Students and the disabled will be the biggest losers among a multitude of small cuts across the gargantuan welfare bureaucracy that will help fund new services for jobless youth.
Student allowances are being trimmed by $47.7 million (7.4 per cent) in the coming year, mainly because of a pre-announced decision to limit allowances to 200 weeks, shutting out many postgraduate students.
Disability allowances will be cut by $37 million (9.2 per cent) by removing funding for some medicines and alternative treatments, cutting funded services for beneficiaries and reducing numbers getting the allowance.
The Budget also almost halves job subsidies, from $40 million to $22 million, cuts family services by a net $7 million, and saves $20 million from a long list of small "efficiency savings", mostly in administration.
So the Natz are ensuring that less poor people will be able to attain a higher education, effectively making education a reserve of the privileged few who can afford it. The jumped up little rightwing fascists are also kicking those already caught in the poverty trap in the guts while they're down... all to promote the privatization of our welfare system.
Giving money to cults like Density Church to try and stop youth becoming dependent on welfare is unproven and likely to fail. What a young person needs these days is a good education and a decent job that pays a living wage so that they can become independent of their parents and the state. National has failed to meet its job growth targets in all its previous budgets by a million miles.
This isn't a zero budget, It's a no hope no growth no brighter future budget... it's an archaic return to failed ideologies of the past that will detrimentally impact on the already downtrodden budget... It's an elitist budget designed to transfer even more wealth from those who can least afford it to those that don't need it... It's a penny pinching agist budget that will do nothing to get New Zealand back on its feet.
Australia is looking better every day under the austerity of National's failed regime.
