One of the great mysteries of the economic landscape is how on earth we ended up with more people on the Jobseeker Support benefit, at a time when jobs were so plentiful it wasn’t funny.

When the borders were closed, there were mass labour shortages and yet, there we were, with tens of thousands more jobless.

National will fix it and in fixing it remind us of what we once had as a country; discipline and consequences and expectations.

Gareth Kiernan of Infometrics has been looking at this mystery of the Jobseeker Support benefit. It's worth looking up and reading, but he claims to be perplexed as to how we ended up where we did.

There are 170,000-ish people on Jobseeker as of the latest figures and over 100,000 of them are job ready.

I'm not confused. Basically, getting Government money has become a way of life for many in this country under Labour.

The idea you have to front for an interview is non-existent and there are no penalties for non-compliance. To even have a system that calls you "job ready" when you clearly aren't, is typical of the farce it has become.

There is nothing radical in what National want; it’s a traffic light system. You get to red, you lose some of your benefit, you do mandatory community work and training.

I am sure the advocacy groups will collectively gasp in horror. A growth industry in this country has been the advocacy group. As an experiment, it has been shown that there is no cause, no dilemma, no problem possible that doesn’t produce a group who are more than willing to offer up an endless series of excuses as to why people shouldn’t be doing what they should be doing.

Think of the carnage of Covid in the horticulture industry, the fruit that never got picked and the jobs that never got done.

Think of the damage to tourism and reputations as places had to close or barely open for lack of staff

Over 100,000 people job ready and yet there were no jobs to be found? That is your legacy of the Labour laziness and excuse making.

There hasn’t been a layabout they weren't happy to fund, or make an excuse for. Carmel Sepuloni on this show repeatedly rolls out her favourite line of "It's complicated Mike".

What it was, was pathetic. And now thank the good Lord the scam is up.

If you want welfare, earn it.

Respect the taxpayer, respect the fellow New Zealander who doesn’t mind their tax helping in tough times, but is fed up to the back teeth with the gargantuan piss-take that the Jobseeker Support benefit has become.