Radio NZ reports:
The Labour Party has accepted the Children's Commissioner's challenge to reduce child poverty rates by 10 percent by the end of next year.So the Commissioner is challenging government to reduce child poverty.
Commissioner Andrew Becroft is urging National and Labour to work together to achieve the change.
Mr Becroft wants a material deprivation measure to be used as the official benchmark for child poverty, under which 149,000 children would be considered to be living in hardship.
What about challenging individuals? Why not, for instance, challenge couples to stay together and committed to their children? Or challenge people who are dependent on benefits not to add more babies? Or challenge young people to finish their education, pay off their loans and get jobs before they start families?
What a difference changing poverty-inducing behaviours would make.
But the new Commissioner has simply taken up the old demands. Disappointing. Very.
5 comments:
"challenge couples to stay together and committed to their children? Or challenge people who are dependent on benefits not to add more babies? Or challenge young people to finish their education, pay off their loans and get jobs before they start families?
Very good and of course quite correct.
Except what politician in NZ today would actually stand up and voice that opinion?
And further to that tragedy, what a shame we now need a Commissioner for such things, when even if he did rise to your challenge (he won't of course) the fact is those ideas were all mainstream thinking a few generations ago, and there was no need for any Commissioner to remind people of them.
What we are really talking about here (once again) is the gradual degradation of our society by so called Progressives (John Key says he is one)and then their dopey attempts to repair their damage without ever having a clue as to what caused it in the first place. (their ideas)
With the govt education system increasingly taking over the role of parents it's not likely that there will be any change in the near future either.
Progressives will never admit that there was social value in Judeo-Christian values and the patriarchal family unit, so we're doomed to futilely struggle with so many things- until we remove Progressives (like John Key) from political ascendancy. If that doesn't happen we're (Western civilisation) going to go the way of the Romans. Nothing surer.
Well Colin Craig and Graham Capill used to talk about it: a lot of good that did! Even Winston from time to time; not ACT though.
But talking or challenging to return to NZs liberal churches will make no difference: choice ms to bludge are quite simply the rational outcomes of NZs welfare state. Eliminate the benefits, health, education, and super; ideally require every parent to deposit say a $200,000 bond or have the child aborted or adopted; prevent unions or charities or social workers interfering - change the incentives and you change the behaviour.
Abolishing the DPB and Dole and minimum wage would certainly reduce child poverty by 10% by the election!
Lindsay
I'd go beyond saying it was disappointing and describe it as depressing. I had high hopes for Andrew Becroft. I wonder if in part it's due to the toxicity of working alongside those 'professionals' who occupy the offices of the various 'commissions' that blot our landscape. By the time the new commissioner has been fully inducted into the system, they sound just like the person they replaced.
There is no political solution to 'child poverty' - it's a feature of the human landscape globally, and in welfare economies like New Zealand where the parent(s) is/are funded by the state to support their child(ren) - inexcusable. If you want to see structural child poverty you must travel to Asia, Africa and other parts of the world.
I see little prospect of our returning to the family centric Judeo/Christian values that animated much of our culture until the 1960's. We are becoming increasingly atomised, and individualistic in our thinking. Sure, there are individual family exceptions, that that's what they are - exceptions to the trend.
It's depressing.
Here we have another highly educated leading professional calling for more gov't solutions to poverty, supported by A Little. No doubt more tax payers money will be required to solve this. More nanny state. Didn't the gov't increase benefits by $25 per week.? How much more taxpayers money will be needed to solve this, the sky is probably the limit. Once all these poverty stricken families are identified, perhaps they could be issued with a debit card linked to the Reserve bank with no limit.The money that these do gooders want to top dress the poor with, is money that has to be earned by someone else who go off to work every day and who have to manage what money they are left with carefully.
`"There is no political solution to 'child poverty' - it's a feature of the human landscape globally"
please: that's simply wrong. Gordon Brown reduced measures of child poverty very simply: by shovelling thousands of pounds to beneficiary families with kids, and by opening up several hundred "sure start" centres (combinations of Plunket and Kindergartens).
Of course, as Lindsay points out: birthrates went up un the lower quantiles, and the overall numbers of children with welfare support certainly skyrocketed.
We know that under Hellen birthrates went up. We know they stabilised for about a year under Key, then went up again -- Christchurch is lagging behind the rest of NZ. Crucially we know that birthrates - especially amount the lower quartiles - went down hard and fast during Ruth Richardson's term as finance minister.
So-called "child poverty" is a "problem" created by politics; that is by welfare, exacerbated by politics, and so can be solved by politics; that is by eliminating welfare. NZ's and the rest of the welfare west's "housing crisis" is created by exactly the same politics and can be solved in the same way (in that case, by health and super spending, not benefits & state education spending). Eliminate the super and health spending and the housing crisis goes away. Eliminate welfare and state education, the birthrate will plummet, and child poverty plummet with it.
It really is that simple.
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