'Free' school lunches: Why?

This week, headline after headline bitched about the new 'free' school lunch programme. Principals apparently compared the meals to 'dog food'. There were numerous teething problems with delivery. KidsCan jumped on the bandwagon to promote child poverty and useless government yet again.

It beggars belief really. Parents are already paid cash every week to help them take care of their children. Family Tax Credits are for low-income or beneficiary families tapering off as a parent's income increases. Before I lay those out, here's a cost breakdown of a lunch I would make and eat myself (maybe omitting the biscuits): a couple of ham and cheese Molenberg sandwiches, a couple of Tim Tams and an apple. Throw in a Just Juice and the weekly cost, purchased from Pak'nSave, for two children, would be $57.31.

Broken down:

Obviously, a couple of vegemite sandwiches and plain biscuits would cost a lot less.

Anyway, here's what a low-income family with two children receives weekly to spend on their children's needs:

School lunches are already well-catered for with $261.86 cash assistance.

Parents are double-dipping.

The complicit schools cry "hungry children can't learn" forcing the state to step in and giving lazy parents ample opportunity to renege on their own obligation.

If the parent refuses to provide the lunch that the government has already paid for then the cost should be deducted from their family tax credits.

If parents are allowed to assume less and less responsibility for their children, no good will come of it. The balance gets ever more tipped towards all rights and no responsibilities. As a society we need to be heading in the other direction.

When Family Tax Credits were introduced, National and ACT opposed them. In government, they accepted them. When free school lunches were suggested National and ACT opposed. Now a decade later, National and ACT accept them.

Look how far we have traveled in a short space of time.

While school lunches may seem small-beer to some, they are a marker of a society steadily moving away from personal responsibility. And that's not trivial.

Absolute number on benefits at all-time high

Benefit numbers always rise in December driven mainly by the influx of students into the system.

Taking the seasonal rise into account, and comparing apples with apples, December 2024 nevertheless saw numbers exceed 409,000 - the highest absolute number ever.

There has never been this many individuals on a main benefit in New Zealand before.

Even in the 1990s the total never reached 400,000.

Of course, when population is accounted for, the picture changes. Nevertheless, 12.6 percent  of the working-age population dependent on a benefit is higher than at any time since the Global Financial Crisis.

12.6% represents one in eight people who rely on an unemployment, sole parent or some form of carer or disability benefit.

There are 232,000 children supported in these families. If their experience isn't short-lived, they will learn habitual dependence from their parents.

Little media attention is paid to the problem of benefit dependence - not since ACT MP Muriel Newman doggedly highlighted this problem during the 1990s/2000s.

The latest December number was released yesterday. Despite being the highest absolute number ever, the media has either ignored the development or is ignorant of it.

This deep dependence is a massive problem because it fuels so many other social ills.

But New Zealand's longstanding love affair with social security (at its inception a benign and worthy institution) prevents a dispassionate assessment of its evolution.

Once driven and sustained by people with common values, it is now too frequently abused by people whose values are an anathema to a shrinking majority. That is the unfortunate trajectory of welfare states over time - they become too much of a good thing.

The genuinely needy probably form no fewer than the 2-3% that relied on benefits between the late 1930s and early 1970s.

But today New Zealand is carrying hundreds of thousands of people who are quite capable of carrying themselves. And would if such an easy alternative wasn't presented.

Minister for Social Development Louise Upston put out a release yesterday highlighting the traffic light system that National has introduced and reiterating their underwhelming goal:

    "These changes will help achieve our target of 50,000 fewer people on Jobseeker Support by 2030."

What about sole parents and their children? What about people who can't access the health treatments and operations that would enable them to return to work? What about those who cause their own incapacity through drug and alcohol addiction?

The numbers on all main benefits are growing - not just unemployment.

Perhaps after forty plus years of over-reliance on welfare the phenomena is now just part and parcel of Kiwi culture. You could be forgiven for thinking so.

Academics crying wolf

Yesterday the NZ Herald produced a headline that read, “Nine in 10 Kiwi kids endure trauma by age 8 - new research.” This was subsequent to an Auckland University press release titled, “Childhood trauma the norm, but positive experiences help” which began,

“Almost all children in Aotearoa, New Zealand (87 percent) have experienced significant trauma by the time they are eight, far more than earlier thought, according to new research.”

Trauma is what I expect refugee children from war-torn countries to have experienced. Turns out though trauma can now include a child answering ‘yes’ when asked, "Do other children put you down, call you names, or tease you in a mean way?"

The researchers (funded by the taxpayer via an MSD grant) used the longitudinal Growing Up in New Zealand cohort and assessed experience of Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) by age eight. Some of the experiences are serious, for example, having a parent sent to prison, but others are just part and parcel of being a child. Being shouted at by Mum for being naughty or having a Mum who believes she’s been treated unfairly because of her ethnicity.

To describe the latter two as experiencing trauma destroys the word’s meaning.

NewstalkZB host Tim Beveridge interviewed the lead researcher and was justifiably skeptical. He later observed that academics risk losing the public when they over-dramatise their press releases; that the public may switch off at that point and miss any important findings which may follow.

What bothers me even more is the bastardization of a rich language abundantly capable of intricate and nuanced description. It has happened with many words beyond trauma. For instance, words like ‘assault’ and ‘violate’ get regularly employed in totally overblown and inappropriate ways. Guilty parties risk being accused of ‘crying wolf’ – a timeless adage that describes how repeated exaggeration will only result in them being ignored or worse, laughed at.

When it comes to children, New Zealand has enough real problems without manufactured crises.

 Money spent on more of this melodrama is money misdirected.

Bad leaders solicit bad advice

 

When Jacinda Ardern became Prime Minister, she was determined to increase income for children in welfare-dependent families - her magic bullet for solving child poverty. The Welfare Expert Advisory Group, led by Cindy Kiro, was convened to make the desired recommendations. A number of evidence briefs were provided to the group, one concerned the "likely effect of increasing the adequacy of welfare benefits on life course outcomes for children."

To prepare the Rapid Evidence Review, MSD analysts conducted an international literature search and came up with the following:

‘[Blair & Raver (2016)] concluded that in “supporting children’s physiologic reactivity, cognitive control, and self-regulation through parenting- and classroom-based interventions, prevention scientists, policy makers, and practitioners are essentially working hard to alleviate the costs of poverty for human development. Yet it is equally imperative to work further upstream—to lower parents’ and children’s exposure to poverty and associated stressors in the first place.” They suggested two avenues of policy development - supporting families to build higher levels of human capital so as to increase earnings, and to increase income and non-income transfers to families so that they are less likely to be poor.’

Ever-cynical I had a look at the Blair & Raver paper. The quote is accurate but incomplete. Blair & Raver’s concluding sentence is omitted. It reads:

"Two avenues of policy innovation include supporting families in building higher levels of human capital so as to increase earnings and increasing federal and state income and non-income transfers (such as the Earned Income Tax Credit or Section 8 housing subsidies) to families so that they are less likely to be poor."

Do you see what the MSD policy wonks have done? There is a world of difference between a welfare benefit and an Earned Income Tax Credit, so the 'suggestion' was manipulated. They could have left the quote complete and allowed the reader to mentally substitute the In Work Tax Credit. But the IWTC isn't a welfare benefit either.

To be fair, the following finding from Heckman & Mosso (2014) was included in the brief:

"There is little support for the claim that untargeted income transfer policies to poor families significantly boost child outcomes. Mentoring, parenting, and attachment are essential features of successful families and interventions that shape skills at all stages of childhood."

But this was described as being in "sharp contrast" to the "more nuanced conclusion" of Blair & Raver. The conclusion they manipulated.

Unsurprisingly the preordained policy preference was conveniently supported by the evidence brief, and benefit payment rates began their inexorable rise. By March 2024 a sole parent with two or more children was receiving a total average income of $1,107 per week.

But what did the brief omit that might have cautioned against increasing benefits? Only actual New Zealand research.

Commissioned by MSD in 2002, Susan E. Mayer of the University of Chicago wrote an 80-page report, The Influence of Parental Income on Children’s Outcomes, and concluded:

"Research on the source of income consistently shows that welfare income is negatively associated with children’s outcomes. Most (but not all) studies also show that even after controlling for total family income, welfare receipt is still negatively associated with children’s outcomes. This is true for research in New Zealand, Canada and the US. It implies that, although the additional income from welfare may improve children’s outcomes, either parental characteristics associated with welfare receipt or behavioural changes due to welfare receipt hurt children’s outcomes."

Mayer's report is listed in the evidence brief bibliography but never quoted from.

Other highly relevant NZ research derived from Statistics New Zealand’s Household Economic Survey (HES) and the Ministry of Social Policy’s 2000 Survey of Living Standards, Children in poor families: does the source of family income change the picture? was completely overlooked:

"To summarise, the findings show that poor children reliant on government transfers, when compared with poor children reliant on market incomes, have lower living standards and a number of compounding shortfalls that can be expected to place them at greater risk of negative outcomes. The findings suggest a need for policies that have a wider focus than just income support. Such an expanded policy focus would incorporate recognition of the multiple sources of disadvantage of many of these children, and would explore mechanisms designed to connect parents and children to services directed at reducing the likelihood of negative child outcomes."

So more than just a shortage of money is negatively affecting children in benefit-dependent homes. If poor children in working households have better outcomes, then increasing parental employment would be a better strategy than increasing benefits.

I occasionally wonder if Ardern, who claimed to have studied child poverty for six years, read the wealth of material produced by MSD during the late nineties and early 2000s. Had she done so she may have reached the same conclusion as her Labour predecessor, Prime Minister Helen Clark, that work was the best way out of poverty, for parents and their children.

Oddly, the Welfare Expert Advisory Group never asked for advice about whether "increasing the adequacy of welfare benefits" would lead to more children relying on them.

It did. In the six years to September 2024 the number of children dependent on a benefit grew by more than 50,000.

And there's also more violence against children, more school absenteeism, lower childhood immunisation (heaven help the poorest communities if there is a measles outbreak), and lower pre-school attendance ... all mere correlations of course.

Sources

https://www.academicpedsjnl.net/article/S1876-2859(16)00026-7/fulltext

https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-economics-080213-040753

https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/journals-and-magazines/social-policy-journal/spj18/children-in-poor-families18-pages118-147.html

https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/research/influence-parental-income/influence-of-parental-income.pdf

https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/research/benefit-system/total-incomes-annual-report-2024.pdf

https://www.msd.govt.nz/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/statistics/benefit/index.html

Remembering Tariana Turia

Dame Tariana Turia has been well-remembered by many over the past few days. She was warm, had a great sense of humour, and was, above all, highly principled. People I trust have said so and I believe them. Having never met her, however, I knew her only by the thoughts she publicly expressed.

On not infrequent occasions Tariana outraged the public. The word 'holocaust', in relation to the Maori experience of colonisation, was first used by Turia in 2000 as a Labour MP. Later, in 2008, as Maori Party co-leader, she likened the banning of gang patches in Wanganui to the treatment of Jews during the second world war. Both comparisons provoked an outcry.

She was what Elizabeth Rata would describe as an ethno-nationalist and bitterly complained that Maori are the only ethnicity in New Zealand that cannot grow their share of the population through immigration (ignoring that 100,000 plus Maori choose to live elsewhere and not return.) Her strong desire to grow the Maori population was evident in a speech made to the First Maori Sexual and Reproductive Health Conference in November 2004:

"I am intolerant of the excessive focus on controlling our fertility. When I used to sit around the Cabinet table with [Labour]colleagues, one of the many hot topics I got into strife about was discussion around the 'problem' of teenage pregnancy. My objection was to the problemmatization of conception. So when Cabinet Ministers sat around tut-tutting the fact that the fertility rate for Maori females aged 13-17 years was 26.2 per 1000, more than five times that of non-Maori, (4.9% per 1000), I objected to their analysis of our fertility as a problem."

Then education Minister Trevor Mallard reacted by calling this irresponsible: "We must do all we can to educate our kids to avoid early pregnancy - whether through abstinence or contraception. We need to give them advice to minimise - not increase - teen birth rates. It is grossly irresponsible to argue otherwise."

Most Maori teenage births resulted in long-term welfare dependence, attendant poorer outcomes and heightened risks. But Turia would never acknowledge the growing body of evidence pointing to this. It is true that she and Maori Party co-leader Pita Sharples would talk about welfare being bad for Maori but with an important caveat which Turia stressed to Scoop editor Gordon Campbell when campaigning in 2008: "We’re talking Maori unemployed. We’re not talking about Maori women on benefits." Sharples reiterated that saying, "... we have a culture of accepting solo parents, [and] we have to take care of them".

By implication, neither associated over-dependence on welfare with Maori children's poor health and educational outcomes or heightened risk of abuse and neglect.

She also took a position which would see her out of step with the current government: "I am totally opposed to children being raised outside whakapapa links.” For her, children should always remain with whanau. Regarding the uplift of Maori children by Oranga Tamiriki she told Ryan Bridge, then on Magic Talk radio, in 2019:

"In the last few years since 1993, we have had 83 non-Māori children killed, we have had 17 Māori children die, so the fact of it is this is an overkill when it comes to Māori families. Now if you don't want to call it racism, you can call it what you like."

Statistics from the Family Violence Death Review Committee show in the 14 years between 2002 and 2015, fifty-one child deaths were Maori. Turia seemed unable to deal with facts.

She was very firmly in the camp that continues today to blame Maori social problems on colonisation and what she frequently called ongoing "economic violence" against her people. "Cultural disconnection and dislocation" were blamed for acts of violence, even against children.

By all accounts Tariana Turia's personal attributes were manifold. But it doesn't follow that finding favour with her ideas is compulsory.

Sources

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/make-work-for-dole-mandatory-to-break-habit-says-sharples/OC4L47G63MUFRC23AUX2JM7ZYA/?c_id=1&objectid=10421177

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/mp-likens-patch-ban-to-wwii-targeting-of-jews/ZK4QGXEAC4QGQPWZJOFMK3DK7A/

https://www.beehive.govt.nz/release/turias-comments-irresponsible

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/turia-whanau-best-to-deal-with-child-abuse/RQPXIHE46UFXQS6FKXOJQAIHXM/?c_id=146&objectid=158779