Honour and contempt

The 2010 Quaker lecture is being delivered by Professor Kevin Clements, a member of the Quakers and wearer of other assorted peace mantles.

Kevin Clements gives particular attention to the relationship between Maori and Pakeha, in both directions. “Who we choose to see and attend to are profoundly political acts. Very often Pakeha do not see and attend to Maori with reverence and respect. Many Maori in turn feel contempt for Pakeha,” he says. “We need to learn how to honour the other. We, i.e. Maori and Pakeha, need to work out how to develop a common vision of the future which provides space for all New Zealanders to realise their full potential.

There's that 'common vision' thing again. If we honoured property rights and individual freedom our cultural differences wouldn't matter. A great deal of the lack of "respect" and feelings of "contempt" described can be laid directly at the feet of the state. From a historical viewpoint the state interfered big time in property rights, from preventing Maori dealing with individual and private buyers to its confiscation of Maori land. But instead of rejecting the (Pakeha) state, Maori came to embrace it as their best shot at aiding their recovery. When the state is embraced the natural consequence is an ongoing fight over the resources it commands and apportions - assets, cash and services.

The speaker focuses overly on cultural difference as the source of conflict when it is actually the method and degree of political governance that generates the rift.

Disappearing comments

Two posts from the last two days have comments that have vanished. There is no remaining 'deleted' message showing who deleted the comment - the author or blog administrator. Mysterious. Happening to anyone else using blogger?

Convicted female offenders - more Maori than European

I have been playing with Statistics NZ's table builder and the conviction and sentencing statistics released Monday. Table builder allows you to instantly compare trends across crime types, ethnicity, age, type of sentence, region, etc.

The following told me something I didn't know. That of all female convicted offenders, Maori form a small majority whereas for all male convicted offenders Maori form a large minority. (Click on image to enlarge. The years read 2009 on the left through to 1990 on the right.)

NZ tops OECD in partner assault

Just released from the OECD database (despite the data being 5 years-old):




The data is sourced from the International Crime and Victim Survey (2004-2005) and European Crime and Safety Survey (2005) so the measures should be reasonably comparable.

NZ isn't just top - but top by a good margin.

In the following tables NZ = selection. The bottom and top values are displayed and the OECD average.

Our ranking for children in jobless homes is second only to the UK (17.6%) NZ (17.5%);



And finally, of the statistics where NZ deviates most from the average, NZ ranks 2nd = with Norway (10.0) in the gender pay gap for full-time employees.(The lowest value of 9.3 doesn't appear on the excel table.)



Strange picture.

It always comes back to philosophy

A presenter at the Welfare Working Group forum last month was Donna Matahaere-Atariki. Her subject;

What sort of society do we want? And how might a collective vision contribute to reducing long-term benefit receipt?

She starts to get my attention right here;

It is incredibly frustrating for me to note, that successive generations of our youth have come to believe that benefit receipt is a career choice.

Who tells them this stuff? Who gets them to believe that this is all they can aspire to?

Good question. Is it the likes of me, because I talk about welfare being a lifestyle choice, not necessarily an active choice but an easy default? I wonder because the next thing I get to is what looks like a criticism of a paper I wrote last year about Maori and welfare.

Last year I read a paper that focused on the legacy of Maori benefit receipt and the contribution of the welfare state to this unprecedented dependency.

While there were many aspects of the paper that I could agree with I felt that essentially it lacked a much broader analyses of the political economy.

It did not even begin to analyse the root cause that underpinned the level of benefit passivity that I perceive among some of our most gifted youth.

In short, the paper failed to define the collective problem to be solved.

Similar to other analyses that focuses only on the subjects of long-term benefit receipt the paper overlooked the context that produced the human experience under scrutiny.

Unable to resolve the issue of so-called ‘Maori benefit receipt’, it collapsed back onto its subject where individual pathology or effect is a shallow proxy for cause.

A sure sign that we have yet to define the problem is to confuse effect with cause.

I know this blog has some very sharp readers so anyone want to have a go at translating that passage for me? Is it any more than the philosophy of determinism being asserted as more powerful than free-will? And if so, isn't that belief the answer to Donna's question, Who tells them this stuff?

Changing attitude to child support?

Radio Live asked for comment on the perennial child support debt problem canvassed again yesterday in the Sunday Star Times. The typical response is that fathers are absconding - as per the headline here. Yet nearly one in five liable parents is the mother.

The child support system is flawed and it will be impossible to 'fix' it without changing the DPB system. I also made the point that the way payments are calculated exploits some fathers. Those are the soundbites they are using anyway. Interestingly the other viewpoint they are airing is from the Father's Union who explain that a great part of the 'debt' is formed from penalties and that the IRD is more usurious than some shark loans.

The population caught up with child support liabilities is diverse but most custodial mothers are on welfare. There is frequently fault, failure and resentment about perceived unfairness on both sides of the equation.

This time around the 'deadbeat dads' angle isn't dominating the discussion. Progress.

Woodham on "slappers" and "cocky bastards"

Absolutely.

The national standards controversy rumbles on

Had a call from National Radio yesterday looking for opinion from 'the right' that would support national standards. It wasn't going to come from me. A number of posts earlier in the year explained why. But the producer wanted me to join the panel (19:40) anyway. Which left Jim Mora pushing the government arguments but each guest refuting them. Yes, there is a problem with some under-achievement. No-one disputes that. But schools were already testing and as parents we were satisfied with the level of information provided to us about our child's comparative progress and ability. Imposing change across the whole system was unnecessary. I now see that's what the principals are also saying.

Art blog updated

Have just updated and re-templated the art blog with pieces from my last exhibition and other commissions. My Andean Woman was accepted for the Academy Galleries Matariki Exhibition opening Saturday 10 July. It will be a show worth visiting if you appreciate art. Especially representative art.

Maori almost 5 times more likely to be serving a sentence or order

According to the New Zealand Herald;

There are currently 9131 beds catering a muster of about 8400 prisoners, which is forecast to rise to 12,500 by 2018.

Putting aside the huge forecast increase, offenders in custody make up only a small percent of those serving sentences or orders.

According to Corrections;
The average number of offenders on community sentences and orders being managed on any given day was 44,893 at the end of March 2010.

44 percent or 19,753 of the people serving a sentence or order are Maori.



The Maori 15-64 year-old population is around 400,000 therefore 49 per 1,000 Maori are serving a sentence or order.

25,140 people serving sentences are non-Maori. The non-Maori 15-64 population is around 2,500,000. So 10 per 1,000 non-Maori are serving a sentence or order.

The likelihood of Maori serving a sentence is almost 5 times greater than for non-Maori. On reporting this to my other half he asked, quite guilelessly, why?

He doesn't ask questions if he doesn't want an answer. So, off the top of my head I offered:

Maori are poorer and get into more financial strife. Unpaid fines escalate.

Maori get into more shtook with substance and alcohol abuse.

Maori have higher rates of mental ill health often a factor in offending.

Maori have fewer stable two parent families which act as a defence to crime.

Maori are targeted more?

On this last point I am thinking about a book just published that posits the war on drugs is really a war on African Americans. It would appear that the author, an attorney, believes many young black men are 'fitted up'.

According to federal figures, blacks and whites use drugs at a roughly equal rate in percentage terms. In terms of raw numbers, whites are far and away the biggest users -- and dealers -- of illegal drugs.

So why aren't cops kicking their doors in? Why aren't their sons pulled over a dozen times in nine months? Why are black men 12 times likelier to be jailed for drugs than white ones? Why aren't white communities robbed of their fathers, brothers, sons?

It is unthinkable that NZ police would have a culture like US cops (if indeed there is one culture spread across so many different states and populations). And it is equally unthinkable that there isn't some degree of institutionalised racism operating in the NZ police and justice departments.

But it is a constant source of sadness to me that too many Maori experience any or all of the above precursors for crime and that I don't see this state of affairs changing in the next few years or even decades.

The "intemperance of the rising generation"

Left to me the TV news wouldn't go on in the evening. But life is a compromise. (At least mine is and those I have observed that are not aren't happy ones.)

But by 6:12 watching Three News last night I was again verbalising my frustration about the prominence given to perennial nag issues. First up Hone Harawira pulling a heart stunt in front of the select committee. Forcing the tobacco manufacturers to hold the heart of a smoker still alive in the room. (Out the window the Maori attitude to body organs went at his convenience - " The tüpäpaku is tapu")

Hot on the heels of the announced ban on smoking in prison comes the news that psychiatric patients in Canterbury will not be allowed to light up anywhere on hospital premises from tomorrow. This is absurd and heartless. Cruel cantabrians. It's no wonder their incidence of psychiatric disorders leads the country.

Then we moved onto alcohol and the 'sages' petitioning other 'sages' about saving us all from the demon drink. It's our young, it's the drinking age. Put it up.

100 years ago the Evening Post used to run a "Temperance" column which regularly served up a summary of international nagging as well as local and ethnic nagging. Such as;



Oh no. The intemperance of the rising generation.

If it was possible to travel forward 100 years it is almost certain that the refrain will be unchanged.

Mean time, what the hell else is going on in the world? Surely there is more interesting news than this endless NZ navel gazing.