NZ Politics

National’s welfare and work spokeswoman Louise Upston revealed last week that if the party wins October’s general election, benefits would rise by the rate of inflation.

This would reverse a law change introduced by the Labour Government in 2020 to increase benefits by the rate of wages, as wages usually rise faster than inflation.

I missed this in the previous articles. National promised to decrease the rate of benefit increases and sold it like an increase?

I am absolutely dreading this. Life is already so hard and difficult and my little world is shrinking. We can no longer afford things like fresh greens even in season most of the time, it has to be frozen peas.

This part's true by the way:

Benefits have fallen way behind where they're 50 to 60% of the minimum wage, which no one can live on. The minimum wage people can barely live on [it]. So you try living on 60% of the minimum wage, it doesn't work,” she said.

My benefit is less than half what I would get if I could work a minimum wage job. Which I would love to do. Anything.

As far as I can tell, this is because for many long years they were indexed to CPI which is lower than the real rate of inflation for poor households.

I honestly don't know how people like me are going to survive if it moves back to it.

What really scares me is that cold and hunger both make my serious illness worse. I don't want to end up a vegetable that can't ever get out of bed or read and write.

Yeah that's probably a feature, not a bug, I'm guessing...

I can't fathom how they're doing so well currently (if the recent myopic polls are to be believed - personally I'm in denial).

I wish our parties would start forming alliances outside of the election phase, it always feels like rolling the dice