Oh and in passing did they both declare the income earned and the fares paid for them by Israel to the IRD?
I rarely bother to look at right-wing hate sites like Whale Oil [picture, Slater in Israel] or Kiwi Blog; I know that both bloggers have visited Israel and then returned to NZ and spilled their hate filled crap on their blog sites.
But their reaction to Metiria Turei is really over the top and they didn’t have to be brought off by a paid visit to Israel to turn their nasty little pens in to hate creating activities.
Just reading the comments made by their fans proves how low some New Zealander can go in expressing their twisted and hate filled minds.
Yet it would appear that thousands of caring New Zealanders if not hundreds of thousands consider Metiria extremely brave and HONEST, not for her the wriggle words of Paula Bennett.
I think she has won the hearts and minds of thousands of NZ women in particular, they may say something different to their husbands, but I’ve a feeling that they may well be ticking Green this election…
A young woman Aine Kelly Costello [pictured] who has a wealth of empathy wrote a blog on the subject Metiria and she discusses how she used the system to achieve a desired goal. Her reasons as she explains were different but compelling for her. Have a read:
My story, on a factual level, has something in common with Metiria’s. We both asked an authority to help us, to alleviate a problem we had no power to lessen on our own, owing to circumstances outside our control. But I suspect our stories, on the inside, share even more. It’s reasonable to suppose that Metiria felt a measure of guilt, however unjustified, for not being able to provide for her child without a benefit. She must have been frustrated that the deck of socioeconomic standing was stacked against her. I’ll bet she hated the fact that she was obliged to spend some time raising her little girl on the welfare system.
That is where the similarities between our stories end.
What Aine displays here with her words clearly indicates a understanding of what Metiria was confronting, yet still conceding that their circumstances differed.
In my story, I told a truth to a system that functioned well enough to remedy the problem to the general satisfaction of all involved. Disability Services were satisfied, my lecturer was satisfied, and I was basically satisfied. I felt relieved, exonerated almost.
In Metiria’s story, she had no choice but to lie to the system in order to get the system to cooperate. She had to avoid her legal obligation to disclose her living arrangements to Work and Income in order to feed herself and her little one. So on top of the guilt, frustration and hate, no doubt there developed resentment at the heartlessness of the system, and above all, fear. There could be no solution for Metiria within the existing Work and Income framework because if the system did tried to fix itself, it would attempt to balance itself out by asking the legally culpable party, Metiria, to provide more of exactly what Metiria did not have.
The above paragraphs show the compassion that Aine obviously feels and it is mixed with a comprehensive element of adult reasoning. This gives me great faith in the humanity of thousands of our young people and I hope it does the same for you. She went on to say:
But from the inside, there was no solution because the system had Metiria’s pent up emotions held captive. That is a road to breaking people, to destroying their spirit. As Metiria notes, the Work and Income system contributed substantially to breaking at least one woman entirely. She committed suicide after Work and Income accused her of fraud, and while being chased for debt.
Thanks to my socioeconomic privilege, it is unlikely (not to say impossible) that I will ever end up as dependent on our corrupt welfare system as Metiria once was. And I don’t pretend to know exactly how that dependency felt for Metiria, because I can’t know. Maybe I can’t know, but I can guess. Because I can guess, I can empathise with her.
In many respects the above two paragraphs show Aine to be as equally has brave as Metiria was at the Greens successful conference, for I think it must be really difficult to bare ones history publicly. Her last couple of paragraphs give her reasons for deciding her reactions they too tell it like it is.
To me, the greatest indignity in Metiria’s story is the facts that, in the very moment when she was brave enough and vulnerable enough to tell us the truth, many New Zealanders attacked her personal integrity. They showed her, and the rest of us, that the societal roots of Work and Income’s ruthlessness may lie considerably deeper in our country’s culture than we expected or would like to believe. I will keep hoping that we can collectively show Metiria that empathy can rule the day. It must, if we are to give the Greens a chance to fix Work and Income and mend the safety net.
Those posting hate filled responses to Whale-Oil and Kiwi Blog proves my underlining of Aine Kelly’s above was and is necessary, it is our culture that needs alteration in the direction of empathy rather than blame and hate. Cameron Slater [Whale-Oil] and David Farrar [Kiwi Blog pictured 5th from the left in Israel] should go back to Israel and live there…for good. Oh and in passing did they both declare the income earned and the fares paid for them by Israel to the IRD?
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