M.P. questions welfare system

Press, 11 October 1982, Page 6

M.P. questions welfare system

PA Wellington ■ The former Cabinet Minister. Mr Derek Quigley, has questioned whether New Zealand can continue to afford a number of social welfare measures, including paying superannuation to people who are still working.

Addressing the Waipa electorate on Saturday evening, he expanded a statement released on Friday in which he asked whether welfare was being spent on those who needed it most.

•'I believe it is now appropriate for us to reassess the continuing justification for paying National Superannuation to working 60-year-olds. regardless of their needs, and in spite of the fact that some of them mav be holding down jobs that younger people could usefully do." Mr Quigley said. Mr Quigley said most inflationary pressures were generated internally and he noted that of the Government's total estimated expenditure of almost $13,000 million this financial year, more than a quarter was on social welfare. When education and health were added, it came to more than half, he said.

Areas in social welfare

which should be looked at were the general medical benefit, the family benefit, and superannuation. Family benefit cost the nation $3OO million annually. Mr Quigley said.

"I am not suggesting that we should engage in a wholesale onslaught on New Zealand's health and social welfare system," he said.

“What I am suggesting is that we are not doing enough for some people who are in genuine need, and that their circumstances require us to reassess the State’s role in a whole host of other areas." It was not a case of the free market verus interventionism. but of how the State should best perform its social responsibilities. Mr Quigley discussed two other areas in which the Government had intervened — supplementary minimum payments to farmers and the decision to continue car assembly in New Zealand. One ‘of New Zealand's greatest problems was that there was not enough diversification of agricultural products. ' partly because of S.M.P.s. which covered only meat. wool, and dairy products.

There was a bias in favour

of producing more meat and wool, which was "very strange" because a lot of last season's lamb was not yet sold.

Referring to the carassemblv industry. Mr Quigley said the New Zealand consumer was paying an extra $165 million every year for the "privilege" of having locally assembled cars rather than imported madeup ones. The justifications for this were that the industry employed 13.500 people at a time of high unemployment, that local assembly saved overseas funds, and that there was a lot of capital in the industry.

The argument for import replacement was an “extremely seductive one." Mr Quigley said that “if you were of a mind to" you could disband the industry and reinvest the savings in job retraining, irrigation development, and market research. New Zealand was at a crucial stage of its development and the Government's growth- strategy would not succeed if economic resources remained in the wrong sort of activities, he said.