Who is this?

That was weird. I'd glanced at this morning's paper while making a cup of tea, and was fleetingly trying to figure out who the woman on the right is. She looked vaguely familiar and the person who sprung to mind was media trainer and TV producer, Janet Wilson. So I found a picture of Janet from a few years ago. By comparison, the woman on the right is similarly gingery, same nose, same eyebrow line, same complexion tone, the eyes starting to go downwards at the sides without a very broad smile, and overly made-up to compensate for age?

Perhaps not, but who does she look like?

On being a case manager

Unusually, I was reading the comments thread after a piece on Stuff about 35 WINZ roles going. Resentment against case managers led to some taking a celebratory position (even though the roles aren't case managers - most readers don't actually READ).

Anyway the following comment caught my eye:

The ignorance of some of these comments is astounding. I used to be a DPB case manager in Porirua with a caseload of 136 clients. Most were lovely people who were victims of circumstance, but some were nasty pieces of work. Threats of violence, nothing you did was enough for them because of their sense of entitlement. The fraudsters, those that chose benefits as a lifestyle. Yet you still bust a gut to help them within the bounds of legislation. Hard not to be pissed that some were making more than you on the benefit ($26,250 was my salary. Ludicrous).

Until you've been on the other side of the desk, don't make assumptions about the lack of empathy of your average case manager. They feel overworked, stressed, carry great responsibility and are bound by lots of red tape. Most are in the job to genuinely help people, but when you get crapped on repeatedly, it's hard not to become cynical. Best of luck to them. And some of you need to develop empathy of your own.

The comment appears genuine. The caseload ratio  and salary look credible. And contrary to what people believe about me, I'm sure that most people on the DPB are perfectly nice people. Most I've come across are. I still  hold fast to the idea nevertheless, that the DPB hasn't improved their lives. The benefit itself probably created the "circumstance" that resulted in their dependency.

Yet again I wonder at the size of the second group she (more likely than 'he') describes. I once put the question to a close relative who spent some years working for social welfare on the front-line. That was back in the late70s/early 80s and times have changed. But he estimated around one third to a half were people exploiting the system. A handful were downright dangerous to deal with.

But see the real problem revealed within the comment above. The very people who know that someone is 'misusing' welfare have to play along. They are bound.

Whereas, in the non-government sector, a volunteer agency, services can be withdrawn when the 'client' isn't 'coming to the party'. The managers of an agency I volunteered with eventually made that call on a couple of my cases, to my relief.

To a degree, the new welfare reforms are an attempt to give case managers that facility. To sort the wheat from the chaff and act accordingly. The threat of a benefit cut when people won't take a job or meet an obligation is not entirely new. Under Labour, sanctions were routinely used. But the range of obligations and persons they apply to is now much wider.

As in any organisation, some will abuse power. Let's hope the majority of case managers reflect the one quoted here who sounds like a reasonable, compassionate individual.

Babies put into state care

The headline on Stuff reads: Babies taken at birth from risky mothers.

Guaranteed to pique my interest.

Nearly 800 newborn babies were taken from their mothers and put into government care in the past five years, with one Waikato baby taken within hours of its birth. The 773 babies - all less than a month old - were taken due to "serious concerns" about their parents' ability to care for them.

773 babies over a 5 year period. Sounds a lot but it's only 3 a week. Out of 1,176 per week (2012).

The reporting doesn't say so but I am thinking some of these births will be to incarcerated females. While imprisoned mothers have the facility to keep and care for their newborns, some will still not be in a position to. Apparently, "The mothers and babies units are only available to women who meet security requirements."

Some of these newborns could be to mothers on methadone whose babies are removed to de-tox.

Some births will be to women with known serious mental health problems. 3 a week is not surprising.

Then, I'm looking to see if the reporter has broken down the figures annually to show any trend. No. Because if she had, more than likely the numbers are decreasing (if they reflect the below graph) - not good copy. Decreasing numbers may simply be a facet of decreasing births over the past six years.

I am left speculating on the difference between regions. The number for the Southern region seems high. Perhaps it reflects practice rather than the incidence of at-risk births.

Importing workers for jobs locals don't want

It's the perennial New Zealand story. Harvest time and no-one to pick the fruit. Thank God for the Vanuatuans - "Ni-Vanuatu" I have been advised.

A lack of seasonal staff is adding to the pressures Central Otago fruit growers face from the weather and also hampering industry growth.
Workers to harvest the area's main crops of cherries, apricots, apples and grapes were scarce this past season and that could be worse for the coming season, growers say.
If had not been able to access 50 Vanuatuans from Blenheim at the last minute through Seasonal Solutions, he would have been in dire straits, Central Otago Winegrowers Association president James Dicey said.

Presumably the workers are accommodated on site so travelling from anywhere in NZ would be possible.

There are currently 129,000 people on the new Job Seeker Support Benefit. But even in  Alexandra, Balclutha, Dunedin, Gore, Invercargill, Mosgiel, Oamaru, Queenstown, and Timaru there were over 4,000 people claiming an unemployment benefit in June (the number has probably been boosted to around 5-6,000 on JSS).

Any work is good work despite the Left's propensity for describing manual, casual jobs as "dead-end" . As well,

''To progress and go forward, we need an adequate casual staff base. We can't grow our permanent staff base without growing our business and to grow the business, we need more casual staff.
''The more we can harvest, the more we can grow and the more permanent jobs we can create.''

Anyway, good on the Ni-Vanuatu who haven't lost the will to be self-supporting.

Pre-ordering Justin Timberlake

Not me. I have no use for iTune vouchers. But my daughter does.

I won the Auckland University's Stats Chat competition (again:-))

Stat of the Week Winner: July 13 – 19 2013

Thank you for the fantastic nominations in last week’s competition.
We’re awarding the prize to Lindsay Mitchell, for her nomination of Stuff’s mixup in the reporting of a statistic:

25 in every 1000 ex-nuptial births occur to women aged between 15 and 19.
Because it is untrue. The claim is a misrepresentation of the following statistic:
25 in 1000 unmarried females aged 15-19 have an ex-nuptial birth (2011)

Sometimes rewording a statistic ends up with a totally different statistic. For example, the proportion of men who are left handed is not the same as the proportion of left handers who are men.

Hundreds line up for jobs - Labour's dream

Labour's main objection to the welfare reforms revolves around a lack of jobs. The government should be creating jobs they say (though stop short of describing how).

"Kiwis are lining up in their hundreds for a small number of jobs," Jacinda Ardern tells us to illustrate how willing beneficiaries are the victims of an economy not producing enough work for them.

So here's an interesting report that unusually points out that many of the hundreds lining up for jobs at a new Fonterra milk plant were already employed elsewhere.

Labour will like the headline:

Hundreds apply for 90 Fonterra jobs

But perhaps not the content:

"...unemployment did not appear to be the driving force for the huge response, with many of the 400 people who had turned out between 10am and noon on Saturday already in jobs, often skilled work."

Here's a thought on which to base a sound job creation policy. The tax taken to pay Ardern's salary could easily be better used to create two or three productive jobs in the private sector.

NZ Child Poverty rate bang on OECD median

The Child Poverty Action Group reacting to the latest Household Incomes Report:

"The government's being told there's no excuse for its failure to act on the high number of children living in poverty. The Child Poverty Action Group says latest figures show one quarter of all New Zealand children are living below the poverty line. Its convener, Associate Professor Mike O'Brien, says that hasn't changed from a year ago. He says that may not be surprising, as the government hasn't done anything to make any difference."We've seen enough material from a whole range of sources to know the extent of child poverty and I guess I would have expected there would have been really concerted effort from the government to respond to some of those reports and the data that we now have." Dr O'Brien says New Zealand's high rate of child poverty damages the country's international reputation."(My emphasis)

Here's a table from that report:

Table J.3

Child poverty rates (%) in the OECD-34, c 2010:

50% of median threshold (BHC)

Israel	29	France	11
Turkey	28	Luxembourg	11
Mexico	25	Ireland	10
Chile	24	Netherlands	10
Spain	21	United Kingdom	10
United States	21	Switzerland	10
Italy	18	Germany	9
Greece	18	Slovenia	9
Japan	16	Hungary	9
Portugal	16	Czech Republic	9
Australia	15	Korea	9
Canada	14	Sweden	8
Poland	14	Austria	8
Belgium	13	Iceland	7
Estonia	12	Norway	5
Slovak Republic	12	Finland	4
New Zealand	12	Denmark	4
OECD median	12

Additionally CPAG make no mention that child hardship actually fell between 2011/12:

Earthquake in Wellington

I haven't moved that fast in a while. What felt like a reasonably strong earthquake struck around 7:15am while I was having a bath! The imperative to get some clothes on outdid my tendency to freeze when the earth moves. Geonet is reporting it as severe though I can't see any media reports. But who's working at this time?

Chris Trotter goes too far

There have been a couple of on-line polls  this week showing most people support the welfare reforms. To my mind there are a number of reasons why and I'll post about that later. But the average person is comfortable with work expectations and social obligations of the kind they regularly meet themselves. And those beneficiaries who genuinely cannot support themselves will continue to receive the same assistance from the state.

So Chris Trotter's  diatribe this morning is a hysterical and offensive over-reaction. The targets of it should make an official complaint.

But think on this. The constant theme from the 'left' is the 'right' bashes beneficiaries. Listen, any beneficiary that read his column would feel wretched afterwards.

The National-led Government's dramatic reform of New Zealand's social welfare system marks an ominous turning point in the country's history. Never before has the state been willing to satisfy so completely the most punitive, the cruellest and nakedly sociopathic impulses of its wealthiest citizens.....
Before the rest of New Zealand could accept such callous brutalisation, however, the National-led Government had first to transform welfare beneficiaries into useless and undeserving sub-humans. Their poverty had to be presented as the consequence of their own lack of application and self-discipline.
They had to become idle ingrates: drug addicts and criminals, totally unworthy of decent people's respect or compassion.
And now, because it is not made up of monsters, and for the sake of their hapless children, the Government is insisting that these creatures somehow be "persuaded" to turn their lives around. This time, however, the persuasion is not going to involve the use of carrots. This time the ministry is going to use the stick.
And, just as they were in Germany 75 years ago, the doctors are being asked to help.
We must hope that Kiwi physicians turn out to be less enthusiastic social engineers.

Shonky birth statistics

An article appears in Stuff today:

 The number of children born outside wedlock is fast approaching the number born to married parents, and debate is raging over what it will mean for society.

Debate raging? I hadn't noticed. Examples of "raging debates" are  asset sales or same-sex marriage.

Anyway at the end of the article these statistics appear:

BIRTH STATISTICS
Births to married and unmarried couples
Fifty years ago, 8 per cent of births were ex-nuptial.
Last year, 48 per cent of births were ex-nuptial.
About 80 per cent of Maori women give birth ex-nuptially.
About 50 per cent of Pakeha women give birth ex-nuptially.
About 13 per cent of Asian women give birth ex-nuptially.
15 in every 1000 ex-nuptial births is to a woman aged between 40 and 44.
25 in every 1000 ex-nuptial births occur to women aged between 15 and 19.

The third, fourth and fifth are wrong. 80 percent of births to Maori women are ex-nuptial. That's not the same as "80 percent of Maori women give birth ex-nuptially." Not all women give birth.

The last two are really shonky. I'll use the last because I'm familiar with the data.

25 in every 1000 ex-nuptial births is 2.5 percent. Yet in 2012 15-19 year-olds had 6.2 percent of all births (nuptial and ex-nuptial). So a large majority of teenagers are giving birth inside marriage? No.

The current teenage birth rate is around 24.89 per 1000 15-19 females. 23.8 per 1000 unmarried 15-19 year-old females gave birth ex-nuptially.

There were 3,768 births to teenagers last year; that means 3,602 were ex-nuptial which represents 12.4 percent of the 29,159 ex-nuptial births.

Expressed as per above then:

124 in every 1000 ex-nuptial births occur to women aged between 15 and 19

Percentage of working age population on a benefit over the last decade

The four main benefits all came to an end yesterday. So the data is worth recording for posterity.

Below I've scanned MSD's graphs for each expressed as a percentage of the working age population (18-64) over the past decade. Beneath I've added some observations.

The invalid benefit axis has a different scale  so the improvement looks better than it is.

The overall dependency has dropped from around 12.8 percent to 10.7 percent. Still over one in ten people on welfare.

This represents a reduction in absolute numbers. But because the numbers have held up in the invalid and domestic purposes benefits - where people typically stay dependent for long periods - the degree of dependency in terms of longevity is still very high. To explain that better, look at the unemployment benefit. The numbers plummeted. But those year-end snapshot totals  represent people who will typically be on a benefit for 7-8 months. Whereas the DPB numbers represent people who will be on a benefit for 7-8 years.

To their credit, the government is now addressing this facet by focussing efforts on those who fit a long-termer profile (barring carer's of invalids, terminally ill, chronically disabled, etc).

The improving economy during Labour's stint resulted in a lot of people coming off the unemployment benefit - 4 percent dropped to 0.7 percent. And that was great.

But the DPB was far less amenable to the positive effect, with the percentage dropping from 4.5 to 3.7 percent. If 3.7 percent is the best a strong economy can achieve then it's clear other factors are at play.

Updating artist blog

Working at the gallery keeps me temporarily away from social commentary blogging so here's a new pastel just going up on my artist blog:

Good news that probably won't see the light of day

The latest Household Incomes Survey is now available. It is still one year out of date but indicates some trends nevertheless. This is the official source of 'child poverty' statistics.

I'm just going to highlight some good news and see if this gets reported elsewhere. Most of the people who read and report on this stuff look for bad news:

Hardship rates for children rose from 15% in the 2007 HES to 21% in HES 2011, then fell to 17% in HES 2012.  

On the latest [international] comparisons available (c 2010-2011), New Zealand is in the middle of the rankings for population and child poverty rates on both measures. For example, the rates for children (0-17 years) are 12% (OECD) and 19% (EU), both in the middle for the respective measures.

 From HES 2011 to HES 2012:

·         median household income rose 2.3% in real terms, following a 3% fall from HES 2010 to HES 2011

·         incomes rose a little for all the lower 9 deciles

 in the context of the GFC and its aftermath [the recovery] is better than many other countries who experienced net falls in the median in the period – for example, Australia, Ireland, the UK and the US

 From HES 2011 to 2012, inequality as measured by the Gini fell significantly

Public support welfare reforms

From the NZ Herald:

What do you think of the welfare reforms?

12400–12450 votes

Sensible and about time 58%

Not sure - need to see the effects 12%

A bit heavy-handed 16%

Totally unjustified 13%

I don't care 1%

Trevor Mallard: deluding himself or lying?

Talking to Tim Fookes on NewstalkZB about the welfare reforms this morning, local MP Trevor Mallard said,

"...the total number of beneficiaries dropped by about two thirds when we were in government."

He was stressing the total number to address Tim's suggestion that many people had simply moved off the dole and onto sickness or invalid's benefit (which has some truth to it).

Looking at the four main benefits, in 1999 there were 359,433. Thanks to plummeting numbers on the unemployment benefit, the total had dropped to 261,747 by 2008.

A drop of 27 percent.

So why would Trevor make such a gross exaggeration? Has he kidded himself into believing Labour really accomplished that or is he just a liar?

Listen here.


For the two commentors here's a relevant graph:

Children included in a benefit at birth or soon after

This post is for the benefit of a commentor on the Daily Blog who says I am talking "nonsense".

The following is a table supplied to be by MSD under the OIA.

 

See also MSD publication Children in Families Supported by Main Benefits:

The proportion included in a benefit at birth or very soon after fell from around 25% of children born in the 1990s to 20% of children born in 2005 and 2006 and 18% of children born in 2007. Although contact with the benefit system fell, as many as one in five children turning 15 in 2008 are estimated to have been supported by a main benefit for a total of seven or more of their first 14 years of life. An estimated one in ten spent a total of 11 or more of their first 14 years supported by a main benefit.

So in the year when NZ had the lowest unemployment rate in the OECD, 18 percent of children born that year were dependent on welfare by December 31.

And regarding increasing benefit levels being a disincentive to work:

 “…every 1 percentage point increase in the level of poverty reduction achieved by the welfare state is associated with an increase in the number of jobless families by 0.63 percentage points. Among the English-speaking countries, the correlation is even stronger (about 0.92), so that Australia and the United Kingdom reduce child poverty very significantly and have very high levels of joblessness among families; while Canada and the United States reduce poverty much less, but have much lower levels of joblessness.”

 Whiteford, P. and W.Adema (2007), “What Works Best in Reducing Child Poverty: A Benefit or Work Strategy?”, OECD Social, Employment and Migration Working Papers, No.51, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/233310267230

Update:

Table not enough. Here is the full OIA as requested.

 

Good news on physical child abuse statistics?

I was prompted to check the latest physical child abuse statistics when I heard Deborah Coddington (standing in for John Tamihere on Radio Live) say that the anti-smacking legislation is working. No disrespect to Deborah but I immediately wondered what she bases that on.

At best it could be claimed that the anti-smacking legislation has lowered the projection, but the trend it is still upward.

Pensions: What the UK and US save, NZ will pay for

The DomPost today reports on the Ministry of Social Development's push to get more retirees to claim pensions from their birth country to offset what New Zealand has to pay out. Fair enough. NZ has long held reciprocal pension arrangements with a number of countries.

But it raises another issue.

With many of those countries (particularly the United Kingdom, where so many NZ residents were born) lifting their retirement ages, what they save, NZ will have to pay out. Foreign-born new retirees will be eligible for NZ Super at 65 but there will be no immediate offsetting equivalent from their birth country.

Here's what is happening in the UK.

And this is what the US is doing.

It makes sense for NZ to broadly align itself with those countries is has social security arrangements with. This anomaly is yet another reason why John Key should have thought before pledging to hold the Super qualifying age down.

(Of course it would make more sense if people had their own individual pension plans but that's not the current debate. Raising the age of Super entitlement is.)

Welfare reduction target misreported

The NZ Herald reports on the release of progress on achieving the Better Public Service targets yesterday.

Welfare
1. Cut the number of people who have been on a working age benefit for more than 12 months by 30 per cent
In the past year, the number of long-term beneficiaries fell from 78,212 to 75,366 - a drop of 3.6 per cent.

The DomPost also reports on page 2, "The number of  people on a working age benefit for more than 12 months has dropped by 3,000, to 75,300."

They are both wrong.

The number of working age people on benefits for more than  12 months is far higher than 78, 212. The actual number is over 230,000.

The 78,212 refers to working age people who have employment obligations.These are the people who will be moved onto the new Job Seeker benefit next week (if the reforms are running to schedule). It ignores women with children younger than 14, most on the invalid benefit and some on the sickness benefit. They will move to either Sole Parent Support or Supported Living Payment.

The welfare target is better explained here.

As I've commented before, it's a very soft target.

(Progress on each of the 10 social targets is graphically depicted here.)

Get lost Grey Power

I have no regard for Grey Power. Do all of the grandparents who belong to this organisation agree that their grandsons (and grand daughters?) should be subject to compulsory military training because some scumbags commit crimes against the elderly and others? It's just one of those knee jerk responses that makes me groan. Why blame the vast majority of young people who live lawful and productive lives?

I suppose they'll be calling for Winston First to adopt this dictatorial, authoritarian measure as policy.  The worst of it is, if successful, Winston First will probably go up in the polls.

Oh, and don't demand my respect based on age. Your collectivist, statist, unthinking notions preclude it. I was going to say that young fools, middle-aged fools, old fools are all the same. But the old fool is actually worse. One might have expected some modicum of wisdom and tolerance to have developed by now.