Weaving Pathways to Wellbeing

Children's Commissioner, Cindy Kiro and Barnardo's CE Murray Edridge were once again hand-in-hand yesterday over the matter of state-monitoring of all children from birth, now referred to as Te Ara Tukutuku Nga Whanaungatanga o Nga Tamariki or Weaving Pathways to Wellbeing.

Here is their economic reasoning; Economic modelling shows that the optimum return to investment in human capital occurs in the first years of life. Estimates of the benefit to cost ratio of early childhood intervention for disadvantaged children in the United States are as high 17:1 as by age 40 (i.e. US$17 net benefit to society for every dollar spent.)

Let's see. Take a typically 'disadvantaged' child. They will be raised on welfare. Even if they only spent the average time on the DPB (which includes paying their caregiver) they will have consumed $151,060 in cash assistance alone. Add in the cost of early childhood intervention (pulling a figure out of the air - $10,000 per annum?) by age forty they can be expected to have returned $3,758,020 worth of net benefit to society.

May as well put your dollar on a horse paying 17 to 1. The chance of it coming in are better than the above proposition.

Update; Sue Bradford wants a cross-party accord to get this thing up and running. She says, "I realise some parents will be horrified by the idea that their children will have regular checkups at key stages of their lives - just after birth, before starting school, starting adolescence and leaving school - but I think it is even more horrifying that so many children in New Zealand today are enduring violence, abuse, neglect, ill health and despair because either no one knows or no one thinks it is their role to take responsibility for what is going on." To use somebody else's analogy we will be checking every piece of hay to find the needle. Actually, it is generally known where the needles are anyway. Madness.