National leader Christopher Luxon has been forced to explain comments he made on Newstalk ZB on Monday about "bottom feeding".
Breakfast's John Campbell questioned Luxon about his comments in the bulk of their interview - nine minutes to be exact - on Wednesday.
In part of his interview with Kerre McIvor on Monday, Luxon had said: "I've got to be honest to all of your listeners. This is a fantastic country. This is the best country on planet Earth, but we have to determine we want to realise our maximum potential economically, socially and environmentally, and we want to be a place everyone can flourish. And if you want to have a go and you want to make something of yourself, we don't just do bottom feeding and just focus on the bottom, we focus on people who want to be positive and ambitious and aspirational and confident, right?"
The comments made it to Twitter and Reddit.
Asked first off who he has aspiration for and who he wants to lift up, Luxon responded: "My general theme is look I think we've been playing quite a small, negative, inward, fearful game and I think New Zealand is a place that's about confidence, ambition, aspiration, going forward. I'm ambitious for every New Zealander. I want all New Zealanders to be able to flourish in this country. I want everybody to realise their potential and that's what we're here to do."
Replaying Luxon his Newstalk ZB comments, Campbell then asked him what he meant by "bottom feeding".
"My general theme there, John, was exactly what I just talked about before which was saying - look we want to have confidence, ambition, aspiration for all New Zealanders and we've got to celebrate that. It's important we celebrate that. What I was meaning there was the fact that the reality is we actually believe and want to help everybody who's doing it tough in this country as well and so we've got to care deeply about everybody."
Asked by Campbell what he meant by this, Luxon replied: "What I meant is we celebrate the achievement, ambition and aspiration, but we also care deeply about people that are doing it tough. But what we don't have a lot of time for is frankly people that are, as we've seen in recent weeks, are people that are in state houses that actually aren't paying the rents, that are trashing the houses, abusing the neighbours. That's not fair on the other tenants, it's not fair on people that are doing it tough that we are trying to support and help, and that's not the New Zealand way. There are rights and responsibilities to this country and the way that we treat each other and how we look after and respect each other."
National's leader then pointed out the "vast majority" of those in welfare doing it tough are "playing by the rules" and continued to single out misbehaving state housing tenants as the "minority".
Luxon and Campbell then unpicked what National's aspirations were for those on benefits. Luxon said the party has expectations of them and that it wants them to achieve their potential.
"The bottom line is it's not just simply work harder, pull yourself up by your boot straps, get on with it, that's not good enough. We actually have to get clear about the rungs of social mobility and what's actually happening there. Things like education have really been diminished. We're not really helping people who are stuck in poverty for generations. That's not cool. That's not acceptable. That's not good enough to just write a whole bunch of people off and say that's your lot in life, slightly better than misery and subsistence. That's not on. So, we have to think really deeply how we solve those problems."
Pushed by Campbell on what National's solutions would be, Luxon said data could be used to identify families doing it tough. He said services could sit down with them and try and identify if they needed to be augmented with more childcare support or upskilling.
Asked if he was talking about benefit increases in some cases, Luxon said: "Absolutely. Whatever it takes. Because the big problem is we've got 90,000 more people on a benefit today when we've got 3.2% unemployment … There are vacancies everywhere. But the Welfare Expert Advisory Group said 'hey listen, you've got to spend money on actually helping people get from welfare into work and get them ready for work', as such. We're not spending nearly enough money on that."
Luxon claimed the Government has not spent any money sufficiently on the transition from welfare into work. He said this needed to be done in order to help people get work ready.
The current, fundamental disincentive for this is: "If you've ever got transport costs, childcare costs, and you're going to spend all of that grief and money to be able to get into a job, some of that stuff we've got to think through the mechanics of that to get that chain right. So that's what I'm fixated on. How do you get all that talent sitting there - we can't just write people off and say 'you're on welfare for the rest of your life'. If we can't do it now, when will we be able to do it?"
Campbell then asked Luxon if he regretted describing using the term "bottom feeding" and whether it was writing people off. "I just wonder sometimes your aspiration is more for some people than others, that's the point I'm making, or do you reject that?"
"I reject that outright," Luxon said. "I've said to you at the beginning we've got to do certain things – in centre-right politics, my observation from around the world is we care deeply about people and that's what our motivation is and secondarily we have to bring our centre-right politics principles and beliefs and go solve the biggest problems in New Zealand, which are things like mental health and education and inequality and poverty, and that's the work we've got to get into.”
The Government has introduced measures to ease cost of living pressure and help Kiwis navigate through the current global energy crisis.
Main benefits will increase more than 3% in April. The Winter Energy Payment is also starting again in May and ends in October.
Road user charges will be cut by 36 per cent for a three-month period from late April to late July.
This is in addition to the 25 cents per litre fuel tax cut, as well as half-price public transport fares for three months starting April 1.
SHARE ME