Pubdate: Wed, 04 Jul 2012
Source: Southland Times (New Zealand)
Copyright: 2012 Southland Times Company Ltd.
Contact:  http://www.southlandtimes.co.nz/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1041
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/testing.htm (Drug Testing)

Testing, testing

OPINION: If you don't get a job because you have failed a drug test, 
or would do if you took one, then the nation probably won't rush to 
console you when Paula Bennett cuts your benefit.

After all, it is galling when the Government cites cases where 
job-seeker beneficiaries have said flatly that they would not pass a 
drug test. Mrs Bennett says that as things stand these people face no 
sanction, but they should and they shall.

If things are exactly that straightforward, then however loud the 
complaints about another gratuitous, diversionary 
poke-the-beneficiaries tactic may be, they won't get a lot of 
mainstream traction and the Government is on to a winner. Which is 
not, necessarily, the case.

Pitfalls aplenty do present themselves. One key question will be how 
the authorities can determine, by reasonable means but with 
certainty, that it's really the prospect of a drug test that stops a 
person going after a job like - off the top of our unhelmetted heads 
- - forestry.

That's a job gasping for workers and not solely because of all the 
drug use out there. There may be other reasons why someone is up for 
all manner of hard work - just not forestry, thanks all the same. 
Surely there shouldn't be a presumption that it's just the prospect 
of a drug test repelling the reluctant applicant. If not, then how 
does he prove that he's not concealing a drug habit?

By taking a drug test to demonstrate that he's clean? This would mean 
he's tested if he wants the job and tested if he doesn't, but would 
just as soon keep his benefit.

Some, not all, of middle New Zealand wouldn't have a problem with 
that. They should. There's a difference between accepting that some 
industries need to apply drug testing, and accepting that the state 
should be able to drug-test any job-seeking beneficiary if it decides 
that it wants to.

That may well be where we're really headed.

Prime Minister John Key has said people who are meant to be available 
for work should be able to pass drug tests. Nothing ambiguous there. 
Reasonably enough, this invited the question at this week's 
post-Cabinet press conference about going further than signalled, and 
just cutting people off benefits entirely if they used that money to buy drugs.

Mr Key didn't emphatically say yes or no, just that that was "another 
debate". Actually, it's the same debate, if we're going to have any 
consistency.

A debate that shouldn't lightly overlook the warnings from the New 
Zealand Drug Foundation that cutting support for drug users would 
reduce their chances of rehabilitation or the arguments that people 
turfed out of benefits because of their drug habits are liable to 
turn to crime to maintain themselves in the manner to which they have 
become needy.

Neither, of course, should we fail to ask ourselves whether the 
job-seekers benefit is really where people with serious drug habits 
belong in the first place.

Clearly we shouldn't be financing people's indulgent recreational, 
drug-enhanced joblessness, any more than we should be heedless of the 
need to look out for people in the grip of harder-to-shrug-off habits.

Maybe the signalled changes to the new Welfare Reform Bill, when they 
kick in next year, can help negotiate some of that. But it won't be 
easy and we don't have the fine details yet. They haven't been worked 
out. And, so far, this isn't a Government that has developed a 
reputation for fussy lawmaking - by which we really mean meticulously 
drafted, comprehensive legislation that works and everything.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom