Australia : "Adoption Advocacy"

The following piece is written in an Australian setting but it is just as relevant in this country. I recall Don Brash behind bagged for suggesting adoption become a more widespread practice. It's kind of odd that people of a leftist persuasion use the argument of 'urgency' for reducing child poverty yet support the CYF philosophy of keeping children at risk with their natural families as long as possible. And it's even odder that adoption by NZ Europeans is almost unmentionable yet whangai (unregulated Maori adoption) is culturally kosher.

A mere 89 children were adopted from 'out-of-home care' last year. At the same time, more than 30,000 children had been in care continuously for longer than two years.

This is a proxy figure for the number of children potentially available for adoption, were adoption not officially taboo within the child protection world. Many children in long-term care have been subjected to prolonged maltreatment at home  and highly damaging instability while in care (multiple entries, exits, and reentries) as endless efforts are made to preserve and reunite dysfunctional families.

The taboo reflects the complex history of adoption, including the legacy of the Stolen Generations and discredited forced adoption practices. But the tragic lessons of these episodes have been learned. Modern adoptions are 'open', meaning adopted children can have contact with birth parents and knowledge of their family and cultural heritages so they do not grow up strangers unto themselves.

A promising sign is that the debate is changing due to the growing realisation that many children would be better off having a safe and permanent adopted family for life.

Diana Bryant, the Chief Justice of the Family Court,  and Megan Mitchell, the  National Children's Commissioner have both expressed support of greater use of adoption for some children in care.

But there is still a long way to go. Political leadership is needed to drive cultural change in child protection authorities, but politicians are wary of supporting adoption for fear of being accused of repeating past mistakes and 'stealing' children all over again.

On controversial issues such as adoption, politicians prefer to lead in the direction the public is already prepared to head. This is why it is crucial for organisations like the CIS, and adoption advocacy groups such as Adopt Change, to lead the debate and build community support for adoption.

Adoption from care will not become a standard part of Australian child protection, as it should be, until the idea that modern, open adoption is a socially acceptable practice is embedded in the hearts and minds of the Australian public. 

Dr Jeremy Sammut is a Research Fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. His book, The Madness of Australian Child Protection: Why Adoption Will Rescue Underclass Children, will be published by Connor Court in November. He is speaking today at the CIS Consilium conference session Changing Minds to Change Lives: Breaking the Adoption 'Taboo' in Australia.

Drilling down DPB numbers

In Parliament this week the Prime Minister said:

"... through a strong economy and the welfare reform measures this Government has undertaken, we now have the lowest number of people on the equivalent of the old DPB since 1988."

Strictly speaking this is true and surely very good news?

The complication is benefit changes.

To get a clearer picture I asked MSD for the number of sole parents on any benefit and compared it to earlier data. Roughly, this compares pre to post GFC.

At September 2006 there were 107,628 sole parents on welfare. (By December 2007 to number had dropped further to 103,366 but I don't have the additional info for that date.) The following table provides a breakdown of sole parents by benefit type. Note that 88 percent were on the DPB.

By June 2015 the percentage of sole parents on the "equivalent of the old DPB" - Sole Parent Support - had dropped to 76 percent.

So we can frame this another way.

The percentage of sole parents on welfare benefits other than "the equivalent of the old DPB" has doubled. 

That is because sole parents with children 14 and older, and 'women alone' have been moved onto the Jobseeker benefit; and sole parents caring for someone who would otherwise been hospitalised have been moved onto the Supported Living Payment.

Of course, it's good news that there are 12 percent fewer sole parents on welfare since December 2007. The employment rate of sole parents has steadily increased. But as my previous post illustrated, the core behaviour that drives long-term  welfare dependency and child poverty is relentless. Beneficiaries continue to add 'newborn' children to existing benefits, most commonly, Sole Parent Support. 35 every day in the six months to March 2015.

I reserve my excitement for the day that steady trend line, which dates back to at least 1993, starts to decline.

35 children a day added to an existing benefit

In the six months to March 2015 6,347 children under the age of one were added to an existing benefit. That's 35 every day. Half are Maori. Just under half have a mother/caregiver aged 24 or younger.

The welfare reform policy which aimed at stopping this poverty-inducing habit has failed. That's hardly a surprise. The threat to make someone with a child as young as one go to work is empty when there are no jobs.

For context the number is down on the 2014 equivalent (6,634) but still up on the 2006 equivalent (5,854).

All annual births to March 2015 (57,476) are down on March 2014 (58,515) in any case, which will explain the drop at least partially.

Here is an age breakdown. Note these figures pertain to the caregiver so differ from total children ie some caregivers have added more than one child.

And here is the ethnicity breakdown:

Around two thirds are to single parents.

Under 1 year-old is proxy for newborn. It's the best I have ever managed to get from MSD. And children's ethnicity is assumed to be the same as the parent/caregivers. Of course that will not always be the case but information on the child's ethnicity is not recorded.

The point is - and I hammer it again - people with no independent ability to raise a child continue having them. And their actions drive the child poverty problem.

The Left are fond of telling us it takes a village to raise a child (the financial implications of which are clear). It does not take a village to conceive and produce it.

Can the Greens be expected to acknowledge this?

Child hardship is easing albeit slowly.

Material hardship is assessed by what people are doing without. The more items forgone, the worse the hardship. The EU method is used to provide comparability across countries. From a companion report to the incomes report released yesterday:

Table G.3

Material hardship rates (%) and numbers for children

HES year	EU ‘standard’ threshold		EU ‘severe’ threshold
	rate (%)	numbers	rate (%)	numbers
2007	14	145,000	6	65,000
2009	16	170,000	9	95,000
2010	20	210,000	9	90,000
2011	21	220,000	10	105,000
2012	17	180,000	9	90,000
2013	15	165,000	9	100,000
2014	14	145,000	8	80,000

The graphs in Figure G.1 below use the 9-item DEP-COMMON to create a time series from 2006/07 to 2013/14. There are two particular features of the trends that stand out:

·         for the less stringent threshold (top lines), the clear rise of hardship rates through the GFC and the strong fall in the recovery phase

·         for the more stringent threshold (bottom lines),

o    for the population as a whole - neither the rise nor the fall is very strong

o    for children the rise and fall are clearer

o    though in both cases rates in 2013-14 are the same as in 2008-09 as the GFC began to impact.

Without a doubt there are children in this country who are doing it very tough. But every social policy attempt to address the problem has fish hooks. More welfare - the Green's favoured approach - is extremely risky. The available evidence should convince against it.

The report makes some notable observations:

·         Whatever else poverty is understood to be, it is in its essence an unacceptable state-of-affairs – it carries with it the implication that something should be done about it. How best to address poverty, especially child poverty, is a vigorously contested area where empirical evidence, social norms, personal values, views on inter-generational equity, political philosophy and pragmatic compromise all play legitimate parts. Different judgements on these matters lead to different “solutions”.
 ·         Yet, just as with the question of where to set low-income or material hardship thresholds, there is in practice a fairly limited range of options for governments when it comes to seeking to reduce child poverty. All MEDCs have adopted a multi-pronged approach, reflecting the range of causes of poverty. The difference from one government to another and one state to another reflects to a large degree the different understandings of the relative size of the impact of different causes, decisions on trade-offs with other priorities, and the consequent different weightings given to the different interventions.

The current govt's approach is a mix of welfare reform, education reform, targeted cash assistance, support for private initiatives, etc but with the long-term view foremost. That matters.

 

Greens court their 'child poverty' constituency

Green MP Jan Logie said in Parliament today that "...there are now an additional 45,000 NZ children  living in poverty." Having watched the exchange I can say she was smug.

She says the source for this claim is the latest Household Economic Survey. Here is the relevant table:

How many poor children are there in New Zealand?
(ie  How many children live in households with incomes below selected thresholds?)

Table F.5

Numbers of poor children in New Zealand

(ie  the number of children in households with incomes below the selected thresholds)

	BHC		AHC
	BHC ‘moving line’		AHC ‘moving line’			AHC ‘anchored line (2007)’
HES year	50%	60%	40%	50%	60%	60% (07 ref)
2001	120,000	250,000	115,000	215,000	310,000	380,000
2004	150,000	265,000	115,000	200,000	285,000	320,000
2007	135,000	210,000	115,000	175,000	240,000	240,000
2009	125,000	230,000	140,000	210,000	280,000	255,000
2010	150,000	250,000	120,000	210,000	315,000	275,000
2011	145,000	235,000	130,000	210,000	290,000	270,000
2012	130,000	225,000	135,000	215,000	285,000	255,000
2013	120,000	215,000	135,000	205,000	260,000	235,000
2014	-	250,000	-	220,000	305,000	245,000

Logie found the best figure she could. It  features in the After Housing Costs 'moving line' 60% threshold. Any other number from the table would have been smaller.

So let's look at what the 'moving line' represents:

‘moving line’:        

o    this is the fully relative line that moves when the median moves (eg if median rises, the poverty line rises and reported poverty rates increase even if low incomes stay the same)

Now, let's look at what has happened to the median:

• median household income has risen at 3% pa above inflation in the post-GFC recovery phase

From HES 2013 to HES 2014 median household income rose 5% in real terms (5% above the CPI inflation rate). This is a large change compared with changes in incomes nearby – P40 was up 3% and P60 and P70 only 1% – and its size is likely to be a year on year statistical blip. While caution is needed about the precise size of the changes year on year, there is clear evidence of a steady rise in median household income in the post-GFC recovery, of the order of 3% pa in real terms.

Combine this with:

On the AHC moving line measures, child poverty rates in HES 2014 are around the same as their peak after the GFC. A good amount of the rise from HES 2013 to HES 2014 is due to the large rise in the BHC median, as noted above, rather than a change in the numbers in low income per se.

Oh Greens. Why are you so desperate to talk up child poverty? 

Here's another "key finding" which would be politically un-useful to the Greens.

In HES 2014, the child poverty rate using the AHC anchored line measure was 3 percentage points lower than the peak rate immediately after the GFC (26% down to 23%), and 8 percentage points down on 2004 (31% down to 23%).  This does not mean that New Zealand’s child poverty rate is a definitive 23% – rather the finding is that using this measure, the child poverty rate is falling, albeit  slowly.

  The material hardship measure shows a falling child material hardship rate using a threshold equivalent to the ‘standard’ EU level, down from a peak of 21% immediately after the GFC to 14% in 2014. Using the more severe threshold, there was a slight rise through the GFC to 10% and a small fall to 8%, the level it was at before the GFC. 

This subject is so technical that most people's eyes glaze over.

But the Greens should be called out on their constant refusal to acknowledge improving indicators.