It begins with me emailing the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) on October 23rd to offer my voice. I had been told about the Advisory Group by someone who had read my last blog - I had heard NOTHING about it prior to that.
At around the same time, I Tweeted & Facebook'd a few things along the same lines, tagging the New Zealand Labour Party, the New Zealand Green Party and an assortment of MP's from both parties. I openly said I wasn't bothering to include other parties as I didn't feel like they would care. At all. I got no response to either the email to WEAG or to any of the posts (well no response from the people tagged into them, I got a fair few responses from people who have had similar experiences with WINZ.)
On Sunday the 4th of November I followed a link given to me on Facebook by a friend to a page the NZ Greens had put up for submissions to the WEAG, it auto-populates to the actual WEAG submission page I think. In this, I listed a number of things I felt need looking at, along with some suggestions for how they might be addressed. It was far from complete because I have put a lot of thought into what needs to be looked at in the welfare system over the years. This isn't the first time I have tried to make my voice heard.
On Monday the 5th of November, I decided that I felt like sufficient time had passed for me to be annoyed and composed an email to NZ Labour, NZ Greens, Prime Minister Ardern, Ministers Shaw, Sepuloni, Clark, Salesa, Henare & Genter and also WEAG. This one mentioned the lack of response and linked to a copy of my last blog entry, asked a few questions and again suggested that I am very willing to talk about the issues I see. I also mentioned that the submission process seems not the best way of communication if there is going to be no follow up from it - if you aren't talking to the person about what they wrote it's ridiculously easy to misinterpret the written word. I talked about my concerns that the WEAG was mainly populated with people who did not appear likely to have first-hand experience with the welfare support - I'm glad to note that apparently, they have one person on the board who is a current beneficiary, and another who has been on the benefit. However, I'm fairly sure that they missed a fair bit of my point there, since the people that have the biggest problems with WINZ tend to be the sort of people who are not likely to come forward and who have problems communicating full stop. They have apparently hosted forums in a number of places - I haven't found anyone yet who has actually attended one, but I'll keep trying. Again though, this system for communicating leaves out people who struggle with transport or who are not good at speaking in a crowd. It's also all pretty pointless if hardly anyone finds out about any of this until it's too late.
So I'm asking here, in the hopes that it gets spread around a bit - if you have been to a forum or made a submission I'd love to hear from you, even just briefly, so I can get an idea of how well used these systems were. At the same time, if you hadn't heard anything at all about the Welfare Expert Advisory Group I'd like to hear that too.
Anyway, back to the point. This second round of communication got a few responses. The office of James Shaw emailed to let me know that they had passed my email on to Jan Logie (Whom to date I have heard nothing from), the office of Carmel Sepuloni emailed to let me know that my email had been passed to the Minister (to date nothing from her either).
The Welfare Expert Advisory Group responded (this is a long story)... Firstly they called me, to briefly apologise for having missed my first email (it looks like they only got my second because one of the MP's forwarded it to them... there seems to be an issue with emails sent from Gmail accounts. Dubious.) They were busy with a forum right then so arranged to call me the following morning. Which they didn't. A few days later I got an email apologising for not calling when they had said they would and to set up a new time... which they also didn't manage. For better reason this time. They asked if they could call the next day - I told them my sister was in town and I would be spending the next 2 days with her but would be available from Friday onwards, to which the response was basically that it would need to be on Friday if any of our discussion was to be included in the submissions. So on Thursday evening after I'd finished with my family, I began taking notes from all the things people had said to me on social media so that I would be as ready as possible given that this was the last chance.
I contacted them in the morning to let them know that I had had a bad night with insomnia and was going to try to get a nap - they responded that they would wait until they heard back from me to call. At 1pm my phone rang, waking me up. I accidentally hit the big red button sending it straight to voicemail, but that's probably for the best as I was completely incoherent at that point. So I finished up my notes quickly, emailed them to let them know I was awake now (and included a copy of the notes) - this was probably less than 10 minutes after they called. 2 hours later, I was back to utterly exhausted so I emailed again to say not to call because I was virtually passing out and was going to try to go back to sleep. A few moments later an email came through saying they could call me right now if that was OK. I was annoyed enough and vague enough to think that replying would be a mistake.
Anyway, the TL/DR version of this is;
I don't think WEAG really grasp the concept of being chronically ill. Which is something of a shame since many of the problems that continue to plague the system are around the extra vulnerable.
I don't think our MP's are particularly interested in responding to mere mortals.
I don't think either the Government or WEAG are really particularly keen to hear what from anyone but themselves on the subject of the state of our Welfare System.
It would be nice to think that having asked for public input they might actually listen to it, but I've become jaded by a lack of this happening before so I will only believe it when I see it.
Peace. Out.
