'Compassion' - the Left's buzzword for election campaign

Have you noticed the word 'compassion', or derivatives of it, cropping up increasingly of late?

It's a word that the left loves. But it needs a new definition. Spending other people's money to make oneself feel righteous, perhaps; The state supposedly fixing problems but actually making them worse, perhaps.

The Greens have launched an entire project entitled "A compassionate economy".

By definition if you aren't a Green you aren't compassionate. You are hardhearted, cruel, uncaring.

But do you notice that the Green's form of compassion entails even greater use of force against individuals? Is it compassionate to force people to take responsibility for problems not of their own making? Is it compassionate to prevent people from freely pursuing life, liberty and happiness because others don't understand or care about those things?

Someone called Deborah Russell (a taxation lecturer from Massey) recently wrote a column in the Dominion Post calling for the welfare state to be compassionate. She said she was happy to pay her tax for it to be so.

She said specifically that the welfare system should err on the side of compassion. Rules for eligibility should not be toughened up as recommended by the Welfare Working Group.

NZ has been erring on the side of compassion since the 1972 Royal Commission on Social Policy urged as much. Then around 8,000 sole parents were receiving an emergency benefit and it was considered caring and inclusive to create a statutory benefit that guaranteed welfare to any single parent regardless of the reason for their single parenthood.

Now there are 113,000 people receiving that benefit, along with nearly twice as many children who are often characterised as living in poverty and without the input of fathers.

If that is the result of 'compassion' then perhaps it is time for a little less. The welfare system is in dire need of reform; not the continued application of thoughtless emoting.

Bennett doing a bad job on latest policy

Paula Bennett is being too vague with the latest welfare reform policy. That became more painful to witness yesterday as Labour tried to tease out the details. OK. The policy is actually part of National's election manifesto; not an announcement of legislative change that will occur before November. But the way it is rolling out it really smacks of finger in the wind. Starting tough but softening under pressure. Perhaps the cash allowance will be more generous? Perhaps the range of payment card licencees will be quite broad?

Notwithstanding that I want to see benefits made temporary for most, short of that, income management is not necessarily a bad thing. Certainly not "sinister", how Bradford's outfit described it.

In Australia the policy began in some Aboriginal communities where children were being neglected and women were frequently the subject of 'economic violence' - their benefit cash was stolen from them. The policy was intended to protect women and children by ensuring they got the necessaries taken care of through a BasicsCard. Usually 50 percent (but up to 70 percent) of the benefit was loaded onto a card and could only be used for essentials.

Then the government widened the policy to include young people who had been on welfare more than 13 of the past 26 weeks; families referred by child protection services; others that Centrelink defined as 'vulnerable'; and those who voluntarily chose it.

The reasons for applying the policy to certain groups or individuals are clear. It would be easy enough to implement the same here. And to provide a clear rationale.

It is impossible to stop people spending cash on what they want to but it is possible (with loopholes) to ensure that the basics are more likely to be attended to. Especially important when children are involved.

But the way the policy has been mooted - applying only to 16 and 17 year-olds plus 18 year-old single parents - it is itself very vulnerable to criticism. And ensuing complication. Especially now a letter expressing Bennett's own distaste for income management has emerged.

The Minister needs to be far more definitive about what National wants to do and why.

(This is the gist of comments I made to NewstalkZB when they rang for an opinion. The soundbite they are running doesn't reflect my main, final point. That may come out in a later bulletin.)

Gordon Campbell: Deliberately misleading the public?

In last week's Hutt News Gordon Campbell, doyen of the left, wrote the following article (not on-line unfortunately):




My attention was immediately caught by the quote in the fourth paragraph. It is reasonably well-known that NZ's elderly are relatively well-off. So the quote he used surprised me and warranted further investigation. Here is what I found:

Outside my window

We are about 20 metres above sea level. Just up from the beach. Beautiful. And will be until the power goes out. Like it did last night. Twice. For long periods. I bought two extra hot water bottles today because I can heat water from the gas stove top. But that's it. Another night of chess by torchlight I am not looking forward to. But our trials, while very unusual, are minimal compared to others.

Option for reforming welfare?

Drove through steadily falling snow into Wellington yesterday to pre-record a Close Up interview. It was about National's welfare reforms for youth. Sitting next to me was Gareth Morgan who was against the reform. I was for but only as a first step. Gareth was also launching his new book about the benefit system yesterday and was taking the opportunity to push his Negative Income Tax or Guaranteed Minimum Income scheme - not sure what label he is using. It involves scrapping all benefits in favour of everyone getting a yearly income from the state.

I am against these schemes. They naturally grate with me because require even greater forced wealth redistribution. They require very high taxation (Gareth wants to use tax on capital gain). They disincentivise however in more ways than one. Labour productivity, savings, investment. And some of the worst off, lifetime invalids with high health costs reliant on the state, are ...even worse off. Strangely some of the Libz want these schemes and so does well-known American writer and libertarian, Charles Murray.

Sue Bradford is also all for a GMI. Her and Gareth shared a platform at the initial WWG conference and agreed this idea as a way to solve many of the welfare problems. Consequently the WWG asked Treasury to model a GMI which gave every New Zealander 16 and over $300 a week. Here's their response.

In the event the weather news overtook other items and the producer rang to tell me they had run out of time to use it but want me back on another day.

Claudette Hauiti. More interesting than the welfare speech.

Here's an interesting new candidate for National, Claudette Hauiti. I like her. And I don't think she is just mouthing platitudes when she talks about smaller government, less bureaucracy, more self-responsibility, and greater reward for hard work. But you would have to watch the video to get a sense of that for yourself.

National's welfare reform proposals don't go far enough

NATIONAL'S WELFARE REFORM PROPOSALS DON'T GO FAR ENOUGH
Sunday, August 14, 2011

The welfare reform proposals that relate to young people on benefits announced today don't go far enough, welfare commentator Lindsay Mitchell said today.

"Allowing the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Social Development to share information about school leavers going on welfare should never have been stopped in the first place. "

"Attaching obligations and money management regimes to benefits received by 16 and 17 year-olds, and 18 year-old sole parents, is an improvement on the status quo. However, many single parents enter the benefit system older than 18 still without the maturity or wherewithal to raise a child. Which begs the question, why draw an arbitrary line at 18?"

"The new message being sent is, if you go on the DPB at 19 you won't get hassled. "

"Today's announcement is a good start but doesn't go nearly far enough. Not only is it vital that existing teen parents are required and supported to continue their own education or training, but that more potential sole parents are discouraged from choosing or defaulting to the benefit lifestyle."

"Strict time limits across all ages would act as such a deterrent."

"If the government is serious about reducing New Zealand's very high teenage birthrate and the associated deprivation, it should promise an end to 16-17 year-old eligibility, and time limits - with some exemptions - extended to all others."

Child support debt is a putting- the- cart- before- the- horse problem

Deborah Coddington is angry about fathers who renege on their child support payments.

There are multitudes of reasons why exes refuse to pay, or can't pay, child support. Maybe they're broke. Some scum have income hidden in trusts. Often they just want to punish the other, following a bitter custody battle, so they think nothing of using their children as weapons.

I call that child abuse, on the same bell curve as the man who threw his kids off a Melbourne bridge.

There are many reasons, but no excuses. You split up, you take financial responsibility for your family. You don't blame everyone else and make the country pay.

Not all liable parents are "exes". They were sperm donors. There was no "split-up". They don't pay child support because they are in prison, the mother hasn't named them as the father, they have more children and child support liabilities than a benefit can support. Think of the many who don't pay court fines. Some have been used to supply a meal ticket to the mother. That action might be described as child abuse on Deborah's "bell curve" too.

Yesterday I was speaking at the Libertarianz conference and we had a discussion along similar lines. That fathers should face up to their financial responsibilities. Bear in mind that even when they meet child support requirements most only pay a fraction of the DPB cost to the taxpayer.

I stated my position back in 2009. It is unchanged;

Mitchell said the traditional political response is to demand fathers face up to their financial responsibilities. "However, the child support problem is only a spin-off from the DPB system. If there was no DPB, which acts as an incentive to single parenthood, there would be nowhere near the current number of liable parents - 130,762. The state has effectively replaced many fathers who are nevertheless expected to pay the bills for children they often have no role in raising. "

"As a general rule fathers should take responsibility for their children but the state has to stop skewing the morality of this by putting up cash rewards to prospective single mothers."

"Before the DPB it was difficult for mothers to chase maintenance through the court system and fathers ran the risk of conviction and imprisonment for reneging on a court order. But that was forty years ago. Today, avoiding becoming pregnant and giving birth is much simpler. And in respect of relationship breakdowns, women, who now make up half of the workforce, are much better equipped to handle being a breadwinner and men are much better equipped for sharing parenting."

"Until the DPB is reformed to suit the times, the taxpayer will continue to foot the lion's share of its cost."

Men failing

A quick cut and paste from NCPA this morning. Written about the US but entirely relevant to the NZ situation.

As Girls Excel, What Happens to Boys?

Women today are entering adulthood with more education, more achievements, more property and, arguably, more money and ambition than their male counterparts. This is a first in human history, and its implications for both sexes are far from simple, says Kay Hymowitz, the William E. Simon Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

You can see the strongest evidence that boys and young men are falling behind in high school and college classrooms.

Boys have lower grade point averages and lower grades in almost every subject, including math, despite their higher standardized testing scores, and they are 58 percent of high school dropouts.
In the mid-1970s about 28 percent of men had college degrees; since then, that number has barely budged.
Meanwhile, the percentage of women with a college degree increased from 18.6 to 34.2 percent and women now earn 57 percent of college degrees.
Male earnings have come to reflect their educational disadvantage -- childless twentysomething men now earn 8 percent less than their female counterparts in 147 out of 150 of American cities.

So what explains this stunning shift between the sexes? The deepest roots of women's current success lie in economic and technological change.

In the early decades of the 20th century, a "household revolution" dramatically eased the domestic burdens primarily borne by women.
Women's release from household drudgery coincided with the emergence of the postindustrial labor market, meaning a growing number of service and knowledge-based jobs -- all areas where women have excelled.

The second and related theory about why men are falling behind is that today's labor market prizes female strengths more than male strengths.

Hymowitz adds a third, more existential explanation, for the male problem: The economic independence of women and the collapse of marriage norms have deprived men of the primary social role that incentivized their achievement. What this means is that boys today are growing up in a culture that, unlike any before in civilization, is agnostic about their future familial responsibilities.

Aside from school reforms that could help keep boys more engaged, the new gender gap has no obvious solutions. The profound economic changes that have led to female success and male stagnation have also transformed our culture and its expectations for men.

Source: Kay Hymowitz, "What's Happening to Men?" Cato Unbound, August 8, 2011.

For text:

http://www.cato-unbound.org/2011/08/08/kay-hymowitz/whats-happening-to-men/

I disagree that there are no obvious solutions. Mine would revolve around getting the state out of areas it shouldn't be. Reforming or discarding social policies that have interfered with the formation and endurance of relationships for instance. Some policies might have been justified as corrective (although foreseeing the unwanted consequences could also have acted as a brake) but they have now outlived their usefulness.

"NZ Classical Liberal"

Here's a new blog that looks promising. Added to my blogroll for your convenience.

Separatism in the City

Another example of different laws. But this one may not work to Maori advantage.

Wellington bar owners say drunk Maori will be specifically targeted during the World Cup, by a 50-year-old law that has been pulled from the archives by police and the city council. The law allows Maori wardens to enter bars and remove drunk or violent Maori.

It'll be interesting to watch the response from Maori politicians. No doubt this form of 'privilege' - having their own, additional security force - will be labelled as discrimination. That's what the bar owners appear to see it as. In practice the whole idea looks utterly fraught.

The law means Maori wardens can stop the bar selling liquor to any Maori who appears to be drunk, violent, quarrelsome or disorderly or likely to become so.

"Likely to become so." That is a licence to turf anyone drinking.

And just how do Maori wardens go about identifying Maori? Isn't ethnicity now about self-identification? The mind boggles.

Meantime overseas visitors will be given the impression that NZ has a problem with Maori drinking similar to that seen with Aboriginal drinking in some Australian cities. Great image to carry away with them.

God-awful excuses for UK rioting

(I lived and worked in London for four years and it is the only other place in the world I have ever regarded as home or would want to make my home again, entirely because of the people who live there.)

Right on cue the socialists start to recount the reasons why young men in London, Birmingham and Liverpool are rioting. But before we read the excuses let's remember what these rioters are doing. Destroying private property and invading private homes. Thieving from and terrorising private individuals.

This isn't some sort of intellectual response to material deprivation directed at the state. It may be a subconscious, base response to emotional deprivation. That is the most generous response I can summon.

It certainly jars with the idea that the welfare state would prevent such malcontent.

Hell, these guys don't even have the balls to chance their arms at real crime with real risk. No. They create a contrived circumstance whereby they can loot and assault without consequence. Cowards. Creeps. And there is another word beginning with 'c' I have never uttered in my life. I hope those who are detained feel the full contempt of the already incarcerated in due course.

In recent months the government has tripled the cost of university tuition and abolished the Education Maintenance Allowance, paid to some 640,000 16-18 year olds to help them continue in higher education.

Areas like Tottenham, amongst the most deprived in the country, have been particularly hard hit. Unemployment officially stands at 8.8 percent, but will be much higher amongst young people. Claims for Jobseeker’s Allowance have risen by 10 percent in the last year, while Haringey Council has cut £41 million from its budget, reducing its youth services by 75 percent.

This is the social reality that underlies the London disturbances. It is replicated in working class areas across the country. It is the reason Cooper anticipates “repeated” disorder in the coming months.

Bad haircut

A Northampton garage owner was apparently sick and tired of thugs breaking into his garage shop to steal tools, etc. So he came up with an idea. He put the word out that he had a new Mexican Lion that would attack anyone that tried to break in or climb his fence.


Would-be thieves saw the "Lion" from a distance and fled the scene.

What's behind Paula Bennett's 'good news'?

Social Development Minister Paula Bennett says Future Focus changes implemented last September have saved taxpayers more than $6 million.

“The changes implemented last September as a pre-cursor to major reforms introduced clear obligations and greater fairness to the benefits system.”

Future Focus changes include requiring:
• Unemployment Beneficiaries to reapply if they remain on the benefit after a year and prove their eligibility to continue receiving assistance.
• DPB recipients with children over six to look for part-time work.

“This common sense approach has seen 7,400 people go off Unemployment Benefits and taxpayers have saved more than $6 million,” says Ms Bennett.

About half of the 7,400 didn’t complete the process, more than 2,000 were in work and 1,400 had left the country, were studying or just failed the work test.

“This simple policy change alone is expected to save a further $3.5 million by October,” says Ms Bennett.

Since September last year, more than 10,800 people have gone off the DPB into work.

“The number of people who’ve found jobs and gone off the DPB since last year’s welfare changes has gone up by 20 percent, that’s significant”

Prior to Future Focus changes there were 13,700 people on DPB doing some part time work and now there are 15,300.

ENDS

DPB statistics

Sept 2010 112,765
June 2011 113,429

Doesn't matter how many go off when more come on.

And those going off most likely represent short-termers best capable of gaining employment while those coming on most likely represent young unskilled and uneducated types quite likely to stay for years.

In earlier years (granted they were years of lower unemployment) MORE people were leaving the DPB and going to work with NO work-testing regime.
2004 12,773
2005 13,484
2006 16,132

One other thing. $6 million represents about 0.03 percent of the $20 billion MSD budget. Big deal. They could easily save the equivalent by dropping some of the highly paid bureaucrats.

Having just been reminded about our $300 million a week borrowing here, that also makes $6 million look skinny; not even worth the iou it was printed on.

ACT list

Naturally enough I am interested in who is on the ACT list this year. According to the NZ Herald:

On Friday it issued its list of 47 candidates, with only one identifying as Maori.

Anyone know where the list was published?

"They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad"

I love my Mum and Dad.

They came for dinner last night. A roast. Because that's all I can cook with real confidence. And my mum, bless her, says she loves my roasts. Leg of lamb. She brought the desert.

I have two close friends I grew up with and Mum and Dad consequently know them well - or knew them well as children. Recently my friends and I got together for a weekend away, one coming from Australia to visit her 90 year-old father. We banded together on a friday and took off for the Wairarapa. Inevitably 4pm - or thereabouts - saw us huddled over a bottle of wine, near an open fire, relishing being able to talk as we always have done. Without reservation and with the security of knowing each other inside out.

But it became apparent that the one who separated from her husband around 4 years ago now, had an attitude to men that was quite irrational. She was always a beauty. But in her fifties is quite convinced - no, convinced isn't the right word - absolutely certain that men are only interested in women superficially.

We dug and delved around why. Kept holding up our own experiences and others that conflicted with hers but she clung passionately to her arguments and examples. As we pushed on, it came out. Her father had always told her that men were only after one thing. He persuaded her he was right. She married early and probably thought she had found the man who was the exception to the rule. Cruelly, after many years of unquestioned faith, that man fell short and found younger (or something) targets for his affection. Of course her father had been right.

I was telling my own Mum and Dad about this. They remember her father. The family lived one house away. My Dad, without hesitation, but quiet recollection, recited the following:

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

Philip Larkin

My children were probably mildly shocked to hear Grandad use the f word but are mature enough to understand the context. Dear Grandad. Always makes us laugh, sometimes till we wish he would stop. Always makes us think. Never fucked us up.

But perhaps the lesson is, you will get what you expect from life. If you look for it, you will find it.

DPB cancellations due to incarceration more than double

Periodically I ask MSD for the reasons why people are leaving the DPB. Just tracking trends.

Not much stands out from today's response. Despite the new work-testing regime people are leaving for the reason 'obtained work' at no greater rate. Not when compared to the earlier 2000s.

But the following statistics are interesting enough to graph (the first years are to December; the last two are to June). Since 2002 the number of DPB cancellations due to incarceration has more than doubled.

There are increasingly more men on the DPB and more males than females go to prison from the DPB according to the 2003 Prison Census.

That's a hell of a lot of kids losing a caregiver to prison anyway and the provision of welfare wasn't enough to prevent these recipients resorting to crime, one of the major reasons advocates advance to justify it.

Greens plan is a blueprint for poverty

The Greens plan to lift 100,000 children out of poverty is unworkable and defies reason on a number of counts.

First the definition of poverty is relative. It puts a number of children below a specified threshold. Arbitrary thresholds are exceedingly troublesome in their own right. The US is currently grappling with a new and better way to measure poverty. In the UK not so long ago hundreds of thousands of children were lifted out of poverty overnight simply by moving the threshold! A move no less silly than the Green's proposal as we shall see.

In New Zealand poverty is usually defined as falling below either 50 or 60 percent of the eqivalised (adjusted for number of householders) median household income. But difficult-to-measure outgoings are just as important as incomes. Most of the 100,000 children the Greens target are in DPB homes. Yet there are nearly twice that number relying on that particular benefit. The government tries to make payments to them that are as equitable as possible. Yet some fall below the defined poverty level when others don't. Which straight away indicates that some have greater outgoings than others. For beneficiaries, outgoings are more amenable to change than incomes. Adjusting expenses will do more to alleviate their children's poverty than waiting for an income increase, all the while racking up debt.

The Greens don't want them to wait. They want a parent who does not work to receive the incentive, the In Work Tax Credit, given to a parent who does. How silly is that? Even the Human Rights Tribunal found that the government was justified in discriminating against non-working parents. If they weren't then welfare advocates could demand beneficiaries receive 100 percent of the median household income!

But just imagine for a moment the Greens achieved their desired rise in benefit payments. An abundance of international research has shown a link between level of payments and rate of unmarried births. Put simply, the more the DPB pays the more people will choose it over work. Children that enter the benefit system at birth stay the longest and subsequently cumulatively cost more. That means what the Greens have budgeted is less than the actual cost over time. But hey what doesn't grow exponentially when it comes to handouts. Paid Parental Leave is a great example. It now costs twice what Treasury initially forecast it would.

The next part of the Green's plan is to re-introduce the Training Incentive Allowance yet Treasury reported to the WWG that this allowance probably contributed to beneficiaries staying on welfare even longer ( as studying became the modus operandi?). In reality there is no case for a beneficiary to not have to get into the same debt as other students do to fund the education they choose. Exceptions only produce incentives for people to make bad choices eg having children before acquiring any means of supporting them.

Raising the minimum wage barely warrants comment. What hasn't been said, and demonstrated, before about the effect minimum wages have on overall employment? They reduce it. When the cost of labour increases, all else remaining equal, employers buy less of it. Extra unemployment incurs additional burden on the benefit system. Which means that again the Greens have under-calculated the cost of such a move.

The last part of the plan is the require rental homes to be insulated. The additional expenditure will end up in the tenant's hands as increased rent. There goes the extra benefit payment which is the first step of the grand plan.

We all know that the Greens are economically the most socialist party in the political spectrum. And we all know that socialism makes countries poor. Socialism makes children poor.

What the Greens have produced is not a plan for less poverty but a blueprint for more.

Are you a Conservative?

Are you a Conservative?

I didn't score enough to need a Conservative Party (8 out of 15). And that was an ambivalent 8 as some of the questions are multi-pronged.

Doesn't solve my problems about who to vote for come November.

Why so many NZ children are poor

Yesterday saw the release of the Household Incomes in New Zealand Report which is updated periodically. It is full of data, both domestic and international. Extremely detailed, very lengthy.

What it does usefully highlight is that many statistics are estimates which lead to considerable variation. But this quote says it all about children in poverty in New Zealand:

What can be said with certainty is that more than one in five and perhaps as many as one in four New Zealand children live in households where there is no adult in full-time employment. These rates and the rate for children in workless households are high by OECD and EU standards.

Yet New Zealand has relatively low unemployment by OECD standards.

What New Zealand does have is a very high proportion of sole parent families living on benefits. Hence the high proportion of 'workless' households.

The high proportion of sole parents, some stats say second highest in the developed world, is a result of social policy accommodation of cultural tradition and feminist dogma. Feminists will say it is the result of male failure to take responsibility but that was secondary. The policy enabled that abrogation.

The very best way - in fact, probably the only way - to reduce the poverty of New Zealand children is to get rid of the policy that creates and sustains (albeit meagrely) sole parent families.