A Universal Basic Income is needed to allow the hundreds of thousands of people surviving on "targeted" benefits to re-enter society. To have a life where they are acknowledged, where their contribution to their society, community, family is acknowledged. Where they can go some way to restoring the dignity that has and is being stolen by the state. Where their rights are more than just voting for or against National or whoever else is the Government of the day shitting on them.

Academics and researchers do studies to see the effects of long-term benefit status. Beneficiaries know. Those effects are poor education performance (studies indicate that the performance of children of beneficiaries drops significantly once the employed parent losses their job), poor diet and health (e.g. babies of beneficiaries weigh less by statistically significant amounts), more crime (ex-beneficiaries over-populate our prisons), suffer from disease which could be prevented (meningitis, glu-ear), live in over-crowded homes, are more likely to hurt themselves and their loved ones, including commit suicide.

It is an absolute must that the relationship between people on the Independent Youth, Unemployment, Sickness, Domestic Purposes, Invalids and other benefits and the rest of the country changes in such a way that the beneficiaries themselves do not suffer.

Possible, let alone workable solutions to getting this changed relationship are few and far apart. The miracle of enough jobs at decent wages and conditions as may of been the case in the our part of the world in the fifties and sixties is not likely. The "second coming" will only save those who have seen the light, and for to many beneficiaries they are to busy surviving to buy the appropriate light bulb - assuming it exists. The Marxist revolutions, as yet, do not have appeared to solved the problem of want and need and freedom. The New Old Right have their own philosophy which neither makes sense economically nor socially, and if implemented would be more likely to lead to even more hardship.

UBI, or a Citizens Income does provide some hope because its essential piece is that everyone gets it. The concept of universality includes the right of access to education and decent health care as well as quality housing, but the key ingredient is the receipt of an adequate weekly income from which any one can choose to embark on whatever one wants.

We need a method of sharing what is created or produced at the time based on ones right simply to exist, to be, yet does not kill the planet any faster than is happening at present.

This in fact was the basis of the first Labour Governments pension system. It was not meant to be a type of insurance system where the income from the tax-payers was invested as National Super is. The money raised each year was calculated to pay the pensions needed, any surplus going to other purposes the Government deemed appropriate, or deficit financed from general taxation. The other major feature of that Labour Governments pension was that it was universal, and over the time of its implementation became adequate as well.

This is in the essence of the figures presented by Keith Rankin. The Social Dividend/Wage is calculated on the years production or expected production. It is fair and easy to work out as it is based on Gross Domestic or National Product. The decision as too how much to distribute needs to be based on the adequacy paid to each person so that those with no extra income are not humiliated in their living arrangements. (Accommodation assistance needs to be provided if UBI is set at $7,000 or $9,000). Obviously the undistributed social dividend goes to fund other parts of the Government/state operations like education, health, justice, police etc.

A system of UBI will not mean everyone stops producing. The desire to produce in innate. It is the systems of income distribution (both market and state) which we currently have that is denying many the opportunity to work, to produce. In moving to a system of UBI the freedom of people age or income bracket to earn more is actively promoted. Gone will be the high effective marginal tax rates which beneficiaries and supernatants suffer from. Instead will be the ability to work for as long as you are able and as long as you want supplementing your UBI.

UBI is needed, and from the perspective of a beneficiary, and a beneficiary advocate it is needed because it will mean no more NZISS. The ridding of the ogre of NZISS from the lives of the nearly half a million people of working age (17-65), let alone the children of these half million would be so monumental that I do not have the adjectives to describe it.

UBI is a necessary step towards a decent society in Aotearoa.

In the short term we see the need to raise benefits back to their pre-1 April 1991 levels, and a shift so that the benefit is an entitlement of the individual - that is getting rid of the discounted rate for married couples. This at least will a step to alleviate the desperate situation beneficiaries are in.

1. Common Sense
2. Reaction to 1987/88 tax changes
3. Consideration of poverty trap & universal welfare state in general c.1991
4. Acknowledgement of contribution public domain resources.
5. Acknowledgement of and encouragement for non-market labour contributions; incl. contributions to the maintenance of and development of public domain resources.
6. To encourage more choice over hours of work and to enable people to live more balanced lives. In particular, to enable overworked people to supply less labour to the market, while allowing underworked people to supply more.

I support UBI because it is a simple, fair, transparent, affordable and high-value system for solving the current crises in work and welfare.

• 'simple'---because UBI is, in principle, capable of being defined briefly and explained clearly to all citizens---and therefore of being widely understood
• 'fair'---because UBI applies to all citizens without discriminating on the basis of gender, ethnicity, employment, income and social status
• 'transparent'---because UBI exposes the current tax-benefit system as a mass of inequity resulting from cumbersome entitlements, punitive and stigmatising modes of targetting, and bias towards the more affluent members of our society
• 'affordable'---because, where the political will exists, developed societies can afford to pay for UBI per se, as numerous proposals have shown---but also because not to have UBI entails many other costs (social, legal, medical, therapeutic and bureaucratic)
• 'high-value'---because UBI not only transfers a higher proportion of actual welfare funding to recipients than any other system of welfare (that is, a smaller proportion is devoted to administration) but also because it has the potential to generate economic growth (through labour market flexibility) and to unleash economic and cultural creativity
• 'work and welfare'---because the solution to one crisis reinforces the solution to the other

1. The establishment of an adequate minimum income, as of right, to enable all to belong to and participate in society was the single major recommendation from the People's Select Committee. In 1992 this Committee heard submissions from people on benefits and low incomes. Thus a UBI would respond to the people who are experiencing the problems of exclusion from our current income-through-employment social planning.
2. My understanding of the Maori word MAHI, often translated into English as "work", is that labours of love and of obligation are included. Thus for us, who are not Maori to build an honourable governance of KAWANATANGA as envisioned in the Treaty of Waitangi TE TIRITI O WAITANGI, requires us not to exclude such contributions when formulating Treaty-based social policy. A UBI will allow the recognition and resourcing of the full range of activities that I understand to be "work".
3. Workers Education Association (WEA) are concerned at the growing evidence that more and more people feel alienated from society and are effectively denied the opportunity to contribute their work. The identity and creative ability of workers must be affirmed and there is an urgent need to rekindle a sense of dignity about the future possibilities of working life, in its fullest sense. A UBI is necessary for this to happen.
4. Citizen/producers are being redefined as employees, employers, self-employed and unemployed. Many are under-employed. They are reduced to an increasingly passive role in the labour marketplace. Instead of being the subjects of history they become objects at the mercy of events. If everyone's contribution to society is to be recognised and valued we need a UBI so that the current "employment" society does not do this, recognising the need of everyone to have an income sufficient to live on.
5. The Southeast Branch of the Canterbury WEA interviewed 743 people, 362 wanted to increase their understanding of matters relating to their hopes and aspirations, only 22 (11 men and 11 women) could find ways to do that. This indicator of lost hope is serious, particularly for young people, if we are to build a better world, together. People with hope have potential to address the limits of the market approach to social planning. The privatisation of the sense of communal responsibility reduces citizen to consumer - and Planet Earth suffers, as does humanity. A UBI will allow us, to address the question of the song from Jesus Christ Superstar - "Could we start again please?". We need to start again - the old system is damaging the human spirit beyond measure!

The most important feature of such an introduction will be the implied and associated improvements that will have taken place in the structure of the new post-industrial society in which:

• women, children and men will have been recognised as an important renewable resource, part of a truly sustainable environment and valued as voluntary participants;
• the place of money in a money-based society will have been recognised as being as important as land once was in a rural subsistence-based society and that the fair and unconditional distribution of societally-created wealth is essential to general well-being;
• security, basic needs, self respect and contributions to society will be based on other than simple monetary values and/or being forced to work for a wage in order to exist;
• stigma and discrimination based on means-testing and job status, educational attainment, race, colour, disability and sex will be replaced by autonomy, creativity, life-learning, innovation, caring, sharing, respect, greater harmony and renewed hope for the future;
• people will be empowered to innovate using their talents and enterprise in their "own work" rather than be dominated by a top-down hierarchy that "knows best" for the "ordinary" person;
• increasing crime, poor health, poor housing and other inequalities will be as distant in memory as the halcyon days of the pre-market welfare state days are now;
• poverty traps will be as insidious as gin traps and equally forbidden;
• at last it has been recognised that there will never be sufficient waged-labour for everyone to support themselves and/or their families and that a new society has at last been built from the wreckage of uncontrolled market forces.

I favour a universal basic income because I believe it would be good for women. In fact, I believe it is the only way to solve the dilemma women have been struggling with ever since the Industrial Revolution separated "home" and "work". They are faced with carrying virtually total responsibility for unpaid work - particularly everything to do with reproduction - while simultaneously being unable to earn the market income required to sustain and support that work.

Three solutions have been offered for this dilemma. Women could devote themselves entirely to paid work, giving up children (and, until the advent of modern contraceptive methods, heterosexual activity as well). They could become entirely dependent on a male partner for their money income (or in his absence, on a meagre allowance from the state). Or they could try to combine paid and unpaid work.

None of these solutions has worked very well for women. But that's not why we are now seeing more and more interest in the idea of a universal basic income. As Dale Spender has pointed out, the problems of women are not the problems of society! The catalyst has instead been the collapse of the traditional full-time job, particularly in those areas which have been most strongly associated with middle-aged male workers, i.e. manufacturing and middle management. The flipside of this change is the rise of part-time work and other forms of "labour market flexibility" long familiar to women, but not to most men.

The violent reaction to the very notion of UBI from some quarters stems in part from the idea that hard work and financial reward are closely tied together. But women have long known that this is nonsense. No matter how hard they work in the home or community, or how vital that work is, they can still end up utterly penniless. The UBI would, at the very least, prevent this happening. What's more, it would send a strong signal that "work" means far more than employment - people do not and cannot live by paid work alone.

Beyond paid and unpaid work, there is what analysts such as Charles Handy call "own work" - the work you really want to do, for its own sake, and regardless of whether it can be sold. The UBI would free thousands of people, women and men, to spend more time doing what they want to do, from running marathons to writing books. And that can only be a Good Thing.

My involvement in the campaign for the introduction of a Universal Basic Income in Aotearoa has arisen from my long involvement in unemployed workers' groups. When we first set up our organisation in the early 1980s our focus was primarily on trying to preserve the remnants of the Welfare State at the same time as lobbying for full wage employment creation.

In the thirteen years or so since then our country has undergone one of the most radical structural adjustment programmes in the developed world. Governments and business support mass unemployment as a key to lower wages and greater productivity. Wage and benefit levels have dropped dramatically compared to the profit margins and tax rebates of the rich. The welfare system has been chopped down to the bare minimum for survival.

As the years went on, we began to look for better ways forward than the old 'return to the 50s' nostalgia of some political parties. The more we learn about UBI the more it seemed to address many of the problems inherent in the current system. When placed alongside a commitment to a full employment to a full employment economy, I believe UBI is a core part of the mosaic in achieving social justice and economic equity.

The form of UBI which AUWRC advocates at present is one in which:

• Every adult would receive a UBI of $7,650 a year.
• People aged 16-18 who had left school would also receive the same UBI, but paid through and educational or training institution, employer or community organisation, so that young people who had left school would be in some form of education, training or work.
• An additional rate of $3,980 would be paid for the first child.
• A further rate of $1,900 would be paid for each subsequent child; to each adult over 60 in a household, and to any household in which there is only one adult.

The reason I am briefly describing our form of UBI here is that I think it is important that people promoting UBI do explain exactly what they are proposing. We need to break down the case put up against UBI, and put forward all the positive outcomes. There is not space to make all the arguments here, but some key points from our perspective include:

• All the blaming and punishing apparatus which surrounds beneficiaries would be removed (I think this is one of the main reasons for right wing opposition to UBI).
• Women would have a lot more power and choice in their lives.
• UBI recognises the value of work such as child care, care of the sick and elderly, and community work which have traditionally not been financially rewarded.
• UBI would do away with the poverty traps which happen when people on benefits go back into part time employment.
• Some wealth would be transferred from those on really high incomes to those on the lowest incomes - in effect we would have a far more progressive tax system.
• UBI would offer a secure income to trainees and students, encouraging in an equitable and accessible way the wholesale improvement of the education and skill level of all.

We will be continuing to take an active part in the campaign for the introduction of UBI, and, along with other members of AUWRC, I am happy to speak to groups who are interested in finding out more or taking the debate further.