Bennett losing Waitakere - wear it as a badge of honour Paula

Sue Bradford stood for Mana in Waitakere to play up welfare hysteria. Carmel Sepuloni was the feasible Labour candidate able to represent the anxieties Bradford stirred. Labour also did some shitty things to stir up fear and paranoia among beneficiaries. In the face of these two influences it is hardly surprising that a welfare-reforming Minister half serious about the job would lose electorate votes.

Sepuloni and Bennett were both single mothers on a benefit when they were younger.

Sepuloni fights in the left corner that tends to idealise DPB rcipients, their needs and motivations. She wants higher benefit payments, greater state assistance for training and education while on the DPB, and no work-testing. Hers is the social development vision that sees single parents as an inevitable part of the social fabric in need of state help to lead succesful lives.

Bennett fights in the right corner that has cognisance of all groups on the DPB but focuses on the young, vulnerable and lifestyle recipients. Bennett wants welfare to be the safety net it once was rather than the career (too respectable a word) choice it has become. She has no blinkers on and has managed to stay staunch (unlike Katherine Rich), while retaining her humanity.

Surely she will retain the portfolio. She deserves to.

Newspaper or junkmail?

Is it any wonder newspaper circulation is declining when they resemble junkmail more and more? Who wants to pay for what often gets thrown in the bin before it ever crosses the doorstep anyway?

In the first ten pages of today's DomPost page 4 is 100 percent ads; page 5 is 50 percent; 6 is 80 percent as is 7; 8 is 100 percent; 9 is 80 percent; 10 100 percent.

Throw in the ads on the first three pages and the total advertising space is over two thirds.

"Disgracefully simplistic, emotionally manipulative"

Karl du Fresne rips into Bryan Bruce's child poverty documentary describing it as "a disgracefully simplistic, emotionally manipulative programme." His column was published in the DomPost on Monday.

Only Greens can now do hysteria over "privatisation"

On the back of ACT's Confidence and Supply Agreement the Greens have been crying foul.

Privatising welfare not the answer: National and ACT’s moves to corporatise welfare will cost New Zealand more money for worse outcomes, the Green Party said today.

Labour cannot take this line of attack because during their term the Ministry of Social Development was contracting out services left, right and centre.

Radio Rhema asked me to do an interview on the subject with Aaron Ironside and have subsequently used a soundbite in their Shine TV Headlines (starts 00:34).

As I said in a previous post the Ministry already contracts to 150 employment services providers.

Hone 'Mana' Harawira on Whanau Ora and "shackin' up with the Devil"

Harawira puts the boot in:

The Maori Party is on the road - asking their members to let them go back into coalition with National because both Tariana Turia and Pita Sharples are desperate to not leave Parliament with the dodgy record that they have at the moment (Pete also said that he needs his ministerial salary to pay the mortgage on his new house).

Turia’s flagship was Whanau Ora. Launched after a big build-up by the Prime Minister himself, Whanau Ora got maximum publicity and became a new phrase in the public domain but in fact got very little.

Originally proposed as a $1 billion Maori welfare restoration programme, jealous Government Ministers forced Turia to turn it into a programme for all New Zealanders immediately reducing its effectiveness.

And then the budget got slashed to $134 million forcing Turia to have discretionary funding pulled from Maori providers around the country to prop up Whanau Ora, leading many to cut staff and at least one major provider, Amokura, to shut up shop all together. Before Whanau Ora came along, Amokura was one of Tura’s favourite Maori providers. After Whanau Ora it was dead.

Whanau Ora will limp on because Tariana is tough, but with limited funding it has become one of those programmes that Maori say is ‘designed to fail’.

More


Watch for the Maori Party comeback. They are donkey-deep in a 'damned if they do and damned if they don't' position.

ACT's C & S welfare concessions

As part of the confidence and supply agreement ACT has secured the following:

The implementation in this parliamentary term of the Welfare Working Group recommendations 27: Parenting obligations, 28: Support for at-risk families, 30: Income management and budgeting support, and 34: Employment services.

What are they?

Recommendation 27: Parenting obligations

a) The Welfare Working Group recommends that every recipient receiving a welfare payment who is caring for children be required to meet the following expectations:
i. ensure their children are attending school when they are legally required to;
ii. ensure their children participate in approved early childhood education once their child reaches three years of age; and
iii. ensure their children complete the 12 free Wellchild/Tamariki Ora health checks, which include completion of the immunisation schedule, unless they make an informed choice not to;
and that failure to meet these expectations after efforts to address reasons for non-compliance would result in the recipient’s income being managed by a third-party or some other means, such as a payment card; and
b) The Welfare Working Group recommends that systems be put in place to measure and monitor the compliance with the expectations set out in a) above.

Recommendation 28: Support for at-risk families
The Welfare Working Group recommends that:
a) all teenage parents under the age of 18 and other parents of at-risk families be required to participate in an approved budgeting and parenting programme and that access be provided to these programmes free of charge;
b) an assessment of risk to the well-being of children should form part of a more systematic assessment of long-term risk of welfare dependency and provide a basis for intervention through participation in intensive parenting support;
c) at-risk families and whānau with complex needs be provided with wrap-around services, preferably by single, integrated providers which address family and whānau needs as a whole. These programmes need to be responsive to Māori through culturally appropriate, holistic, and whānau-centred solutions. In addition, they need to meet the needs of other parts of the community, such as Pacific, migrant and refugee communities; and
d) at-risk families participating in an intensive early intervention parenting programme have access to quality early childhood education and childcare services from 18 months of age, as currently provided through Family Start.

Recommendation 30: Income management and budgeting support
The Welfare Working Group recommends that in situations where a parent receiving welfare has shown they have a clear need for budgeting support due to repeated difficulties in managing their budget, such that their child or children’s well-being is put at risk:
a) the person be given access to budgeting support services;
b) Government consider using a third party to manage the person’s income, on the understanding that that this income management would cease once the person has demonstrated their capacity to manage their assistance; and/or
c) this may entail provision of a ‘payment card’ programmed for use only on essential items, to ensure that children’s needs are properly met.

Recommendation 34: Employment services
The Welfare Working Group recommends that:
a) employment services be based on contestable, outcome based contracts; and
b) contract referral processes and contract payment structures be designed to financially incentivise contractors to achieve positive outcomes for those with greatest risk of long-term dependency.

A lot of this is already in place.

Private contracted employment services that work with the hardest to place. At August 2011 150 service providers were contracted to assist around 15,000 clients to find employment.

Contracted budgeting services. In 2009 83 members of the NZ Federation of family Budgeting were contracted to MSD to provide budgeting services.

Payment cards is National's policy for young beneficiaries. Once they are available I have no doubt they will be extended to other beneficiaries as per the Australian operation.

Beneficiaires are already sent to parenting programmes. I had a client who went on one (which seemed of dubious quality.)

Analysis of the Family Start programme based in Christchurch showed some gain for children of beneficiaries but not for parents. As I blogged a couple of days ago intervention that is not wanted (compulsory) can further entrench parents in a siege mentality which may put their children at greater risk. So I am very dubious about complusion. I concluded that post with the following:

But I keep coming back to two broad propositions for the state, which will continue to monopolise the problem for some time yet. It has got to stop incentivising childbirth and start incentivising prevention. Stop paying people to have children and start paying them not to. And it has got to stop counselling against adoption and get more children into stable and loving homes from the outset.

The massive escalating intervention - private, public or a mix - is usually too much, too late.

The concessions extracted by ACT represent more intervention and more paternalism which it can be argued are necessary on the back of an extensive benefit system that pays young women to become mothers.

They do not represent a reduction of the benefit system itself.

National's policy of worktesting mothers when their youngest child is 5 (or 1 if the child has been added to the benefit) better represents a reduction in the availability of benefits. ACT should have (and may have) pushed for the age to be lower, afterall they have extracted the promise that parents on benefits must ensure their children participate in approved early childhood education once their child reaches three years of age. Or time limits which was always part of their policy in the past.

Between them there is still no resolve to actually stop the welfare incentives that give New Zealand the second highest teen birthrate in the developed world.

More half-truths from Labour

In response to John Banks getting the Associate Education Ministership Labour's Education spokesperson Sue Moroney says:

John Key has used a bogus agreement with ACT to bring in education policies promoting bulk funding and privatisation that National were working on before the election, but did not tell voters about, Labour’s Education spokesperson Sue Moroney says.

“News today that the confidence and supply agreement between ACT and National includes plans to push on with a trial charter school system will come as a shock to most Kiwi parents.

“The ‘charter school’ proposal is bulk funding in drag. It is a model that has been blamed for the decline in educational achievement in Sweden.

An overview of trends in government in Sweden 2011 contains the following:

In Sweden, the proportion of pupils at compulsory school attaining the set knowledge targets, i.e. passing in all subjects, is rising.

On the other hand, surveys carried out in the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows that the proportion of 15-year-olds with poor reading ability increased from 12.6% to 17.4%, while the pupils' results in mathematics and science deteriorated, between the 2003 and 2009 surveys.

The proportion of pupils eligible for the national study programmes at upper secondary school decreased, mainly among pupils whose parents'education ended before upper secondary school.

The proportion of young people aged 20–24 who have completed upper secondary school in Sweden rose from 86% in 2000 to 88% in 2008. The corresponding EU averages were 77% and 78%. The proportion of Swedish pupils leaving upper secondary school with basic eligibility for higher education rose from 85% to 91% during the same period.

The number of students attaining first and higher degrees and diplomas in higher education, as well as PhDs, in the period 2000–09, increased. At the same time, the level of achievement in basic higher education fell slightly.

A mixed picture but hardly an all-out decline.

Child victims - no cut and dry answers

Three stories drew my attention today. Child death and child neglect and child neglect.

For ten years I have racked my brain over what can be done to either improve the lot of children who are born into circumstances of material and spiritual impoverishment, or reduce the likelihood of it happening in the first place. Initially I looked at the problem theoretically and philosophically, then I got involved at a political level, then a practical level for a number of years. And still I find myself without a single hard and fast answer.

I was prompted to reflect on this after a conversation yesterday with someone who continues to work for the community organisation I was a volunteer for. She told me that it has expanded significantly but wasn't necessarily more effective. Government funding was good but they were now getting compulsory referrals from CYF making the job different and difficult. In the past referrals came in on a voluntary basis which meant clients were amenable - well, initially at least. So the need is growing but the private/public mix isn't the silver bullet.

Scene-set. The CYF caseworker refers dysfunctional families to a community organisation that can provide volunteer mentoring. The government saves taxpayer money by harnessing an unpaid workforce. But to the dysfunctional family this new intrusion presents just another hurdle they have to jump over to continue to receive a benefit (or perhaps keep custody of a child). That's my take on it anyway. Every client I ever had in 5 years was on a benefit.

The idea that people need to meet criteria to receive state support is inherently a conservative one. What pains me about it is it legitimises state support where it shouldn't. But even worse it pushes already damaged people further into a 'them and us' mindset, a feeling of sullen resentment and alienation which drives an instinct to rebel and reject. That manifests in the way they treat their children.

So not only are we back to square one but possibly minus square one. The children are probably even more vulnerable than they were before extra pressure was brought to bear on (usually) the single mother.

Time pressure doesn't allow me to return to my volunteering and on the basis of what was described to me, I wouldn't want to.

But I keep coming back to two broad propositions for the state, which will continue to monopolise the problem for some time yet. It has got to stop incentivising childbirth and start incentivising prevention. Stop paying people to have children and start paying them not to. And it has got to stop counselling against adoption and get more children into stable and loving homes from the outset.

The massive escalating intervention - private, public or a mix - is usually too much, too late.

Earthquake in Wellington

About 7:20 a reasonably strong tremor brought both of the kids running and the dog has gone off into her own tremors and panting. Went for about 6-7 seconds getting stronger but no big jolt. Sam is 13 and that's the worst she has ever felt. Robert says no wonder the people of Christchurch can't sleep.

Update: 30 Km east of Picton 5.7

Reported as "biggest recorded in around twenty years."

Are you missing John yet?

Confession: I actually warmed to John Key during the campaign because he dropped the smile-and-wave persona and actually looked like Phil Goff was getting right up his nose. I heard commentators describing him as "looking like a coldfish" and "refusing to engage" and "hard-faced". To me he looked unsmiling and deliberately detached from the silly gamesmanship of Labour blaming National for the inevitable detrimental effect on New Zealand of the worldwide recession. He showed calm and concentrated discipline in the process. I started to empathise with him. This is the John Key I'd like to see and hear more from. But I'm an oddity.

So I suppose I am destined to miss the new John until his re-appearance in 2014.

Marcus Lush on David Shearer - what the listening audience doesn't see

Had been listening to Willie Jackson and JT yesterday and still had my radio tuned to Radio Live this morning . David Shearer popped into the studio on his way to the airport to talk about his prospects for leading the Labour Party. Marcus Lush made some interesting comments after his departure in respect of what the listening audience doesn't see. He was impressed that the guy had turned up in person and shaken hands with all the news staff. Said that Shearer obviously really wants the job. But there was something he was uncomfortable with. Whenever he was asked a question Lush said Shearer's eyes immediately darted to the right. Lush preferred someone to look him in the eye when conversing and suggested that it was a habit that Shearer would need to be "media-trained out of". Otherwise he came across as (I was waiting for the word shifty but Lush deliberated just long enough to leave the word loudly unspoken) "too politician-like."

And if I hear one more time about how Shearer negotiated with Somali warlords I will .... roll my eyes again. Has anyone asked whether his negotiation successful?

Cracked 9,000

Have been blogging for six years and never exceeded 9,000 visits per month. Last month the counter reached 9,500 and the stats through the year have been steadily climbing. Thank you for tuning in. Finding the time to blog is becoming increasingly difficult but the growing readership makes me resolve to keep it a priority.

What can the government do for the poor?

What ... can the government do to help the poor? The only answer is the libertarian answer: Get out of the way.

— Murray N. Rothbard

Political Progress

I emphatically disagree with the proposition that ACT should once again try to tie their factions together. It shouldn't aim to be the "broad church" that is the National Party. It should declare itself economically and socially conservative. How hard is that?

Then those people who are ecomically conservative and socially liberal know where they stand and can act accordingly.

It still remains for those who reject ACT (or whatever Banks decides to call it) to form a new entity that does manage the differences that will inevitably arise because people are always somewhere along a spectrum. But there needn't be differences as gaping as those between people at opposite ends of the social spectrum.

It'll take goodwill, genuine compromise and committment to discipline. But I ask you, what else is left?

Politically homeless

That's that then. I wanted Catherine Isaac in parliament and voted accordingly. But it didn't happen and I see this morning Catherine has, wisely in my view, ruled out assuming leadership or any other active role in ACT.

Ms Isaac said the future depended on Mr Banks. "Will John Banks embrace Act ideology and its policies and seek to advance them?

"I don't know how John Banks is planning on conducting himself. His history is with the National Party, not with Act, and I don't know to what extent he embraces Act principles."

She said she did not intend to take an active role in the party, but there was a future for a classical liberal party.

Mr Banks' conservative views have rubbed the more socially liberal Act members the wrong way. But he was comfortable because of what he called the "80/20" principle - he agrees with 80 per cent of the party's policies.

But will a leader keep the 20 percent he doesn't agree with? Liberals and conservatives can often agree on a majority of economic policy but are deeply divided on social issues - those that arguably have more impact on individual personal lives.

Catherine is right on one other thing too. There is a future for a classical liberal party. One that attracts all ages. The 'disengaged' who are perenially cynical about self-serving politicians. Young people like my son who baulk at socialism and collectivism, but don't identify with a political brand of any sort. NOT conservatists; and NOT statists.

The Libertarianz can surely not go another election with their ever energetic efforts but disheartening results?

There are rather a lot of politically homeless people out here I am afraid.

And on a related note Oswald asks about The Conservative Party, "Why are they getting even more derision from the so-called right-wing blogs?"

My answer:

Because 'so-called right-wing blogs' are misnamed?

Conservatives are by definition anti-abortion, anti voluntary euthanasia, anti same sex marriage and adoption, pro-criminalisation of drugs, and happy to use the state as an instrument of supression. None of which interests me.

A selection from the Otago Daily Times

The Otago Daily Times is intellectually a cut above other New Zealand papers.

Colin James' succinct pre-election wrap. The Domininion Post stupidly dispensed with Mr James services earlier in the year. They prefer lightweight bias:

What's changed during the campaign? Not John Key's prospects for a second term as Prime Minister even though Phil Goff narrowly bested him in this week's debates. But nor have Key's support parties' problems got sorted. For tactically-minded National-leaning voters, November has been unhelpful.

The trend in the average of the five main published opinion polls points to an overall National majority but not wide enough for Key to be confident in advance he won't need support. That explains Key's late buildup of Peters as a bogey: he needed to scare National voters to the polls after an otherwise soothing campaign.

ACT has come out of the campaign worse than it went in, thanks in part to the awkward, then embarrassing, tea party antics. Published polls, plus a stack of anecdotal evidence, point to its disappearance tomorrow or at best a sickly survival on tenuous life support from National.

Colin Craig's Conservatives have polled better than ACT recently. But to get seats Craig has to win the Rodney electorate.

Peter Dunne is at risk of being an overhang MP, of strictly marginal value to Key.

The Maori party's 2008 party vote is being shared with Mana. There is a real possibility the Maori party gets four seats and three are overhangs, which would mean Key has to get 62 seats for a majority (63 if Dunne is also an overhang). The good news in that for the Maori party is that it just might have more leverage than in 2008 to push its whanau ora flagship policy.

For Labour the anecdotal evidence suggests somewhere in the upper 20s, possibly better if there has been a late swing, as some polls suggest. But Labour has bled to the Greens through the campaign after bleeding to Key from 2007. The solidity of Greens' support will be tested in the next three years if Labour manages a resurgence.

And Peters? The polls have been tantalising but the trend average leaves him short. Still, you never say never with Peters. As Goff, hoping for a (not completely dismissible) shock win that needs Peters, might say.

And this delightful letter from 100 years ago:

Prohibition punishes the whole population

In the Prohibition camp preaching to the converted goes on merrily; the proposition that if my neighbour gets drunk it is against me that a prohibition order must be taken out had never greater acceptance. What percentage of citizens get drunk I am unaware: two in every 100, says a correspondent of the Daily Times. To correct the bibulous error of the two, a prohibition order is to be taken out against the other 98.

According to the same correspondent the total number of drunkards in New Zealand is 8000, which sounds a liberal estimate. For the amendment of the 8000 a prohibition order is to be taken out against the whole population. It is not assumed or assumable that the whole population will agree to this lunatic treatment; it will be held sufficient if one-half agree, or at the most three-fifths. The remaining half, or the remaining two-fifths, are then to be put under duress - guarded, watched, spied upon, policed, dragooned, bludgeoned into submission. This done, New Zealand, it is thought, will thenceforth rank as a vestibule of the kingdom of heaven. And there are ministers of religion who, having despaired of Christianity and gone back from Mount Zion to Mount Sinai, cry Amen! It will still remain, however, that two and two make four; and in my humble opinion there are other truths, fundamental and axiomatic, that may be expected to assert themselves. For one thing Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret. "You may drive out Nature with a fork, and yet she will come back."

And finally today's editorial which strikes a chord with me with its criticism of Trevor "stop your nonsense" Mallard:

The Labour Party 2011 election campaign was strategically inept, which is likely to contribute to one its worst defeats when the polls close tomorrow.

Unless Labour can get every single supporter out to vote tomorrow, and the party will try, it has the potential to remain in the wilderness for at least another six years.

Mistakes were compounded on throughout the shortened campaign period and long-serving Labour MP and campaign manager Trevor Mallard might have hard questions to answer on Tuesday if the caucus meets, as it generally does.

Mr Mallard, who spent most of his time on social networks during the campaign, was nowhere to be seen. In fact, first-term MP Grant Robertson was more active on the campaign trail.

Labour made a series of mistakes, and senior MPs should have known better.

Read more

Labour's desperate lies

I generally avoid the word 'lie'.

But the following is a lie.

"New Zealand has the highest youth unemployment rate in the developed world."

If you are wondering where you heard it most recently, NewstalkZB is regularly running a Labour advert which makes the claim.

The rate for 15-24 year-olds is currently 17.3%

This is lower than the US, the UK, France, Finland, Sweden, Chile, the Czech Republic, Italy, Belgium and a few others.

It isn't hard to check these spurious claims. For Labour to be so brazen they must be beyond caring.

Update: Even predicated on the "highest unemployment rate for under twenty year-olds" the claim does not hold up. There are many countries with unemployment rates for 15-19 year-olds higher than NZ's.

Colin Craig - the Big Spender

Has Colin Craig broken the spending limit on electioneering?

We have received his glossy A4 pamphlet at least three times and yesterday 4 copies fell out of the middle of the Hutt News. Apparently his signs are absolutely everywhere in Auckland. He seems to have more radio ads than any other party. "Hi Colin the Conservative here..." always conjures up an image of what the Goodnight Kiwi would sound like if it could speak.

I haven't got time to look up the rules right now but perhaps he can afford the fine as well.

1200 children born today might well be dead if they had been born in the 1960s

I am watching the Bryan Bruce documentary on child poverty and am completely exasperated. So much is left unsaid. He blames Rogernomics for everything that is wrong with children's health. His slant is thoroughly political despite contrary pleading that child welfare is an ethical and moral problem.

New Zealand apparently used to be a socialist Utopia. That is stated baldly. Bryan Bruce, who looks of a similar age to me, grew up in a country where children got a free bottle of milk everyday and so we lived in paradise.

Putting aside non-fatal preventable disease, as I pointed out earlier, in 1960 the infant mortality rate was 23 per 1,000 infants. Today the figure is 4.8.

So let's frame those statistics in Bryan's terms when he says, "150 babies died in New Zealand last year who might well be alive if they had been born in Sweden, Japan or even the Czech Republic."

1200 children born today might well be dead if they had been born in the 1960s. Born into that socialist era when New Zealanders, as he put it, owned everything including electricity and the rail, and our agricultural products had guaranteed access to the British market.

Thank God we have moved on.

Sweden. He shows two Dads with their toddlers at a kindy-like centre. In Sweden parents get 480 days parental leave which they can share. Then they go back to work. Sole parent or not.

Here we have allowed sole parents to make a lifestyle out of benefits with no requirement to go back to work - if they have ever been in work. Mr Bruce didn't illuminate the circumstances of all the children on benefits be detailed. Never did he mention that most are on the DPB.

He took us into homes in East Porirua where the children and parent had moved into the one room that wasn't mouldy rendering them "over-crowded". Why didn't they clean the mould from the other rooms away? I have to do it upstairs in our house. The bathroom curtain has been bleached; then later dyed; and eventually replaced with a cheap Warehouse wooden blind. The bedroom windows and window sills need the blackened grime removed regularly. The walls feature some mould from time to time but I keep on top of it. This all happens because we can't afford to heat the whole house in winter. But we own it and want to protect it. In state houses it looks like the tenants expect someone else to do the upkeep, including cleaning.

I am angry and appalled. Not because the state is failing these people and their children. But because the PARENTS themselves are failing their children. Yes, some of their homes are irredeemable hovels needing attention but I also know that periodically the authorities come in and repair and renovate yet the results are not appreciated or cared for. Thus, over time, they degenerate once more.

Their children resemble their homes. In preventable neglected condition.

Too much input

I suddenly started thinking about sensory stimulation. The only reason is, we had another mild escalation in our house over why the heck is Master Chef on when nobody watches it? It's just a load of sound and emotion with no gain. None of us is interested in cooking. I hit the off button.

Now I am standing here in the quiet thinking. Another family member is reading. Another is drawing, and the last is listening to House music in a different room. Peace. PEACE.

I am thinking about young men who hurt babies. I, and probably you, can recognise and deal with multiple sensory imput and subsequent overload. It's prevalent across society. Can others? When young men have channels of input prioritised (eg watching a DVD, playing Xbox, texting) being compromised by an additional stream from an unattended baby, can they respond with reason? Do they have the faculties?

Newborns need dedicated attention. The degree of attention diminishes with age but when they come home after birth their need is the only one that matters.

I am sure that rather a lot are surviving against the odds, and that very act of survival will later manifest in unhappy, self-destructive adulthoods.