Kill some local economies

I remember the first ACT 'do' I ever attended. Still a member of the Libz, I had been very active in campaigning against the DPB from the social, economic and philosophical viewpoints. It was 2002. The local candidate had persuaded me to attend this dinner and he would sit me next to Muriel Newman and we could exchanges ideas etc about welfare. It was at the Hutt Men's club, very plush and with many grey-haired, well-heeled in attendance. I was dumbstruck when this gentlemen, who had begun the conversation about welfare, said to me, smugly I thought, "If we took away the DPB it would kill some local economies. Can't be done." Because it was such an unexpected comment with validity, because I was amongst business people who may well share the same attitude, I let it go. If it was repeated to me today I would agree and explain why those particular economies need to be killed off. Economies that survive on the money pumped into them every day by Work and Income. Places like Ruatoria, Te Kaha, Waverley, Flaxmere, Reporoa and Kawerau. And certain suburbs near all of NZ's major towns and cities. Places of hopelessness. Places where inhabitants experience small superficial highs and desperate deep lows. Where life is about day-to-day survival with no capacity to aspire to anything else.

False economies do not work on a large scale, and they do not work on a small scale. The Labour government's official recognition of this manifested in the Jobs Jolt policy, which forbade unemployed people from moving to places where there were no jobs - not if they wanted to receive taxpayer support anyway. But because they never extended the policy to other beneficiaries, particularly those on the DPB who could support a none-work inclined partner, the jobless economies survived.

The remark from the ACT dinner attendee was probably well-intentioned in his view. It may have been self-interested. But it was shallow in its ignorance of 'that which cannot be seen' and a denial of the day of reckoning which must surely come.