Saturday morning read

If you have a few spare minutes this morning  Jacob Hornberger is well worth reading:

The leftist shibboleth that undergirds America as a welfare state is that Americans, if left to their own choices, would never voluntarily help out others to a sufficient degree. Given such, it is necessary, liberals say, for the state to enter the picture and force Americans to do their moral duty.

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ACT well shot of this one

John Banks never appealed to me at any level. Not as a National MP, not as a talkback host, not as a mayor. But most certainly not as an ACT MP.

Follow the link to court decision from here.

Of particular note, Banks alleged reaction on finding his 19 year-old girlfriend was pregnant.

As a committed opponent of the DPB I struggle with the bona fide reasons for its introduction - abandoned pregnant females. If the DPB had only ever been extended to those women, it would never have become the social undoer it did.

The Honourable John Banks. It jars.

Jacinda versus Bill: TV One Debate

Jacinda would be great cast as the humble, charismatic  up-and-coming politician who wins hearts and minds. Tom Hanks would play the male equivalent.

But this is an election. Not Hollywood.

Bill wouldn't be cast by any director. He gets tongue-twisted, he misses his cues and he resides very much in the head space where facts are a given and don't need ardent defence or advocacy. They speak for themselves - thank goodness. Because he does't.

But on a more subtle level, Bill versus Jacinda found a perfect performance in him. There was not a skerrick of anything  unsightly or ugly. He looks like the man who continues to do the business; who gets what aspiring NZers are about, and is respectful. We might have preferred more sass and sparks but that wasn't going to happen.

Bill is a bit of a bumbler. The crew had to contain him when the show ended. He went to move away and then realised he was supposed to stay still. Is that the man who can't wait to get out of the limelight or the man who needs to move on to the next task?

Personally I just think it's the man who has a job to do and finds all of the media stuff an unwelcome intrusion and burden.

That's the kind of character I would to prefer running the country.

Let's never forget that as Minister for Social Welfare Steve Maharey spent his period in office defending welfare dependency. Bill English turned that on its head. He sought to understand what drove it and what would reduce it. English goes deep when it comes to social deprivation.

Jacinda would return to pulling the levers that drive it.

Is Jacinda the next Michael Joseph Savage?

Is Jacinda the next Michael Joseph Savage?

Will the portrait of Adern adorn walls for decades to come?

Jacinda has evoked Savage for some time now.  She frequently drops his name and talks  about how his welfare ideal degenerated into a judgemental and unjust system under National. She is a little bit Turei, and a little bit Clark.

But no bit Savage.

His goal was to provide assistance for people who were utterly down on their luck through no fault of their own. 

Savage's social security, following in the tradition of the Old Age Pension and even the Widow's Pension, required applicants to prove they were worthy of state support - that provided by their unknown fellow New Zealanders. There was a strong and shared understanding about the deserving and the non-deserving.

That may seem archaic today - certainly to leftists (but not insurance companies). The 'societal social compact' the Left strongly champions was necessarily based on the deserving/non-deserving concept. Without it, the common understanding that held the compact together as a successful policy for so many decades was gone.

Now Ardern  talks forcefully about a better and fairer NZ. But she has no idea - or chooses to ignore - what fairness on Micky Savage's terms would look like.

He wouldn't have been trying to convince Labour supporters they need to pay a young woman $3,000 a year for her newborn. He would have been demanding that a father support his child. He would have strongly rejected any idea that the state should pay for what  Jacinda advocates.

She should quit exploiting past leaders to build support for her own senseless spraying of social subsidies.

"We don’t have huge numbers sitting on welfare..."

David Farrar has a post about New Zealand's increasing workforce participation in contrast to both Australia and the US.

"We don’t have huge numbers sitting on welfare and/or out of the job market. We have lots of people in work or looking for work."

Regarding the first statement, I beg to differ.

Around one in ten of the working age population relies on a benefit. Granted that is better than during the nineties but it's historically still high. Too high:

Think about the likelihood of Judith Collins, back in 2008, campaigning against Labour,  saying "...we don't have huge numbers sitting on welfare". Yet at that time, the rate was the same as today.

One of the the first things National did after becoming government was establish the Welfare Working Group to investigate the high level of dependency.

Memories are very short at election time.