With Ratana celebrations looming some are saying the church's loyalty to Labour is still strong and National needs to show what it has done for Maori.
All govt should be 'doing' for people is creating economic conditions and freedoms that allow them to 'do' for themselves. Nevertheless, that doesn't preclude looking at social indicators under National. I'll aim for 2002 to 2014. The first half under Labour - the second under National.
Benefit Dependency
Bad start
Prison Population
Better
Smoking rate
Continuing to decline
Teenage birthrate
Astonishing improvement
Abortion rate
Also positive
Life expectancy
No cessation of steady rise between 2006 and 2013.
Suicide
Very mixed.
Maori aged 15-24 Not in Employment, Education or Training
This data is is only available from 2008 but the trend is at least positive. In fact a lot of the Infoshare data now appears to only date back 7 or 8 years. Frustrating.
There are far more social indicators but the data isn't particularly easy to access and graph quickly.
Based on the above snapshot there isn't a lot that Ratana followers could gripe about that they wouldn't have griped about under Labour.
When a child is born
58 minutes ago
4 comments:
The evidence will mean nothing to these people as they are determined that their philosophy is the correct one and that that is a self evident truth. Well done for the work though- the rest of us can see it clearly.
More importantly, what have Maori done for themselves?
To be fair, you could compare the very worst Govt towards Maori and the very best and the result wouldn't be very different because missing is the one thing that matters.. education.
Until Maori can move on from a failure rate of about 50% at Stage Two in the education system and an overall 70% illiteracy and innumeracy there must always be despair and anger coming from all sides.
It doesn't matter who is at fault for this situation, the reality is what it is and what can be done about it. You can forget about reparation, apologies and compensation making a difference.. only total dedication to making sure every child gets a good education will work.. and thats not possible from too many parents.
JC
Since when do facts and evidence matter to any religious group? They will keep on believing what their leader tells them to believe.
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