Shane Wiringi and his partner are wanting to come off the benefit. They enrolled on a free course intent on starting a small business which has resulted in Work and Income reducing their weekly benefit payments.

An Auckland man's night classes cost him his benefit until an intervention by poverty advocates.

Shayne Wiringi, 55, has also been told he is too old to receive a student allowance while he takes a free business course at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa.

Wiringi lost his benefit after he enrolled in the course in March, alongside his partner, and both were told they needed to apply for a student allowance.

LAWRENCE SMITH/STUFF Shayne Wiringi, his partner and their 7-year-old child are surviving on $230 a week.

He, his partner, and their 7-year-old daughter had been living on his partner's $230 a week student allowance for nearly a month.

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﻿Auckland Action Against Poverty advocate (AAAP) Alastair Russell said Wiringi had been put on an emergency benefit after an intervention by his organisation but he feared for others in a similar situation applying for free courses.

Wiringi said he was told that enrolling in the free course meant he was ineligible for the jobseeker benefit and he should apply for a student allowance.

After applying for a student allowance he was told he would be ineligible for the allowance because he was 55 years old and had studied for 120 weeks in the late 1990s, exceeding his allocation for a person of his age.

Wiringi was told he could receive the benefit again if he stopped studying his course.

"People should be out there either working or on a course, and now that I'm on a course they're telling me to get off it."

Russell said the bureaucratic tangle was like something out of a Kafka novel.

"If both of them stopped studying and just accepted that they would be on a benefit for the rest of their lives on the dole then they would get the full unemployment benefit."

Wiringi is a long-term beneficiary and has faced issues with depression.

Russell said the advice from the man's GP had been that the course would be good for his mental health.

His partner, who did not wish to be named, said Wiringi's mental health had been steadily improving over the years.

However, the recent dispute with WINZ had sent him spiralling into a deeper depression and he had been put back on medication.

Wiringi said he had chosen to stay on the course after losing his benefit in the hopes it would leave him and his partner with the skills to help him get off the benefit.

Mark Goldsmith, Auckland's regional commissioner for the Ministry of Social Development, said he understood the stress Wiringi and his family were under.

The agency was attempting to reach a solution as quickly as possible, he said.

"This is a complex case, it is the first example of its type that we have seen and so it will take some time to resolve it."

Wiringi's partner encouraged him to join the course.

She is a qualified chef who had to quit work after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.

Since her diagnosis she had put on 30 kilograms, her feet were swollen and her eyesight was fading.

However, she felt she had another two decades of her working life ahead of her.

She wanted to take the course with her partner in the hopes they would both be able to run a small property maintenance business at the end of it.

Wiringi could mow the lawns and she would deal with the paperwork, she said.

"They're trying to tell people to study or going to study and this is what they do to you," she said.

"I don't want to sit on a benefit for the rest of my life, I want to do something."