Avoiding sanctions - how hard can it be?

Does anybody else notice the irony of  child poverty activists complaining about beneficiary parents travelling overseas who've had their payments suspended?

NewstalkZB reports:

Nine percent of Auckland sole-parent beneficiaries had their benefits suspended for travelling overseas in the six and a half months to the end of January.
The figures have been supplied to the Child Poverty Action Group under the Official Information Act.
They show 2414 Auckland sole-parent beneficiaries, had their benefits suspended for travelling, well above the national average of 6 per cent.

It's not that beneficiaries aren't allowed to travel overseas. They just have to tell WINZ. How difficult can that be?

Most working people would have to make arrangements with their employers regarding going overseas and a contact while away.

CPAG can get all indignant but most people are just going to shrug.

Photo of the day

Described in this photo as "a scholar and future politician" he is now a past politician.

At a Maori Party meeting at the marae on Hutt Rd I remember laughing at Pita Sharples sounding very much like Billy T James as he described becoming a MINISTER in her majesty's parliament no less. Utterly self-deprecating and humble. I'll miss him.

Who will replace Paula Bennett?

TV3 is reporting that Social Development Minister, Paula Bennett, wants a change and the PM agrees. Apparently she has a big future and needs to build experience.

If people really do enter politics to make a difference, she should stay put. She's done a better job than any other recent social development minister. Her 'been there, done that' background is hugely valuable. She can handle the opposition which is amongst the most vitriolic by nature. She's tough, she's Maori, she's young. All a great fit for that portfolio.

OK, she's been in the job for 6 years but it'd take that long to get a grip on the vastness of the biggest spending bureaucracy dealing with over a million New Zealanders.

It's my guess that the popularity of her reforms - only a start - helped with National's re-election. Only a week before the election she was promising to reduce beneficiary numbers a further 25% by 2017. People believe her.

It is also my guess that she has inspired many young Polynesians in West and South Auckland in an unprecedented way. She's fiesty and aspirational.

Moving her on might be good for Paula. It might be good for National. But will it be good for the country?

Apart from which, off the top of my head, I can't envisage a suitable replacement.

National 1938 to 2014

Kiwiblog has the following depiction of Labour's polling results from 1938 to 2014. Curiosity got the better of me so I produced the same for National beneath. Same downward trendline but nowhere near as steep.

 

A classic media beat-up story

My attention  was drawn to the following Telegraph article which claims:

Stay-at-home mothers 'have the most worthwhile lives'

Mothers who have put their career aside to care for their children have a stronger sense that their lives are “worthwhile” than the rest of society, official figures suggest.

New findings from the UK’s national “well-being” index show that those classed as economically inactive because they are caring for a family or home are also among the happiest people in Britain.

I had a look at the tables.

When  specifically asked how "worthwhile" they considered their lives, stay-at-home carers (who could be male) nudge out part-time workers, presumably many of whom are mums, with an average rating of 8.03 over 7.96. Overall the employed rate 7.85 and the retired 7.92

In a further table people are asked to rate their life satisfaction out of ten. The stay-at-home carers have an average rating of 7.51

The employed rate 7.62, retired 7.81, and students 7.74 - all higher though there's not much in it.

In this table the so-called stay-at-home mums are only a "stand-out" because they are grouped with other people who are economically inactive due to illness or discouragement. The low ratings are all associated with ill-health and, to a lesser degree, divorce.

On the whole most people in Britain seem pretty happy and getting happier.Not a headline grabber though.

"Our smallest citizens"

While it is temporarily out from behind the pay-wall I've taken the opportunity to record the following Listener article by Karl du Fresne based on an interview with Russell Wills, the Children's Commissioner:

Our smallest citizens

Children’s Commissioner Russell Wills explains that the poor really are poorer now – and whoever forms the next Government will need to set policies to help stop the damage to our under-fives.

By Karl du Fresne In Life in New Zealand

26th September, 2014

Image/Thinkstock

“How long have we got?” I ask Russell Wills. “As long as you need,” he replies.
The Children’s Commissioner is as good as his word. It’s a generous two hours before he wraps up our interview because he has a son waiting to be picked up from school.
He looks tired. Every Monday morning he’s on the early flight from Napier to Wellington, where he puts in two days as Commissioner. First thing Wednesday he’s back here, in his tiny, cluttered office at Hawke’s Bay Hospital, dealing with sick and often seriously disturbed children in the paediatric outpatients department.
Friday he describes as his “peripatetic, could-be-anywhere day”. Often he’s heading somewhere on a plane to give a speech – he averages about one a week. And every seventh weekend, he’s on call.
“My last weekend on call,” he says, “we had a child with pneumonia, which is straightforward, but he had an empyema, so the whole lung was full of pus, from top to bottom. He needed to be put to sleep and have a hole made so that a big fat drain could be put in to let the pus out.”
How old was he? “He was three. That’s common.”
Wills is the sixth person since 1989 to hold the title of Children’s Commissioner, but the first to carry on doing his previous job simultaneously. He insisted on it as a condition of his appointment and Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett agreed.
He had two reasons for wanting to continue practising paediatrics. “I thought it would keep me grounded, but I also thought it would help my credibility with the public and with ministers. And I think it has.”
But back to that last weekend on call. “That weekend,” Wills continues, “I had three children in intensive care and one on the verge of being admitted, and that was a very usual weekend load.” Typically there are 40 inpatients spread between the hospital’s Special Care Baby Unit (or SCBU; he pronounces it “Skiboo” – I unscramble the code later) and the children’s ward. In an average year, the hospital admits 3000 children – that’s an average of eight a day from a region with a population of 155,000.
How come? It’s simple. “Half the children in Hawke’s Bay are born into the two poorest income deciles.” It’s one of five district health board areas that stand out as having high rates of child poverty; the others are Northland, South Auckland, Lakes (Rotorua) and Tairawhiti (Gisborne).
In Tairawhiti, three-quarters of babies are born into deciles nine and 10, the two poorest. (Confusingly, decile rankings in health are the reverse of those in education.) “Imagine that,” says Wills. He barely seems able to grasp it himself.
“The workload across those five DHBs is very similar – high poverty, cold, damp, crowded housing, and a high proportion of Maori and Pasifika families.
“What you get with that is a very high acute workload, particularly with respiratory, skin and gut infections, with all the complications that go with those. We frequently see kids who present late – kids who are really, really ill, needing resuscitation, who ought to have been identified in primary care, but weren’t, for various reasons.”
It’s an eye-opener for young British registrars who come to Hawke’s Bay for experience in paediatrics, observes Wills. “We have diseases that they’ve read about but never seen – tuberculosis, acute rheumatic fever.”
And there’s more. Wills and his colleagues also have a heavy outpatient workload that includes a lot of child-protection work – in other words, looking after children in violent households – and children with severe behavioural problems.
“There are three of us here and that’s most of what we do. We see a lot of quite young children with very severe behaviour disturbance, for a whole bunch of reasons. Typically there’s a mix of domestic violence, major mental illness in parents, serious addictions, very poor family and whanau support, fetal alcohol and fetal drug effects, and so those kids have, as you’d expect, delayed development and very challenging behaviours. So our task is to figure out why they behave the way they do and then start putting them back together again.”
THE POWER OF THE PARENT
It must seem a very long way, sociologically if not geographically, from Wills’ own childhood. He was born in the hospital where he now works. His upbringing couldn’t have been more comfortably middle class. Mum was a physiotherapist who pioneered antenatal physiotherapy in Hawke’s Bay. Dad owned a busy pharmacy in the Napier suburb of Marewa and was well connected in business and sporting circles.
As a boy, Wills rode his bike around Marewa, Napier South and Maraenui delivering prescriptions and junk mail for his father. He went to Lindisfarne, the state-integrated Presbyterian boys’ school in Hastings that his teenage sons, Peter and Michael, now attend. Weekends often involved helping on working bees with his father’s friends from Jaycees.
There was rugby, cricket and Sunday school too. The day of our interview, he was delighted to bump into his old Sunday school teacher in the hospital car park; he hadn’t seen him for 40 years.
It was in many ways a quintessentially conventional – you might say privileged – Hawke’s Bay boyhood. In one respect, though, Wills’ upbringing was far from normal. As a hyperactive three-year-old he fell while trying to extract a nail his father had just hammered into the wall of their garage. The blow to his head when he hit the concrete floor rendered him deaf for five years.
“There were plans to send me to Van Asch [a school for deaf children in Christchurch], but my five-foot-one-inch red-headed mother wouldn’t have a bar of it, so I went to Napier Central.”
He recalls being in the toilet at lunchtime on his first day of school and not hearing the bell ring. “I came out and the playground was empty. The teacher strapped me for being late back to class. I remember telling Mum and her saying, ‘Right – get in the car!’” He laughs at the memory. “She didn’t take that lying down. It didn’t happen again.”
Did the experience of deafness, which was eventually cured by reconstructive surgery, give him empathy with people who were sick or disabled? “It’s hard to know, isn’t it? A lot of my outpatient work is with disabled children, and I guess I really get that it’s the environment that is really disabling for a child. If a child has a disability and you create an environment around them that meets their needs, then they are less disabled.”
He also learnt an important lesson from his stroppy mother. “What Mum showed me was the power of the parent as an advocate for their child. When we’re good at partnering with parents, they can be amazing advocates for their children and make sure the stuff happens that perhaps we [the system] should have done.”
Not all parents can do it, though. “Some parents have their own needs: low IQ, mental illness, addiction. Then we have to make sure we do that work.”

Children’s Commissioner Russell Wills. Image/Hagen Hopkins

Could he ever have imagined, growing up in a secure, middle-class home with devoted parents, that there was another side to Hawke’s Bay? Or did it simply not exist then? “It was there. An early memory is having lunch next to a Maori boy at primary school. He didn’t have any lunch, so we shared mine, and he said, ‘Gee you’re lucky’, and I said, ‘Why’s that?’ And he said, ‘Because your parents love you.’”
That aside, some things are different now. For example, it never occurred to Wills as a 10-year-old that riding his bike around working-class Maraenui with two saddlebags full of drugs wasn’t a good idea. “It wouldn’t have occurred to Dad either. It was safe. You wouldn’t do that now.
“The world has changed. It really has. I still have lots of patients in Maraenui and Napier South and Flaxmere, and I’ll go and visit them, and it just feels different.
“Marewa is not the flashest suburb in Napier. Dad would often not charge people because it was very clear they couldn’t afford it. But the poor are poorer now, they really are. And there are more of them.”
What’s the explanation? He’s not sure. “It’s complex. The solutions are complex too, but they are within our hands.”
REASON ENOUGH
Paediatrics wasn’t Wills’ career choice when he began studying medicine. He wanted to be a GP. So what altered his course? “A year of paediatrics,” he says with a laugh.
He can be intense at times but laughs readily, often in a gently self-mocking way. He’s 50, but has a boyish good humour that, combined with his earnest desire to do the right thing, somehow reminds me of Michael J Fox.
Wills did his initial medical training at the University of Otago and later acquired a master’s degree in public health in Brisbane, as did his wife, Mary. (He says Mary, originally from Invercargill, is the clever one, with two master’s degrees. She has a managerial job at Hawke’s Bay District Health Board.)
He did his paediatric training in Britain, intending it to be merely an adjunct of general practice. Though he loved working with children, the experience wasn’t entirely encouraging: he found himself working 80-hour weeks in Winchester and admits it was hard going. A six-week stint in a neonatal unit in Southampton was no better. Junior doctors were responsible for as many as 12 ventilated babies.
It was terrifying, he says; a good lesson in how not to do things. “I very nearly left medicine at that point. I was looking for a job as a drug-company rep.”
What changed his mind was a stint working as a community doctor in the south of England, doing developmental checks on children who were about to start school. Driving around the red-brick schools of Hampshire in a VW Kombi he and Mary had bought for a tour of Europe, Wills fell in love with paediatrics again.
What was the appeal? “I just love kids. It’s not very complicated. If I wasn’t doing this, I’d probably be a teacher.”
Children can be very complicated medically, says Wills, but as people, they’re not. “If they like you they give you a hug. If they don’t like you, they tell you.”
But surely it’s difficult dealing with patients who are often too young to explain their symptoms? “Well, sometimes communication is a challenge. It’s just a skill you have to work at. You have to get down and make friends with them. That’s the deal.”
THE OTHER CHILDREN
That comforting bromide about New Zealand being a great country to raise children – is it still true for most families? Unquestionably, says Wills. “My sons play four sports. They’re busy every night. My brother in the UK says just getting access to a playing field there is really difficult.
“We go camping at Mahia in the summer holidays. It’s cheap as chips. We go with friends. Our kids have learned to surf, we go fishing … three-quarters of kids in New Zealand have opportunities that kids of similar incomes in other countries don’t have. In some countries, you have to pay to go to the beach.”
But it’s those other children, the ones living in cold, overcrowded homes and going to school without food or adequate clothing, whom Wills has made his No 1 priority as Children’s Commissioner. More than any of his predecessors, he has championed the issue of child poverty and helped place it squarely on the political agenda.
He notes that there are 44,000 poverty-related admissions to New Zealand hospitals every year – an increase of 7500 since the global financial crisis unfolded.
What has struck Wills and his colleagues is that admission numbers no longer fall off in summer. “We used to have this fabulous quiet time in January and February. We don’t get that any more. So we see what used to be winter illnesses – pneumonia, bronchiolitis, that sort of thing – all year round.” Again, it’s the very young who are most affected.
Any idea why? “When you look at the determinants, the strongest associations are crowding and poverty. It seems likely that there are more families bunking in together. Evidence from household surveys suggests that’s true.
“Crowded conditions mean illnesses spread easily. Very commonly families all sleep in the living room because they can only afford to heat one room. It only takes one kid to bring a cold or school sores home. Adults and older kids get a cold, but the baby gets bronchiolitis or pneumonia and ends up in hospital.”

Image/Thinkstock

A high proportion of patients are from single-parent households. Other common factors are unemployment and low qualifications. Maori and Pasifika children figure disproportionately.
But Wills shoots down the notion that it’s all about solo mothers or welfare dependency. It’s more complex than that. “Forty per cent of kids living in poverty have a parent who’s working. Half are from two-parent households. Sole parenthood and benefit dependency do not account for our high rate of child illness.”
A crucial factor is the price of housing. “At the bottom end it’s common for families to spend between half and two-thirds of their income on housing, which is why they crowd together. That’s very different from when we were kids.”
And then there are power prices, the very mention of which makes Wills shake his head in mystification. “I’m not an economist, but I simply don’t understand how power prices have gone up the way they have.”
STRAIGHT SHOOTING
Wills has never shrunk from taking a stand on the issues he regards as important. Before his appointment, as a spokesman for the Paediatric Society, he was an outspoken supporter of former Green MP Sue Bradford’s bill outlawing parental smacking. Now it’s child poverty.
It’s an issue that often gets muddied by ideology, but with Wills you get the impression that dogma doesn’t enter into it. He simply cares about children and thinks it’s shocking that some get a poor start – one that’s likely to hold them back all their lives.
He doesn’t mince words, either, in the way that a risk-averse bureaucrat might. On TV3’s The Nation in June, interviewer Lisa Owen asked whether he agreed with Professor Jonathan Boston – who co-chaired an expert advisory panel Wills set up to investigate child poverty – that it was scandalous that New Zealand treated its elderly so much better than its children.
“Of course I do,” replied Wills. He also agreed with Boston that benefits were “woefully inadequate”.
Such blunt talk might be expected to invite censure from his political masters, but Paula Bennett insists Wills’ stand on child poverty causes her no discomfort. In fact, she says she likes his independence: “I don’t appoint someone and then tell them what to do. I believe in setting people up to do the best job they can and I’m very comfortable with the work that Russell does. Whether he always agrees with the Government or not is completely irrelevant.”
She describes Wills as totally child-centred. “I’ve found him to be incredibly driven by his work for children and never doubted that that’s where his commitment lies. As long as he’s coming from a place of putting children first, then I would support him in whatever work he’s doing.”
The admiration is mutual. Wills took a liking to Bennett when he was first interviewed for the job. She had already signalled her interest in children’s issues with the publication of a Green Paper on child protection. “She said, ‘I really want to make a difference to child protection outcomes and I need some help,’” recalls Wills. It was clearly a factor in his decision to apply for the job.
He and the minister meet regularly. “It’s a free and frank relationship,” he says. “She hasn’t always agreed with what I’ve done or said.”
He agrees he has probably said things that ruffled Government feathers, “but that’s my job. I don’t just upset her. I upset the left as often as I upset the right. I think it’s my job to speak truth to power. I think she’s very comfortable with that. I think she likes people to be frank with her.”
In any case, Wills likes some of the things the Government has done: extending paid parental leave, for example, and putting more effort into early childhood education. He also approves of National’s and Labour’s pledges to extend free doctors’ visits and prescriptions to children under 13, and would be even more pleased if after-hours access to medical care could be made easier for low-income parents who often work shifts or long hours.
It’s not enough, though. Wills wants a national conversation about child poverty. He thinks we should all agree it’s not okay that if a child in New Zealand is born poor, that determines their lifetime prospects.
When I suggest no one would disagree that having 170,000 children living in poverty is a bad thing, he pulls me up. “Actually, there’s a high level of tolerance for this still. When we ask voters what’s the most important thing for them this election, among centre-left and female voters, child poverty is usually in the top three. Among males, business owners and centre-right voters, it’s down at seventh or eighth.”
WEALTH DISTRIBUTION
But child poverty remains an ideological minefield. A substantial body of opinion holds that welfare is already too big a drain on the productive sector. Many of the ideas Wills endorses, such as the universal child payment recommended by his expert advisory group, would inevitably require more welfare spending.
Moreover, there’s concern that throwing more money at poor families risks perpetuating the problem. Child advocate Dame Lesley Max, founder and chief executive of the Great Potentials Foundation, says that a universal child payment, programmed to run out once the child reaches a fixed age, could nudge parents into paid employment as intended, but it could also serve as an incentive to have another child once the payment starts petering out.
Another with misgivings is Wellington welfare researcher and former Act Party candidate Lindsay Mitchell. “There is ample international research showing the rate of single parenthood increases with higher benefit payments,” she says. “There is a strong risk that raising benefits, which also reduces the gap between income from work and welfare, aggravates benefit dependence. Long-term benefit dependence is bad for children. That’s beyond dispute.”
Mitchell describes Wills as a good-hearted man and says it’s understandable that he wants immediate action on child poverty, but adds: “Advocates for greater wealth redistribution need to think about the long-term picture. The breakdown of the two-parent family is a major contributor to child poverty and all the associated risks: ill-health, abuse and neglect, educational underachievement and behavioural problems. The trend won’t be reversed by doing more of what caused it in the first place.”

Minister for Social Development Paula Bennett. Image/Thinkstock

IT’S AFFECTING US ALL
Wills accepts that there’s no magic bullet. He also agrees that state spending to alleviate child poverty needs to be rigorously monitored to ensure it achieves the desired outcomes. “We just don’t throw money at the problem. We need to know what investments make the biggest difference. Early childhood education [ECE] obviously makes a big difference; that’s import­ant. ECE for kids in poorer areas is a must-have.”
A crucial first step, he says, is to measure the true extent of child poverty – a project his office has embarked on in collaboration with the University of Otago and the JR McKenzie Trust. “You can’t fix a thing unless you can measure it and monitor progress.”
Then he thinks governments should set targets for the reduction of child poverty. After all, they do it with other things. “We have a plan for biosecurity and the road toll. You have legislation, you set targets and you hold government and ministries accountable. That’s what you do.”
Target-setting should be mandatory for every incoming government and it should be linked to the Budget process, he suggests. It would be up to each government to set the target and choose the appropriate policy mix.
“Let’s understand that this really matters, because it affects all of us. Then we need to be clear about who’s affected most, and that’s the youngest children. So which children do we need to invest in, at what age, and how? We need to understand that well and communicate it well.
“And we need to use the language of investment. We have an ageing population. As people leave the workforce, we need to replace them. The proportion of people entering the workforce compared with those leaving is falling. Soon it’s going to be one to one.
“If we want to maintain our standard of living and national super and interest-free student loans, we have to be able to afford it, which means we need our workforce to be as productive as it possibly can be. If half of Maori kids leave school with no qualifications, that ain’t going to happen; we’re in real trouble.”
Note the references to investment. One of Wills’ missions is to get the business sector onside by highlighting the economic cost of children growing up in poverty, requiring expensive medical treatment for poverty-related illnesses, falling into crime, failing to achieve educationally and ending up on welfare – all at a cost to the productive sector.
“The evidence tells us that if we want our workforce to be as productive as it possibly can be, we need to keep doing the good things we’re doing.
“Our education system works pretty well. What we aren’t doing is investing in that period of children’s lives that makes the biggest difference, and that’s ages one to five. That’s when your brain is making those millions of connections every minute. Those connections are determined by the child’s environment.
“Now, if they are growing up in an impoverished environment where those needs are not met, where parents are stressed, where it’s cold and damp and they’re sick, they’re going to arrive at school not ready. By the time the education system picks them up, the damage is done.”
It’s a warning that’s not lost on Phil O’Reilly, chief executive of BusinessNZ. O’Reilly was a member of Wills’ expert advisory panel and has taken the message to business audiences.
“The Ministry of Social Development will tell you that if an 18-year-old kid gets on the dole and stays there for more than about six months, chances are they will stay there forever and die young and without qualifications,” says O’Reilly. “There’s only one answer to that if you’re a business person: well, we’d better invest in them at 18 then, or earlier, to make sure they don’t end up there. I can use that information to make business people see that child poverty can have a long-term economic impact – for example, more taxes – and that they’re not going to get the talent they need, which is what business is most interested in.”
Child poverty is enormously daunting and complex, says O’Reilly, but he admires the way Wills has gone about tackling the issue. The advisory group brought together people who wouldn’t normally sit around the same table – O’Reilly, the champion of private enterprise, found himself alongside left-leaning academics – but he says their deliberations were evidence-led and rose above polemics. He sounds slightly surprised that he wasn’t a lonely voice arguing against an increase to the minimum wage. “The evidence didn’t point to that conclusion, so we didn’t recommend it.”
He admits he found some recommendations in the group’s report “a bit uncomfortable”. They included policy measures that the report warned would be costly and require reprioritisation of government spending or higher taxes. But it was a consensus document and everyone agreed with its overall tenor.
There’s no bright, shiny, simple solution to child poverty, adds O’Reilly, but partly due to Wills’ commitment, there’s now a core of high-level people from both sides of the political divide engaging with the issue.
DOUBLE DUTY
I ask Wills how he copes with the stress of two jobs, both of which present complex and potentially overwhelming challenges. Planting trees helps, he says.
The family lives on a rural block west of Napier that was originally bought by Wills’ parents when he was 10. It was 4.5ha of gorse then – “gorse over my head. No power, no phone, no water. My adolescence was spent slashing gorse and building fences and moving stock, putting in watering systems.”
Now they’re reforesting it. “I’ll plant 150 trees and feel better; do something for the next generation.” He plants only natives, all locally sourced.
His appointment as Children’s Commissioner was for five years. Is he likely to seek a second term? That laugh again. “No one’s ever wanted one.”
Does he get tired? “Yes. There are some big days. I don’t add up the hours any more – I stopped doing that. But you only get an opportunity like this once in a lifetime. How lucky am I?”

A gloom and doom perspective on election result

Here's how the gloom and doomers see the election result:

Election results bad news for those on benefits

Beneficiary Advocate Kay Brereton says, “ The election result holds no good news for people on benefits, National campaigned successfully with their beneficiary bashing agenda, and will now believe their punitive treatment of beneficiaries has the support of our citizens.”
“National policy promised a continued reduction in benefit numbers, in reality this will mean more sanctions, leading to hunger, homelessness and desperation. The measure of success of the policies will be numbers of people forced into unsafe and unsuitable jobs on minimum wage.”
“National also intend to extend the control they exercise over peoples payments, removing the right to manage their own finances, as well as the chance to learn financial literacy.”
“I fear W&I increased security may be here to stay, as the National Party progresses its agenda of 'welfare reform' forcing people to try and exist precariously in the casualised minimum wage economy they are creating.”

Here's how I see the result.

Plenty of good news for those on benefits

1/ No cuts to benefit payments and no plans to

2/ Extension of income management and e-cards to ensure that rent and power bills are paid,  children have a warm home to live in and food on the table.

3/ More incentive payments like the $3000 reward to move to Christchurch to apply to other centres of employment

4/ Even greater focus on the economic conditions that create jobs because work is the best way out of poverty

5/ Enhanced security at W&I offices to protect not just staff but any other clients in attendance


Not infrequently I wonder to myself how helpful the glass half empty attitude is 'at the coalface'.

Arguing with Celia Lashlie

 Urban Institute   (a non-partisan, definitely not right-wing US think-tank)

Nearly 14 percent of the sons of adolescent mothers have been in prison by their late 30s.

 Paediatrics 

Males born to unmarried mothers under 18 years old had an 11-fold increased risk of chronic offending compared with males born to married mothers ≥20 years old.

 Corrections NZ  Over-representation of Maori in the criminal justice system,

 A great many studies indicate that births to mothers under the age of 18 are associated with poorer long-term outcomes for those infants. While this factor in and of itself is not necessarily “criminogenic”, it appears to be so strongly when associated with other social disadvantage factors.

Celia Lashlie was on Radio Live today.

I wanted her opinion on what was causing the substantial drop in teen births given that, "...prisons are full of people who had very, very young mothers."

Now I stated this injudiciously because it's not a claim I can back with proof.

She quickly responded, "No. Not true. Not in my experience."

I modified my statement to say they may include subsequent births to mothers who had started their families very young and without support. But Lashlie was still certain that they were not a major segment of the prison population. She said "...there are plenty of good boys from good families that just do dumb things."

I sent the following to Willie Jackson.

Celia says that I am wrong about inmates and very young mothers.

However, international research shows that is the case. And even in NZ, Corrections published a paper about over-representation of Maori in the prison system with a  section titled, "Very young mothers."

http://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/over-representation-of-maori-in-the-criminal-justice-system/3.0-early-life-environmental-influences/3.2-family-structure%2c-context-and-processes/3.2.html

I wasn't trying to score points. I simply wanted to know whether Celia - or you Willie for that matter - has an idea about what is causing the remarkable drop in 16 and 17 year-olds (including Maori) having babies because it would be a shame to stop doing whatever is causing it.

Here's the problem.

Nobody knows because nobody does the research. Celia and I could argue back and forth and not establish the truth. I bow to her far greater knowledge of prison inmates but would very much like to see some research to establish the facts.

In the meantime I remain very encouraged by the drop in 16 and 17 year-olds births anticipating a corresponding drop in criminality and prison population.

(The exchange is here at 1.45pm slot around 8 mins in.)

Why Labour took a drubbing

If I could say it in a sentence - Labour makes us feel bad about ourselves.

We are told we should be ashamed to live in a country that tolerates  inequality and poverty. It's implied that success is a matter for sheepishness when others are missing out. We are heels for feeling any aversion to taxation, or the idea of increasing it.

They ran what was billed as a positive campaign but talked, almost always, negatively.

If things were really dire it might have worked. Oppositions can run winning campaigns built on bad news if it's real and pervasive.  But economic and social statistics are nearly all trending in the right direction. There were no traditional battlegrounds on which Labour could build a case for change. Not the economy, health, education or welfare.

They tried to bribe the have-nots and guilt trip the rest. But the working have-nots figured out they would lose other subsidies with any wage increase, and didn't like the idea of beneficiaries getting the tax credits they've been working for.

Jose Pagani relates an anecdote about a conversation she had with an ex-Labour voting truck driver who said, "National is for the rich and Labour is for the poor. Who is for me?"

She relates this during her advocacy that Labour needs to return to being a party for workers. "Look at their name," she remonstrates. "It's Labour for heavens sake."

Trouble is National is now picking up low-wage workers votes. Note the PMs insistence today that a gap must be preserved between income from welfare and income from wages. Another Labour line he now espouses and they stupidly abandoned.

Forget their inward troubles. Their inability to look competent and trustworthy.

They have lost a large share of their old constituency by not moving with the times. Clark and Cullen wanted to bed Labour in as the natural party of government by keeping a majority of voters reasonably happy. But the new guard took the party backwards. Now it would have to be conceded that National could fairly hold the same ambition.

Update
A reader sent me through this link. It's relevant. In Christchurch National beat Labour in all but the most deprived quintile:

Metiria climbs back on and ups the ante

Despite the Green's judgment that child poverty is "the issue of our time" obviously not enough people agree. Or if they do, not with their cash hand-out solutions. They failed to make any headway on Saturday. Yet Turei persists:

“John Key has stated he wants to leave New Zealand in a better place than how he found it, but he cannot do that until he acknowledges that over 205,000 children live in severe poverty."

The hyperbole has escalated. 'Poverty' is now preceded by 'severe'.

It is frustrating and time-consuming to continually have to identify and  verify each new number the Greens trot out.



Here is the source. 205,000 children in households below the 'moving line' 50% threshold.

So sorry for the repetition but here is a breakdown of the 50% children. Low income and deprivation applies to a minority. Roughly 150,000 children (blue) experience 50% threshold low incomes but are not deprived.

Don't vote? Don't care

A great deal has been said today about the 1 million who didn't vote.

Would on-line voting engage them? Is more civic education required? I even heard one academic recommend lowering the age to 16 to increase turnout. Proportionately, the younger the voter, the less likely they are to enrol and go to the polls, so that would actually lower the overall vote percentage (although I can find plausible reasons why 16 year-olds should be allowed to vote.)

On Radio Live this morning, Sean Plunket was very angry at non-voters verging on disallowing their reasons why to get a hearing.

I couldn't disagree more. If people aren't politically attuned or aware, if they don't value democracy, if inclement weather is enough to make the task too tough, so be it. Stay away.

I don't get the drama.

Welfare reforms: ambitious target?

According to Stuff:

National sources say the party will focus on continuing welfare reforms, as it attempts to hit an ambitious target of cutting the number of people on benefits back to levels last seen in 1998.

Hell. I hope not. In 1998 there were nearly 374,000 working age people on benefits!

At the moment there are around 294,000

Why doesn't anyone ever check what they write?

So much to absorb

ACT is back with a young MP. Every cut to their party headquarters last night showed loads of young people milling around. A great basis for renewal. Seymour may be on his own but not in the way Banks was.

Speaking of young people, a first time voter I know gave two ticks to National yesterday. Reasoning: if they could go it alone they could get more done. I hope their faith is rewarded.

Hone. I felt sorry for him and his Mana supporters, but that emotion was quickly overwhelmed by my deep satisfaction at Laila Harre getting nothing. Maybe not even her last pay cheque.

Maori. At this stage only two and a half percent of voters gave their party vote to race-based parties. Fascinating.

Winston. Oh joy that the PM does not need to include him. He has more MPs but less power. I could not believe the many media muppets last night repeating the line, He wants to be speaker. Winston isn't interested in a role that requires daily discipline. But welcome back Ron Mark.

(Pause to make second mug of much-needed tea.)

Conservative. What a waste. Next time at least cost your policies. I received one pamphlet that was 50 percent dedicated to anti-alcohol and drugs nannyism. Big lose to wowserism.

Kelvin Davis. If Labour was really serious about just staying in the game they'd make him leader.

Greens are stuck. Another term in opposition. Rodney Hide can tell you how wearing that gets year after year. They gambled too much on child poverty emotional blackmail.  Metitria Turei is a fake. In time she could replace Winston Peters as parliaments biggest fibber.  I actually felt the tiniest smidgen of sympathy for Russell.

I watched the final party addresses on Friday evening. National won it then. And Key, surprisingly I thought, emphasised more than once that government should leave people to make their own choices and run their own lives.

Stay on that message for the next three years (and don't be overly magnanimous to those parliamentary enemies your voters didn't want.)

WINZ - between a rock and a very hard place

As a consequence of the terrible Ashburton killings, Work and Income has closed 29 sites until security can be reviewed. Their WINZ website page is now emblazoned with

The satellite sites are located at the following locations

• Northland - The Pulse
• Auckland - Great Barrier Island and Wellsford
• Waikato – Coromandel, Raglan, Te Kauwhata, Whangamata, Whitianga
• Bay of Plenty - Katikati, Putaruru
• East Coast - Te Araroa
• Taranaki - Ohakune
• Central - Featherston
• Canterbury - Akaroa, Cheviot, Oxford
• Southern – Fairlie, Geraldine, Lumsden, Nightcaps, Ohai, Otautau, Riverton, Te Anau, Tuatapere, Twizel, Waimate, Waimate (St. Johns), Winton.

Social security is a huge industry in this country with MSD having 300 centres of employment. So 90 percent remain open and can never be fully secure.

An opinion writer at Stuff says:

The Ashburton killings weren't part of a rash. They horrified the country because they were extraordinary. Winz should react by securing its offices, not overreact by shutting them.

My worry is making it harder for people to access help, especially when they are desperate, could escalate the situation.

But WINZ visits are often also about getting work. That's on hold too.

On the other hand the safety of WINZ staff must be the first priority.

Of course the whole dilemma is magnified by having far too many working-age people dependent on benefits.

Election myths

This week's column from Muriel Newman of the NZCPR addresses election myths, amongst which child poverty features. This is an succinct observation:

There are simply no excuses for any family in New Zealand to send their children to school hungry. If they do, it is they, not the state, who should be questioned.

More

Written for and published at the NZ Centre for Political Research.

ELECTION 2014: Where to with welfare?

In the last six years National has done more to address working-age welfare dependence than Labour did in the prior nine. However their reforms shouldn’t be overcooked. Describing them as a “useful start” in his recent autobiography, Don Brash was spot on.

A Labour supporter would reject my opening statement on the basis that numbers on the unemployment benefit took a nosedive over their incumbency. Absolutely true. Work and Income put enormous effort into those on an unemployment benefit and Labour luckily oversaw a good economic patch (their responsibility for which was probably as genuine as National’s for the GFC).

But chronic welfare dependence, a crippling social and economic issue for New Zealand, lies in the other main benefits:  pre-reform they were the DPB and Sickness/Invalid benefits combined.

To their lasting credit, in 2009 National set up the Welfare Working Group, and from there, commissioned the Taylor Fry actuarial work which exposed where long-term reliance is concentrated. The revelation that teen parents and other young beneficiaries entering the system at 16 or 17 would stay there the longest was no surprise to me.

Through the early 2000s, although only 2-3 percent of the DPB total at any given time were teenagers, between a third and a half had begun there as teenagers. I’d been arguing throughout Labour’s administration that average stays on welfare were much longer than government issued figures. Point-in-time data produces much longer averages than data collected over a period of time, but it suited Labour to use the latter data to minimise average stays. To understand this statistical phenomena imagine a hospital ward with 10 beds. Nine are occupied year around by chronically ill patients; one is occupied on a weekly basis. At any point-in-time 9 patients had an average stay of 12 months and one an average stay of one week. But calculated over the year, 85 percent of total patients had an average stay of just 1 week. Equate this to spells on welfare and you can see how long-term dependence can be minimised.

Here is the huge difference between National and Labour.

National looked for what Labour had denied.

Their discovery has led to a radically different approach to youth and young parents. Intensive mentoring and income management have seen the numbers of young people on welfare plummet. The teenage birth rate has been falling since 2008, and as virtually all single teen parents go on welfare, benefit dependency levels have consequently fallen. The reforms must be playing some part. How much is probably unquantifiable.



With the inflow into the benefit system stemmed, future reductions in every associated negative outcome can be expected. That means fewer childhood health and educational non-achievement problems; fewer youth criminal apprehensions and convictions; and lower prison populations.

It is especially telling that there are no promises from Labour or the Greens to undo this new regime.
In fact Labour has advocated more income management. Their 2014 ‘Social Development’ policy paper advocates, “…allow[ing] income management to be used as a tool by social agencies where there are known child protection issues and it is considered in the best interests of the child, especially where there are gambling, drug and alcohol issues involved.”

This endorses National’s intention – given another term – to extend income management to other beneficiaries who are not providing basic necessities of their children.

Unfortunately, though, that is where the accord ends.

Without religiously spelling out which party is responsible for which policy, the road ahead under a Labour/Green/Internet-MANA government would likely involve:

1/ Paying the parental In Work Tax Credit (IWTC) to out-of-work parents.

The Greens have disguised the extension of this tax credit as:
“A new Children’s Credit that will give an extra $60 a week to families currently missing out, at a cost of $400 million a year.”
Unsurprisingly this isn’t a popular policy amongst some of their own and Labour’s low-income constituents who are working hard for the extra payment.It was Clark and Cullen who created the IWTC. That the Greens and Labour now want to destroy the margin between parental income from employment and income from a benefit demonstrates how much further left this group would be.

2/ Restoring the Training Incentive Allowance (TIA) to career beneficiary students who have become addicted to studying and want the taxpayer to fund their PhDs. 

Minister for Social Development, Paula Bennett, abolished the TIA and moved the funding into efforts to get younger people to achieve lower level qualifications. Treasury advised that use of the TIA led to longer stays on welfare.

3/ Lifting abatement-free thresholds to $150 weekly on every benefit. 

This is ostensibly to allow beneficiaries to earn more from work while not losing benefit cash thereby encouraging part-time work. In fact it makes it is much more difficult for individuals to get off the benefit because the combination of benefit and work pays more than work alone.

4/  Under the guise of solving child poverty, paying people on welfare far more for producing babies  – eg Labour’s Best Start policy.

Higher benefits increase the rate of unmarried births, already a major source of child poverty.

5/ Raising minimum wages.

Internet-MANA have outbid both the Greens and Labour with a promise of $18.80 hourly (ditto the Maori Party).

While not strictly a ‘welfare policy’ the Left say this move will make work more viable (ignoring the moral case for employed independence) and ease childhood poverty. Yet in their recently published book Child Poverty in New Zealand left-leaning Professor Jonathan Boston and economist Simon Chapple discussed lifting minimum wages/ implementing a living wage and concluded:

“In short, the living wage proposal, whether implemented via an increase in the statutory minimum wage or through voluntary actions in particular sectors or industries, will do little to solve child poverty in New Zealand.”

This is primarily because most people on the minimum wage aren’t parents. Additionally, the authors accept that the resulting higher unemployment will push more people into or back to the benefit system.
Broadly speaking then, a government made up of Labour, the Greens, and Internet-Mana (with the possibility of support from the Maori Party and/or NZ First) would redistribute billions more and almost certainly increase dependence on state welfare.

A quick trip down memory lane will remind us of what welfare has achieved:

• A huge increase in sole parent families with dependent children from around 3% in the 1970s to 30% today.
• A horrible legacy for people made redundant in recessions like that of the early 1990s. Unlimited welfare let people languish and develop more than just joblessness. The constant debate in the United States is whether their time-restricted unemployment benefits should or shouldn’t be extended for this reason.

Which brings me to 2 major problems which no party (bar ACT) is talking about:

The Invalid Benefit (now the Supported Living Payment) continues to grow in numbers

A recent MSD report states:
” A higher than expected rate of transfer to Supported Living Payment is also occurring from both Jobseeker – HCID and Sole Parents.”

Back in the 1960s around 1 percent of the population was ‘permanently’ incapacitated. That now stands at over 3% – small percentages but large absolute numbers.


Why?

The single largest reason for incapacity is psychological and psychiatric conditions. The recent spate of tragic violence, repercussions and earlier threats to Work and Income staff are almost certainly due to mental ill health. (In 2009, people on an Invalid  Benefit made up the majority of those allocated to the Remote Client Unit because they had been trespassed for violence or aggression.)

The late 1980s policy to close psychiatric institutions and support mentally ill people within the community was very well-intentioned but has wrought new problems which politicians seem to be ignoring.

Children are being added to an existing benefit at an even greater rate than pre-reform

National’s early sole parent work-testing policy intended to reduce this habit but has thus far failed. Female beneficiaries – particularly Maori – continue to have babies when they are already unemployed and without independent means to raise their children. In the six months ending March 31, 2006, 5854 children aged under one were added directly to a benefit. In the same period prior to March 2014 the number increased to 6634 – a 13% rise.

And many thousands more will become benefit-dependent by the end of their birth year.

The ACT Party, promising continuing support to a National government, seeks to address these deeper problems with the following policy:

“Introduce a life-time limit of 5 years for support under the Sole Parent programme (as the US did in the nineties), and a life-time limit of 3 years for support under the Jobseekers Benefit, with “income management” (as currently applies to those on the Youth Payment and Young Parent Payment benefits) when those limits are reached.”

The advantage of such a regime is expectations are clear and simple. Limits would incentivise people to save up entitlements rather than simply defaulting to (currently) open-ended benefits.

As it stands many workless rural communities rely heavily on welfare. Work-testing is somewhat meaningless. People can remain in these small towns generation after generation. Ironically the only recent leader who has verbalised this problem was Helen Clark when her government introduced a policy to prevent people on the dole from moving into these ‘dead’ areas. As touched on earlier though, that administration was far more conservative and centrist than a new Left government would be.

Every election the Greens use children to promote robbing Peter to pay Paul. This time Labour has joined in. Both refuse to recognise that the easy quick fix of transferring greater sums into non-working homes will make people more dependent and inevitably, poorer. The prospect is depressing and frightening.

The alternative is National gaining a third term and the opportunity to cement in the reforms that are working and reappraise any that aren’t.  With the support and influence of ACT and possibly the Conservative Party (Colin the-best-welfare-program-is-a-job Craig) who share strong family, small government values, much more could be possible.

ODT: 53,000 16-20 year-olds on a benefit

This must be a typo - a collosal one.

According to the ODT under the headline

Young on benefits targeted

Paula Bennett said,

''Our target of a 40% reduction of young people on benefit is a bold one but 53,000 young people aged between 16 and 20 on welfare is too many for a country with prospects like ours.''

I don't have exact comparable data but I do know that at March 2013  only 2,415 16-19 year-olds were on either a Youth or Young Parent Payment.

MSD benefit fact sheets show at June 2014 there were 49,889 18-24 year-olds on a benefit.

Some further digging turns up a different quote, this from Radio NZ:

At present, there are 53,000 people aged under 24 on the benefit and Ms Bennett said that can be reduced by 40 percent.

That makes more sense.

Readers of the ODT will be getting altogether the wrong impression. The bulk of the 53,000 referred to will be aged 21 and older.

(To be fair to the ODT it's possible the Minister gave them the wrong information. The quote is very specific.)

1.2%

There have been so many polls I missed the Colmar Brunton poll that has ACT on 1.2%.

That'll do it. I feel I can safely give them my party vote without wasting it.

I recall too the 2005 election when ACT's support plummeted to a level that delivered only two MPs - Rodney Hide and Heather Roy. I think that is ACT's very core support and will turn out again (conservative Banks repelled too many).

Though when I think about it I am not into law and order tough talk, and sit on the fence over Maori and privilege. But ACT has the best welfare and tax policies.

Ran into a young guy campaigning for Chris Bishop yesterday and promised him the candidate vote. What I have come to appreciate about John Key is his connectedness to globalisation and his excitement about where it can take NZ.

Labour is the past. I think they will be overtaken by the Greens. The old socialist, unionist, brother's keeper stuff isn't relevant. The child poverty and inequality focus has backfired for the left because most thinking people see a country that provides opportunity and a strong safety net.

Tariana Turia is gone. I like what I've seen of Te Ururoa Flavell and think the Maori Party have a much better grip on what Maori need than Mana, so even briefly considered giving them my party vote. But, no, I'd like to see what Seymour and Whyte can build together.

Here's a speech Whyte delivered yesterday:

ACT will hold the balance of power after the election on Saturday.
In every poll taken last week, ACT has gone up. Not in every poll published last week mind you but in every poll that was taken last week.
In the latest Colmar Brunton poll – the most reliable of the pollsters – ACT is on 1.2%.
Our messages are getting through. We are winning support. 1.2% (28,000 votes) means I will be elected as a list MP, giving ACT two MPs and allowing John Key to be Prime Minister again without the “help” of Winston Peters.
In a week’s time ACT will be in a position to give the country three more years of stable Centre/right government.

More

More people rely on government transfers

Statistics NZ released Census data about personal (15 years+) and family incomes last week. Income is gross and relates to the year prior to Census night.

Here are some cut and paste highlights (or lowlights perhaps).

- The only sources of personal income to experience an increase between 2006 and 2013 were 'NZ superannuation or veterans pension' (2.0 percentage point increase) and 'other government transfers' (0.9 percentage point increase). 

-  12.7 percent of men and 19.4 percent of women received personal income from 'other government transfers'. This higher rate for women was partly accounted for by the domestic purposes benefit (90.0 percent of recipients were female) and 'other government benefits, payments, or pension' (75.4 percent were female).

- Auckland region has highest proportion of adults who receive personal income of $15,000 or less
In Auckland, the local board areas with the highest proportion of people having an annual income of $15,000 or less were:
•  Mangere-Otahuhu (42.2 percent)
•  Otara-Papatoetoe (40.1 percent)
•  Great Barrier (37.5 percent). 

- In 2013 compared with 2006, for people in the 15–19-year age group:
•  median personal income from all sources dropped 74.2 percent – from $3,100 to
$800
•  the proportion stating they had no source of income increased – from one-quarter
(28.8 percent) in 2006, to almost half (43.8 percent) in 2013
•  employment decreased 30.9 percent – from 136,980 (47.2 percent) employed part-
or full-time in 2006, to 94,596 (33.7 percent) in 2013. 

- At some time in the 12 months ending 31 March 2013:
•  25.1 percent of families received income from an 'other government transfer' (up
from 23.2 percent in 2006)
•  17.5 percent of families received income from NZ superannuation or veterans
pension (up from 14.8 percent in 2006) 

- Over half of one-parent families receive an annual income of $40,000 or less In 2013, the percentages of families receiving a family income from all sources of $40,000 or less were:
•  24.7 percent for couples without children
•  60.6 percent for one-parent families
•  10.2 percent for couples with child(ren).

Not the time to change direction

Listening to Hekia Parata yesterday talking about the increasing secondary school achievement of Maori and Pacific Island youth, I wondered how much this is influencing the dropping teen birth rate. Perhaps more than the welfare reforms?

Figure 2: Percentage of school leavers with at least an NCEA Level 2 qualification or equivalent, by ethnic group (2009 to 2013)


Earlier in the week I posted about the halving of 16 and 17 year-old sole parents dependent on welfare since 2008. It's not simply  because they aren't receiving benefits. It's because there are far fewer of them.

I asked Statistics New Zealand for data relating to births to 16 and 17 year-olds which arrived the same day. Good response time.

 

Interesting (but possibly insignificant) that the birth numbers (very broadly-speaking) decline under National governments and increase under Labour.

What is known is prisons are full of offenders who were born to very young mothers (or are subsequent births to her). They have been neglected or abused, and subsequently spent time in state institutions or foster care growing up. They are on a path to prison from birth.

So the dropping adolescent birth rate will also dovetail well with the working prisons and more rehab services policy, plus Anne Tolley's new approach to gangs. There is every reason to expect a drop in crime and prison populations.

Without getting overly excited  I wonder if, in time, we will be able to look back to 2008 and pinpoint it as the year NZ really began to get breakthrough on inter-generational social problems that have plagued some parts of the country and some parts of society for a very long time.

(After watching Dark Horse last weekend, an insight into gang life in Gisborne which depicted some kids escaping though the reality weighs that many more do not, I want to believe change is afoot.)