What threats to LGBT New Zealanders might the recent "Welfare Working Group" proposals contain? In a previous welfare privatisation article, I dealt with the practice of welfare privatisation in the United States and Australia and showed what risks it held for LGBT social service clients of outsourced welfare services after privatisation. However, even less radical proposals contain risks. Sue Bradford In saying this, I am indebted to Sue Bradford's incisive criticisms of New Right benefit cutback proponents at the Welfare Working Group and would like to supplement that excellent analysis through highlighting specific risks to particularly vulnerable members of our own LGBT communities. During recessions, marginal and unskilled workers suffer especially. In our case, this would mean unskilled takatapui, whakawahine and fa'afafine have more difficult times in the labour market due to the impact of institutional racism, economic inequality, educational and employment disruption, homelessness and possible substance abuse resultant from these risk factors, in addition to their experience of transphobic discrimination. Bear in mind that even if they are engaged in erstwhile employment, they may not have been able to save much income, given the costs of reassignment surgery and medication neccessary for it to begin and continue. Moreover, gender identity remains only an implicit category under our Human Rights Act, not an overt ground of impermissible discrimination. For that reason, I share Bradford's condemnation of time-limited unemployment and other benefits. They are likely to brutally impact unskilled transgender workers in the labour market. For that reason, I also reject them. What about 'insurance' format unemployment benefits? Again, Sue Bradford condemns them and in the case of transgender/ whakawahine and fa'afafine unskilled workers, I concur. Insurance-based contributory schemes are all very well for middle-class professional unemployed, but what about unskilled and low-paid workers in marginal housing or rental accomodation, with inadequate diets, poor health access and dependent family, whanau or aiga depedents? How could they save enough and what happens when this inadequate 'insurance'-based unemployment runs out? And moreover, what about people with intellectual and psychiatric disabilities, whose educational and employment history may have been similarly disrupted- including LGBT community members in this context? At the end of the road is the prospect of greater community welfare agency participation in welfare provisions. In the case of mainline religious welfare agency and iwi social service and welfare providers, I have no problem with partnership with central government agencies. However, partnership is one thing- wholesale privatisation is quite another. Why doesn't the Key administration have the honesty to come out and say that its ultimate goal is welfare privatisation? This is typical New Right beneficiary bashing and social exclusion. If we allow the government to implement this, it is vulnerable transgender/whakawahine and fa'afafine, as well as unskilled takatapui, workers that will suffer the most. It will result in greater levels of untreated mental illness, substance abuse, violent offending, criminal activity and recidivism, gang membership, violence against children and so on. It may be incremental, but it should be seen for what it is -an attack on the weakest and most vulnerable New Zealanders. We cannot and must not tolerate this. Recommended: Simon Collins (11 June 2010). "Bradford blasts insurance welfare". The New Zealand Herald: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1