The NZ Herald's editorial is about the welfare reforms. It makes this observation;
Young women who regard the domestic purposes benefit as an open-ended career choice have long been a source of largely unwarranted anguish to the party.
Naturally my response is why "unwarranted"? Has the Herald some particular insight or information that the rest of us do not possess? As I have said before at least a third of single parents currently on welfare started there as teenagers. If record keeping extended beyond 1996 the percentage would be considerably higher. Perhaps the Herald looks at the point-in-time numbers and thinks, ah, only 3 percent of DPB beneficiaries are teenagers. That is not an uncommon mistake but leads to a complete misunderstanding of the size of problem of young women treating the DPB as "an open-ended career choice."
Children who are raised long-term on welfare are at much greater risk of experiencing poor health, transience, insecurity, poor educational achievement, abuse and neglect, getting into trouble with the law, developing substance abuse problems and becoming a beneficiary themselves. Anguish about this group can never be "unwarranted".
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5 comments:
Is it a choice or the result of insufficient education about sex and the resultant consequences?
The word verification is suatasms ... sugar fantasy?
And then there was the solo mother - 0f three - interviewed on TV 1 news last night. Quote:
"It's not fair. What sort of job would I get. Would I be better off."
Goodness me, take it from a worker paying your benefit doing a job he doesn't particularly like, that is entirely not the point, dear.
Is it a choice or the result of insufficient education about sex and the resultant consequences.
Certainly not education. Just like smoking: everybody knows it causes cancer, just as everybody knows how babies are made.
Only a leftist would think that people need "educating" about the consequences of unprotected sex. And only a leftist would demand that productive people pay for those consequences.
Everybody needs educating, we come into the world knowing nothing, and life is a continuing education process. Anybody who thinks differently is a hopeless case to put it politely.
It is very fair in principle though from experience I have reservations about the fairness of the system in practice.
Everybody makes the same decisions, "If I do that will I be better off", its human nature and the trick is to make it seem so. Politicians do this all the time to gain support.
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