He said hundreds of thousands of people were using welfare to sleep their life away, while their neighbour went to work.<\/p>\n
![\"Advocate](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/4PDITL1_copyright_image_41477.jpeg\")
<\/p>\n
Kay Brereton.<\/p>\n
RNZ \/ Teresa Cowie<\/p>\n
Kay Brereton told Checkpoint that ACT leader David Seymour was making huge assumptions about people he had never met.<\/p>\n
“It [the policy] sends a message that ACT doesn’t understand, or have any compassion for people on benefit – especially for people in mental distress.<\/p>\n
“If people are on a health related benefit, actually what they are trying to do is get better, and that’s what I see with the people that I’m assisting who are on health related benefits.<\/p>\n
“They are spending that money on treatment, they don’t want to be sick forever, no one wants to be sick forever.”<\/p>\n
ACT campaigning on welfare clampdown<\/p>\n
Checkpoint<\/p>\n
Personal doctors knew their patients on their good days or bad days, but going to see a designated doctor – who thought it was their job to cut benefit numbers – for an hour would not provide sufficient quality of assessment, Brereton said.<\/p>\n
Reassessing all health and disability beneficiaries to find the one percent rorting the system did not make sense, she said.<\/p>\n
Brereton also took aim at ACT’s policy of an electronic money management system for long-term jobseeker recipients.<\/p>\n
The policy would mean these particular benefits would be delivered through an electronic payment card directed towards groceries, rent, power, transport, health and childcare.<\/p>\n
The card would block spending on alcohol, gambling, tobacco, and cash withdrawals.<\/p>\n
“These are adults – there are a whole lot of people in their fifties for example losing their jobs, being made redundant and unless the labour market improves, those people are probably stuck on benefit,” Brereton said.<\/p>\n
“It’s once again a huge assumption, and a real moral judgement with no basis and no data to drive it.”<\/p>\n
In his announcement yesterday, Seymour said the electronic money management meant that taxpayer support would not fund purchases that made it harder to get their lives back on track.<\/p>\n
New Zealanders wanted to help people through tough times, but the deal had to be fair, he said.<\/p>\n
“If you can work, you should be taking real steps toward work, and taxpayer support should go to the essentials it was intended to fund.”<\/p>\n
He said the number of people on jobseeker benefits had increased by 73 percent in the past 10 years – and that this category of benefit cost more than spending on policing, and twice as much as the medicines budget.<\/p>\n
“Behind those numbers are real people whose potential is being wasted.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The ACT Party’s new welfare policy shows a lack of compassion for people who need help, says a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-500988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}