John Armstrong has his own 'ideology'

NZ needs to have the welfare debate because change can't happen without it. But when we have it, it becomes almost insufferable reading the claptrap every man and his dog comes out with.

John Armstrong writes that the working group's prescription for change may be blinkered by ideology such as time limits.

Why is it 'time-limits' are ideology but an absence of time-limits is not? Why does National have ideology and Labour none? Armstrong's own angle on welfare is ideological. Can't he see that? We all have some sort of belief system; principles, ideas, world-view. After criticising the actuarial calculations and describing the paper as "polemic masquerading as analysis" he writes;

Perhaps worst of all, it makes assertions that are just plain wrong.

As part of the discussion paper's emphasis on getting beneficiaries into work, it cites Denmark, France, Germany, Sweden and Ireland as countries where, in contrast to New Zealand, sole mothers have higher employment rates than mothers with partners.

The OECD's family database tells a rather different story. In Ireland. mothers with partners outstrip sole mothers when it comes to paid employment - as they do in France and Germany, though not by much.

Armstrong has used this graph;



The Issues Paper relied on Peter Whiteford's presentation slide;



There is a time difference in the statistics. Unfortunately many of the statistics presented to the 2 day forum were outdated. (Not mine).

The fact remains that NZ has a low rate of employment among single mothers when compared with other single mothers in the OECD. That is an effect of the open-ended DPB. Quibbling about unintentional errors won't make that fact go away.