Are we more upwardly mobile?

Colin James has a good column in the NZ Herald today in which he argues that upward mobility is important for sustained economic growth.

In his February 7 speech, Cullen argued that Labour's workplace regulation and "fairness" spending in the 2000s enhanced economic growth. He is premature. The boom was in large part debt binge-fuelled. We have yet to live through the bust.

A big reducer of inequality has been the transition of large numbers from benefits to jobs, more a factor of business growth and, in part, 1990s policies than Cullen's spending. Societal changes are likely to affect economic growth rates only after a lag.

There is no denying the movement from benefits to jobs but let's qualify which benefits. The dole. Yes. Sickness and Invalid - some but newcomers or returners have added to overall substantial and steady growth. Although numbers on the DPB have been dropping there are still well over one hundred thousand single parents reliant on welfare. To put that into some sort of context there are just over half a million NZ families with dependent children. Around 22 percent depend on welfare. The vast majority of these are single parents. In low socio-economic schools children from welfare homes can make up the majority.

The left constantly harps on about the growing gap between haves and have-nots as if the greedy 'rich' are somehow to blame. The gap (which is more about values than income) in NZ society is growing because poor, predominantly brown children are growing up without a working parent. All they know is WINZ the provider. They are concentrated in poor areas and the likes of my kids have no experience of them and vice versa. I cast my mind back to growing up in 60s NZ when most families were headed by two parents. My closest friend's parents were Pacific and American and they both worked at General Motors. They lived in a small house which was home to 9 children. It was a different experience to mine and I spent much of my time there. The oldest daughter got pregnant and the child was brought up in the family. Today she would almost certainly have left home and gone on welfare. In other words in the 60s this family produced upwardly mobile children. Today it might not.

Because NZ society has become increasingly segregated due to the growth of one parent families on the back of welfare. Naenae in the sixties was a pleasant suburb with a modern shopping centre. We would visit it most weeks when I lived in Avalon. Now it is to be avoided. Naenae Work and Income is nanny to over a thousand single parents. Sure, many will be struggling to do their best, living in one of the few areas their budget can stretch to. But they have to send their kids to schools where dysfunctional kids make everybody's learning that much harder. Again harder to get an education. Harder to maximise opportunity. Harder to get ahead.

The poorest NZ families are those on welfare. Too many are there by choice, either consciously or sub-consciously. The days of blaming unemployment are over. It is welfare that has driven the re-emergence of a class-based society with a large group stuck at the bottom with poor prospects of being more productive than their parents. With easily available and relatively generous welfare, the left has achieved exactly what they set out to destroy.