A recent
Amnesty International report made the following observation about New Zealand:
The 2013 Technical report on Child Poverty found that 27% of New
Zealand children remained in poverty. Maori and Pacific island children
were disproportionately represented in child poverty statistics,
highlighting systemic discrimination.
Really? Which system is discriminating against Maori and Pacific Island children?
With free GP visits and prescriptions – recently extended to all
under 13′s – it’s not the health system. With community service cards
and medical centres like the Petone Union Health Centre which provides
“comprehensive primary health services to Maori, Pacific, Refugee and low income families”
free to patients 18 and under, the case could be made that Maori and
Pacific Island children are the subject of positive discrimination
though that is unlikely what
Amnesty International intended.
Immunisation rates are steadily increasing (PI rates are now higher than
NZ European). School nurses are a feature in low decile schools and of
course, whanau ora services are specifically aimed at improving the
health of Maori families. Oral health services are free to all children
and adolescents. Maternity services are targeted at low income
vulnerable mothers-to-be dominated by Maori and Pacific Island females.
Is it the education system they refer to? The targeted funding to
low decile schools is well-known. Charter schools are being established
in some of the poorest neighbourhoods to meet the challenge of the
under-achieving tail. Free hours of early childhood education have been
steadily expanded. Again a case could be made for positive
discrimination as opposed to negative.
Perhaps
Amnesty International meant that the labour market
discriminates against Maori and Pacific Island and, by proxy, their
children. Yet it is unavoidable that low or no educational
qualifications will predict future employability. Which takes us back to
the education system that, as alluded to earlier, has, for the most
recent decades, operated in a manner that exercises positive rather than
negative discrimination towards ethnic minorities. Targeted funding of
low income schools is synonymous with targeted funding of Maori and
Pasifika.
Is the social assistance system stacked against them? Are Maori and
Pacific Island children being denied benefits that NZ European children
access? Again, the opposite is nearer the truth. Maori children, in
particular, disproportionately receive social assistance, especially by
way of Sole Parent Support.
A recent
New Zealand Statistics report into the employment rates of NZ females featured the following graph:
It reveals that 40 percent of Maori mothers, and 29 percent of
Pacific Island mothers are unpartnered. This has a direct bearing on
child poverty.
The official source of child poverty statistics is the
Household Incomes Report published by the Ministry of Social Development. It finds:
…the poverty rate for children in sole-parent families living on
their own is high at 60%…the poverty rate for children in two-parent
families is much lower at 14%…
Is there some systemic discriminatory force that prevents Maori and Pacific Island parents from forming stable partnerships?
I don’t know what it is.
There is validity to the theory that welfare benefits have undermined
marriage. If the state is prepared to financially replace fathers,
especially low income fathers, then there will be inevitable
repercussions. When the universal, non-means-tested family benefit –
paid directly to mothers – was introduced in the 1940s, Maori marriage
rates climbed. Only
married mothers qualified to receive them.
In
The New Zealand family from 1946, Treasury comments:
Legal marriage is now less common among Maori than among
non-Maori …The estimates for people aged 60 and over are, however, an
exception. Maori in this age group—who would have been entering the main
marriage ages during the baby boom—appear to have just as high a
probability of ever marrying as other New Zealanders of the same age.
Maori in earlier periods had not seen any great need to ask non-Maori
officials to provide legal sanction for their marriages (Pool 1991: 109)
so the baby boom may well have been the high water mark for legal
marriage among Maori.
After the 1973 Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) guaranteed eligibility
to a relatively generous benefits for single parents regardless of the
reason for their circumstance, the Maori marriage rate plummeted.
Welfare had a more devastating effect on Maori families because their
incomes were lower and Maori men couldn’t compete with the DPB as
easily. Pacific Island families have withstood the sole- parent-
subsidisation assault better due to other cultural and Christian
traditions which uphold and protect marriage and intact families. Even
Pacific Island single mums are more likely to reside with their extended
family.
But again, the welfare system didn’t discriminate against Maori and
Pacific Island children. It sought to relieve their poverty by replacing
incomes lost to unemployment or a missing partner. That it achieved the
opposite – grew the incidence of relative poverty - is an appalling
result.
Amnesty International makes pronouncements about every
country in the world (in this particular report, 160 countries) but
cannot intimately understand the development of child poverty locally.
The only purpose this report serves is to provide headline fodder for
the political Left.
Consequently this sort of claim soon has the silent majority’s eyes
glazing over. It reads like a statement about minority rights in the
1930s or earlier. It doesn’t reflect the reality of New Zealand in 2015.
(Published at
NZCPR, March 1)
