole? “You could take that from [the series] but you could also take the opposite,” says McKenna. It’s not particularly didactic. And, he laughs, “Any kind of sane person doesn’t take their cues from sitcoms.” Richards agrees.
“The core is just getting people to think about their attitudes toward beneficiaries. It’s about how people value other types of work or types of activity that’s not paid employment but is still a really valuable contribution to people’s lives or society. Beyond that people can take what they want.”
NZ Idle is out 15 April on The Wireless, YouTube and nzidle.com.
This content is brought to you with funding support from New Zealand On Air.