benefit envy

Brash's Orewa II speech seemed to be an attempt to tap into the vein of benefit envy that runs deep in many Kiwi hearts. We have this insanely inaccurate picture of life on the dole, or the DPB, or a sickness benefit - it seems like a land of milk and honey where lazing around all day is the norm, you can afford Sky, and you laugh maniacally at all those mugs who work for a living.

For the record I've never been on a benefit and touch wood I will never have to rely on one in the future. But I did spend three years living like a cat due to illness. I never considered a benefit seriously - I had family support that was more than I would have got on the benefit (and even so was still difficult to live off) and I knew that trying to get, and keep, a sickness benefit with ME would only make me more stressed and thus more unwell and less likely to ever recover.

Living on a benefit is not an easy feat - it is definitely not fun. The amount of dosh you have to get by on is meagre, especially since the 1991 benefit cuts. Anyone who has seen In A Land of Plenty will tell you that one of the most shocking parts of the doco is when it covers how the amount of food costs needed for each person was calculated - nutritionists were asked to prepare three food budgets, one luxurious, one standard, one the absolute bare minimum. One of the nutritionists is interviewed in the film and pointed out that they told the bean counters that you could not live on the bare minimum for long and maintain good health. But that bare minimum figure was then slashed by a further 10% (from memory) to get the food portion of the 1991 dole. These cuts have never been reversed in real terms.

And yet so many New Zealanders are envious - they have an incorrect picture of life without work. As someone who couldn't work for three years my mental health suffered considerably. I felt worthless without something to do - although I taught myself to cook when I was well enough, I still felt like a complete bludger, even though I was not actually on a benefit. That feeling of uselessness haunts me still - every time I get tired or experience that peculiar ME muscle pain I fear that I will have to go back to lying around all day doing nothing.

Most people actually want to work. They get a sense of self-worth from being employed and from what they achieve through work. I tried everything to keep working, and I know of others with ME or similar illnesses who have gone through the same experience - you just want so much to be more than a lump of human flesh occupying space.

A colleague who used to work for a benefit advocacy group told me a story this week of a man she had helped. She visited him at home and was shocked by the bareness of the place. The man told her that he used to bash beneficiaries too - he had been consumed with anger at people who were on benefits. But now that he was in that situation, due to no fault of his own, he could see the other side of the coin. He had had to sell many of his possessions to get by and was now very very depressed which was of course only making it harder to get back to work.

And most people on benefits would rather not be - think about it, how would you like to get by on less than $200 a week, not for a week or two, but for months or even years on end? How would you manage? Who would you turn to when all your mates thought you were a bludger because they didn't understand your illness? How would you make the decision between whether to sell the fridge or the washing machine? What would you feel when you had to buy everything from new on hire purchase, because you didn't have enough of an income to purchase things in one off payments, meaning no second-hand bargains for you?

These questions bear consideration by even the healthiest and most highly employed of us - because at any moment you or I could be amongst their number. We could get sick, we could get fired, we could end up with a child on our hands who required constant care. I thought I was immune and I wasn't. Neither are you.