Welfare Fit for Families (2018)

For all children in Aotearoa to thrive, we must have a supportive and compassionate welfare system. No-one is immune from life’s challenges; when circumstances arise that negatively impact on a parent’s ability to provide for their family, it is vital that they can confidently continue to provide for their children. Shamefully, New Zealand’s system of welfare response is broken, and does not provide adequate support for families when they are experiencing difficult circumstances.

In 2018, corresponding with the establishment of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group, CPAG launched the Welfare Fit for Families campaign. CPAG sought to inform the Welfare Expert Advisory Group’s deliberations and hold the government to account in ensuring children’s wellbeing was put at the heart of all policy decisions.

The campaign called for a reconsideration of the principles of social security in New Zealand and promoted 17 concrete and practical recommendations to aid in achieving the Government’s vision for a welfare system where people are “treated with and can live in dignity”.

Informed by more than 25 years of observation and research on the welfare system, our recommendations – many of which ultimately aligned with the WEAG’s final recommendations – included:

Removing harsh sanctions that impact on children;
Ensuring that all benefits and all part of Working for Families (WFF) are indexed annually to prices and wages;
Removing the hours of paid work criteria from the WFF In-Work Tax Credit and extend it to all low-income families;
Treating adults in the benefit system as individuals without penalising them for being in a partnership;
Focusing on what will give children better outcomes and less on moving their carers into paid work; and

Ensuring that applicants receive all the assistance to which they are entitled.

CPAG’s full list of Recommendations to make Welfare Fit for Families (PDF) is available to download here.

Welfare Fit for Families: Welfare for Wellbeing

In 2018, CPAG collaborated with Actionstation to crowdsource the experiences, insights and perspectives of over 250 people through an online survey. Using these survey results, the two organisations developed a report to inform the deliberations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group, pitching a vision for a reformed welfare system that would enable all children and whānau to flourish.