Crowded house

The headline reads, "Baby gets sick in crowded house".

It is now an established trend for young people to stay longer in the family home. It's happening in our family and I am fine with it. It makes sense due to various circumstances.

But if the young person then adds a partner, followed by children, it is inevitable that overcrowding is going to happen.

What I would like the media to decide is which is worse? Poverty - higher when housing costs consume a greater part of income - or overcrowding, which allows people to pool their resources.

Overcrowding actually alleviates poverty. So then the story has to be about how overcrowding makes people sick.

I have a suspicion that state houses are the cause of the problem - not the solution. Because they are cheap compared to private rentals families tend to congregate in them as well as on the grounds.

It may be that the son can't find a rental in Tauranga or that, compared to living with his mother in a cheap state house, he can't find anything 'affordable'.

No free lunches in Upper Hutt

A social entrepreneur has contacted 300 Upper Hutt businesses to pay for school lunches for children who turn up without. He's had no takers.

Hutt Valley Chamber of Commerce CE says,

"I'm genuinely surprised to be perfectly honest . . . the feedback that's been given to me is that there's been a genuine lack of interest and in most cases a non-reply which absolutely astounds me for a business community that we have in the valley that do like to normally support community projects."

The social entrepreneur says,

"I'm not trying to sound harsh but if there are businesses that are making money off our community then I'm sort of garnering towards making them socially responsible to give back to the community that it makes money from."

But they do give back. As the first comment records. And they give back in taxes that run the welfare system that distributes income for the very purposes of feeding children.

So I am not surprised that there is little interest in this project. Businesses will also have figured out that once 'free lunches' are on offer the need will mysteriously grow.

These schools need to talk to the parents. Or send them a letter saying that if their children continue to come to school with no food CYF or Work and Income will be contacted. That will result in the parent either having to do budgeting course or have their income managed by a third party.

A couple of slices of bread, apple, and biscuit. How hard can it be for god's sake? And if the school can prepare and freeze sandwiches in advance why can't the parents?

All this guy is doing is encouraging absolutely slack parenting (if indeed children are genuinely without lunch. I bet some are given money to buy food but spend it on whatever it is kids buy these days.)

It is disgraceful that he is trying to shame businesses when it is the parents who should be shamed.

Welfare fraud versus tax evasion

Various coverage occurred yesterday about Victoria University research into the lack of even-handedness in dealing with welfare fraudsters versus tax evaders. There is even a very large billboard mounted just to the left of the motorway heading into Wellington highlighting the issue (thank you taxpayers.)

The following is, I believe a misunderstanding on the part of the lead researcher:

Ms Marriott said despite the higher cost of tax evasion, people who committed welfare fraud were judged more harshly because society had little sympathy for people on welfare.

People have plenty of sympathy for those on welfare; for those who have suffered a redundancy, the loss of a spouse, an accident, a disability, care for disabled children etc. But fraud is an abuse of their sympathy and causes anger.

More importantly, what people have little sympathy for is the idea that the state controls all the money and it decides how much of it you can keep. Whether you personally helped create the money is immaterial.

So when an individual attempts to keep more of what he has created there is less anger than when someone tries to take what he hasn't. That is why society has greater tolerance (and exhibits it through the courts) for tax evasion than welfare fraud.

Latest abortion statistics

The latest abortion statistics were released yesterday:

(Left click to enlarge image)

The big news is the massive drops among the youngest groups 20-24 and 15-19 year-olds.

This is coinciding with a substantial drop in the teenage birth rate.

Fewer conceptions can only mean

1/Less heterosexual sex or
2/Better contraception - more use and increased efficacy

Whatever is happening it is fantastic to see these developments. The numbers are dropping across ethnicities (with slight rises on 2014 for Maori and Asian).

"Where have all the good men gone?"

My answer (a guess) to this lady's question is, man shy-off activities where there are loads of women.

Just because they aren't into pilates, the theatre and tai chi it doesn't mean they aren't creative.

Maybe they are into their cars, woodworking, fishing, golf or lycra-cycling.

You can't turn people into the mirror image of yourself. You take them as you find them. They might get interested in what you like doing and vice versa.

But I doubt men over 60 are quite as "unadventurous" and uninteresting as the writer believes. They may simply have a tendency to be more solitary and less into socialising. Therefore less visible.

The male readers of this blog, many of whom I suspect are in the group complained about, may have something to add.

Make benefit system open slather

That's what barrister Catrionna MacLennan is essentially recommending in today's NZ Herald referencing the social security legislation rewrite currently underway. My comments are interspersed below in orange:



Here is how we could improve our social welfare law;

1. Delete the purposes and principles sections from the bill and replace them with the statement "The purpose of this act is to ensure all New Zealanders in hardship receive the help they need and it is the responsibility of the Ministry of Social Development to do this."

Define hardship.



2. Make the reduction of poverty the aim of social welfare, rather than the current focus on reducing the number of beneficiaries.

Even Labour believes (or used to believe under Clark and Cullen) that paid employment is the best way out of poverty which is why they created the In Work Tax Credit. The current focus is getting people into work to reduce poverty.



3. Write into the bill a recognition of the value of parenting. At present, our welfare system is preoccupied with ensuring as many people as possible enter the paid workforce. This is a short-term approach and fails to take account of the long-term value to the community of parents spending time with their children. In addition, casual, very badly-paid work means that paid work is no longer a guaranteed route out of poverty.

Parents on welfare are far more likely to abuse or neglect their children. Children in a cohort who had contact with the benefit system before age two accounted for 83% of all children  for whom findings of substantiated maltreatment were recorded by age 5. More welfare will not equal better parenting. 



4. Delete section 70A from the bill. This sanctions women who cannot name the fathers of their children by docking their benefits - initially by $22 a week and later by $28. The main people this punishes are actually the women's children. They are already growing up in a financially-deprived household and further reducing the family's meagre income exacerbates that hardship.

Abolishing this disincentive would  increase the single parent benefit bill in two ways. By paying existing mothers who dot not name fathers more, and going forward, recouping  less money from the unnamed fathers of whom there would be far more. There are already  exemptions made from the Section 70A rule in unusual circumstances.



5. Require the Ministry of Social Development to provide all beneficiaries with all the assistance to which they are entitled. Currently, people seeking help face major difficulties in obtaining their legal entitlements. Research demonstrates that those accompanied by an advocate have a better chance of receiving assistance. Hundreds of people have queued in recent years to receive help from Auckland Action Against Poverty at "Impacts" in Mangere and elsewhere. Voluntary groups should not have to do the job a government agency is funded to carry out.

See 7 below



6. Delete the phrase "long-term welfare dependency" from the bill. This makes welfare a burden, rather than the responsibility of the community and an investment in the future wellbeing of New Zealanders.

In other words  stop differentiating between those people who use welfare as a temporary support (for which they paid taxes)  and those who remain on welfare for years, if not their entire working-age lives, as a matter of choice.



7. Write into law a provision that grants, advances on benefits and other additional assistance are not recoverable by MSD from beneficiaries. If people were not in desperate need, they would not be receiving such help. Requiring them to repay these amounts - as in the case of people staying in Auckland motels at the moment - merely pushes them further into hardship.

This is exceptionally foolish. Here the writer says that people would not be receiving grants etc if they "were not in desperate need." Earlier however she says MSD are not providing "all the assistance to which they are entitled." Which is it? No requirement to repay grants and advances would be open slather.



8. Stop sending mothers convicted of benefit fraud on the basis of a confusing and inconsistently-applied legal test to jail. As these women are already single parents, sending them to jail has disastrous consequences for their children, who end up deprived of both parents. In addition, if the debt established against them cannot be repaid within two years, it should be written off. That is what happens in other parts of our legal system. Pursuing them for the rest of their lives for debts they cannot repay means they can never improve their families' financial position.

So no repayments for grants and advances, no repayments for fraudulently acquired benefits, and now, no jail terms. Why not just issue every beneficiary with unlimited credit, and throw the rule book out the window?



9. Abolish Benefits Review Committees and establish an independent process for reviewing the ministry's decisions.



10. Make benefit rates liveable, rather than keeping them very low to punish those who cannot - for many reasons - either find or perform paid work.

How many times does it need to be demonstrated that a single parent receiving a basic benefit, family tax credits and accommodation supplement has an all-up income above the minimum wage. The average sole parent with two children living in South Auckland is receiving around $670 weekly. If she takes in a lodger or shares with another sole parent the household income will be even more "liveable".

Even the Greens wouldn't adopt this policy prescription. It's quite insane.

Bona fide socialists are dirty on the Greens

The World Socialist Web Site reports on the memorandum of understanding signed by Labour and the Greens.

Tens of thousands of workers left Labour in disgust following the Labour government’s wave of pro-market restructuring, mass sackings and privatisations in the 1980s, which led to soaring social inequality.
The MoU, which aims to prop up this despised party of big business, demonstrates once again the reactionary politics of the Green Party. Like its sister parties in Germany and Australia, the NZ Greens are not a “left” alternative but a party of nationalism, militarism and big business. James Shaw, elected Green Party co-leader last year based on his experience as a business consultant for HSBC bank and PricewaterhouseCoopers, has described himself as “a huge fan of the market” and promoted Margaret Thatcher as a model environmentalist.

The Libertarianz used to attack ACT like this, their anger made worse because  ACT, the only party professing classical liberalism, too often betrayed it. In reality, a party can only work with what it has and the conservatives (and others of many-coloured coats) were numerous.

But the above piece of  vitriol exemplifies how some save their deepest bitterness for those most like them.

Poor old Greens. They would profess disinterest in WSWS opinion but it's not nice being internationally shamed by ideological purists.

Jane Bowron in DomPost

Just last Thursday I blogged about the tide turning on society's tolerance for sole parent families.

In this morning's DomPost  Jane Bowron has written a column which highlights this perfectly.

Solo-mother-bashing is considered to be a base sport, to be kicking someone when they're down. I understand why people leave violent and abusive relationships, but I have little time for women who think they have sufficient skills to bring several children into the world from different fathers, and have no intention of making a go of it with a decent partner to give children two steady parents to help them grow up.
If he looks like a violent duck, if he quacks like a violent duck, he is a violent duck, so don't breed with him. If he says emphatically that he doesn't want kids, then respect his wishes and don't 'fall pregnant' (I believe it happened because sexual intercourse took place) to him. Take a full inventory of your situation and personality to access whether you have enough in your favour to help your children survive and kick on in the world, financially, emotionally, physically.

When I started campaigning against the DPB in 2001, with a parliamentary petition calling for a review of this particular benefit, the outrage unleashed was enormous, even vicious sometimes. I thought I was prepared for it but I really didn't know what I was getting into. Only a handful of influential people were on the same page.

Now, 15 years later, so many are starting to put the pieces together and actually question the effect sole parenting is having on children.

Bowron still stumbles however with her prescription of 'sucking it up' for the sake of the children. The great dilemma is of course how to help what are innocent children without encouraging more of them. She's says,

Let's find out what's going on, get some statistics, start making policy.

Where has she been hiding? MSD, Treasury, SuperU, Families Commission have produced oodles of research about sole parent families. The welfare reforms were targeted specifically at getting sole parents into jobs (thereby breaking the dependency cycle) and reducing the habit of adding children to existing benefits. Some success is evident but there's a long way to go.

If she wants more policy aimed at taking care of the children but discouraging feckless breeding she might have to look beyond National.

Violence begets violence

The Chief Social Worker has taken the unusual step of releasing a practice review of CYF's involvement with the minors who killed Arun Kumar in Henderson, Auckland.

First I need to acknowledge the grief of the family of Arun Kumar.
Child, Youth and Family (CYF) had open interventions with both boys accused of his manslaughter.
We accept we could have done more to support these boys.
CYF’s involvement in their lives began before they were even born.
They each grew up in environments where drug and alcohol use, criminal activity, family violence and anti-social behaviour impacted on their lives.
Our staff put a lot of time into trying to help these boys on a positive path.
But none of this excuses us from admitting that CYF could have done a better job.

More 

My overwhelming reaction is a vision of the thousands more NZ children growing up in similar circumstances. Our prisons are bursting at the seams with young men who have grown up in these environments and, statistics tell us, most have already fathered two, three or more children who will follow suit. It seems to me that even though the official line maintains, "crime is reducing", the incidence of violence spilling over into innocent communities is increasing. Even the bright spot that is reducing teenage births, where many of these tragic families hail from, is probably self-selecting for the worst cases to continue. That is, those females with the most capabilities are also those who will successfully avoid a pregnancy. It's a gloomy day and a gloomy thought.

Jacinda Ardern in the SST

Jacinda Ardern attacked my report in last week's Sunday Star Times.

Lobby group report ignores the realities.

--------------------

This week I opened the paper to find some astonishing "news" - a lack of marriage is to blame for child poverty.

I've spent the better part of six years reading and researching the issue of child poverty, and what we need to do to resolve this complex problem in New Zealand

And yet here it was, the silver bullet we have all been looking for. Marriage. Getting hitched. Tying the knot. It turns out that we didn't need an Expert Advisory Group on child poverty, or any OECD analysis for that matter - apparently all we really need is a pastor and a party.

At least, that's the world according to Family First, who commissioned a report this week which, they claim, provides "overwhelming and incontrovertible" evidence that when it comes to child poverty, a lack of marriage is our problem, and it's simply become "politically unfashionable" to talk about it.

I'm happy to talk about it; in fact all of Parliament is. We debated the ins and outs of the institution not that long ago - it was called the Marriage Equality debate. Oddly, I don't recall Family First supporting the idea of increasing access to marriage when it came to same-sex couples. But I digress.

The major piece of evidence Family First use to back up their claims? Child poverty has risen significantly since the 1960s, and more people were married back then. I am paraphrasing, but that's the general gist. And yes, those two pieces of information are true. But are they linked? You only have to look at where child poverty figures really jump around to figure that bit out. Back in the mid-1980s, child poverty numbers (after taking into account housing costs) were about half the levels they are now. What happened to cause the spike? De facto relationships and single parenting didn't all of a sudden become "on trend".

What happened was Ruth Richardson's Mother of all Budgets. Government support was slashed, unemployment rates were grim, and child poverty, as you would expect, went up significantly. Equally, you can also see a downward trend in child poverty numbers around the early 2000s when Working for Families was introduced.

So what about the other claims in the report? How about "51 per cent of children in poverty live in single-parent families". Stating the obvious, surely. Single parent equals single income.

So, Family First, here's my view for what it's worth. Families will take many forms. Some children will be raised by one parent, some will be raised by two, possibly with some distance in between, and some will be raised by four. But the other factors Family First was so quick to dismiss - low wages and staggering housing costs - mean we have 305,000 children in poverty. And this is the stuff that needs to change. It's time we faced reality.

I wrote a response below but have been told that only a 150 word letter-to-the-editor will be accepted. She gets nearly 500 words to attack and I get 150 to defend.

Here is my full rejected response.

Labour, not Family First, ignores realities

The Family First report Child Poverty and Family Structure: What is the evidence telling is?, attacked by Jacinda Ardern in last week's Sunday Star Times,  traced the change in family structure from 1961 - the year more babies were born than ever before, or ever since. Families were much bigger, mother's educational qualifications far fewer and their work force participation much lower. Yet child poverty was also very low. Under 5% of families with children lived in the two lowest household income bands.

Using the measure Labour/Greens favour (because it provides the highest estimate and greatest political impact) child poverty grew to around 16% by 1990 following 15 years of growing unemployment and numbers of sole parent families. Because so many children relied on welfare, it then shot up after the benefit cuts, peaked around 2001 and has fluctuated since. In 2014 it still sat at 29% despite unemployment falling to 5.7 percent.

Ardern says Family First ignores realities. Here is the reality she and Labour ignore. The strongest correlate for child poverty is the sole parent rate. Ardern is correct to say that de facto relationships and single parenting didn't, "...all of a sudden become 'on trend'." The growth in the rate of each is tracked in the report. Increasingly single parent families became the product of births to single females and this is now a well-established pattern.  In 2015, 5% of babies had no father details on their birth certificate; a further 15% had fathers with different residential addresses to the mothers. This is then reflected in the number of babies who will be benefit-dependent either immediately or shortly after their birth - 17.5 % of all babies born in 2015. It is somewhat fatalistic to bring a baby into the world with no means of supporting it and then start complaining about low wages, low benefits and high housing costs. That's after the fact.

Yes, two parent families also experience poverty but it tends to be short-term because their incomes are generally  derived from the market. Sole parent incomes are generally derived from benefits which create a trap for poorly educated and unskilled mothers and lead to long-term child poverty exposure. New Zealand's largest longitudinal study, SoFIE, showed that two parent families move out of poverty faster. Those most likely to stay poor over many years are Maori and sole parents.

Marriage comes into the income equation because marriages are far more stable than de facto relationships. By the time a child turns five, his parents are 4-6 times more likely to have separated if they were cohabiting rather than married. This high dissolution rate also drives sole parenting, leading to more child poverty. But even stable cohabiting relationships are often poorer because they are second or third partnerships struggling to support children from previous unions.

Ardern claims "low wages and staggering house costs" are the major reasons 305,000 children live in poverty.

Housing costs are contributing latterly, especially in Auckland. But the report details evidence from the New Zealand Institute for Economic Research that finds, with regard to the long-term picture, "...the cost of renting has remained broadly stable relative to income over many decades." Child poverty pre-dates the housing affordability problem by a long margin.

Perhaps relatively higher wages contributed to lower child poverty in the 1960s but does Ardern think voters want a return to state-mandated award rates? And while Working For Families - a Labour policy - goes some way to easing child poverty, it also subsidizes employers keeping wages artificially low. Similarly, rental subsidies go straight into landlord pockets. MSD recently published findings from a literature review that found, "... a proportion of demand-side housing subsidies is capitalised into higher rents in the private rental market."

A government cannot subsidize its way out of child poverty problems. Take another example. Subsidizing sole parents saw their portion of families with children almost triple between the 1976 and 2013 censuses.

The answer to solving the child poverty problem lies largely with individuals. Without a reverse in the trend away from stable, committed two-parent families, child poverty will remain high.

"...abuse and neglect inflicted on young children is a product of staggering levels of poverty..."

The soft bigotry of extreme socialists rears its ugly head in the following report from the World Socialist Web Site. It refers to the death of Moko Rangitoheriri:

"Thirteen children died in New Zealand during 2015 in similar circumstances. Their average age was three. Over half the victims were Maori, one of the most exploited layers of the New Zealand working class. In the final analysis, the abuse and neglect inflicted on young children is a product of staggering levels of poverty, social breakdown and family dislocation."

So, there is no self-will available to this "most exploited class"; no access to feelings of humanity or compassion; no intellectual escape from the exploitative oppression.

Individuals are mere puppets.

So how is it that within this "most exploited class" a massive majority do not beat and kill their children? What makes them different?

The socialist explanation for the horrors that occur to some children is utterly deficient.

Apart from that, the paragraph's statistics hail from this report which also notes,

The most common cause of death for a child was a head injury, followed by asphyxia, which includes suffocation, strangulation and carbon monoxide poisoning.

The circumstances of Moko's death were extraordinary. Protracted and unspeakable.

Where are the fathers? Where is accountability?

Since Martin Van Beynan asked the question, Why doesn't anybody ask the questions? three more published writers have expressed very similar sentiments.

Ewen McQueen, in the NZ Herald, "The court has reached its verdict. The marchers have gone home. The politicians and media have done their usual hypocritical hand-wringing. But the question remains - where was Moko's dad?" He then generalised it to, where are the fathers?

David Seymour writing in the Sunday Star Times (opposite Jacinda Ardern who slated my child poverty and family structure report but more on that soon) asked, "Where the hell was his Dad?" referring also to Moko but broadening to a "fatherhood crisis".

And now, in this morning's DomPost, somewhat surprisingly, Rosemary McLeod has joined in,

I am sorry for women left alone and homeless with dependent children, but increasingly annoyed that nobody tracks the fathers of the children down to see how they are living, and ask why everyone else should pay for their offspring. While suffering mothers and children pose for the cameras, how come nobody ever asks such obvious questions?

It takes years, even decades for public opinion to reach tipping point but societal acceptance of fatherless families is on the wane.

Andrew Becroft - good luck

I'd vote to abolish the Office of Children's Commissioner because it's just more state bureaucracy and to date, the lead role has only been occupied by seeming leftists.

But I've always had some time for Andrew Becroft because he was prepared to stand up and say the most common factor among the youth that came before him as Principal Youth Court judge was a lack of a father.

And he said it during the last Labour innings.

On the eve of his taking the reins from Russell Wills, the DomPost has written a piece about him. Again I warm to his attitude and conclusions (which mesh with mine when it comes to keeping on with dysfunctional families):

He says he's never written a young person off, though there is an air of "desperate inevitability" that comes with the family situations of some of them.
"I've always felt that with the right intervention, and with the right people in a young person's life, there is always hope.
"The reality is for some that is never going to be the case. But you never know, you see - you can't say for sure."
There is something about the job that "gives while its takes".
"There are enough stories of significant change to help you through the more distressing or despairing times when you wonder if change is possible."

So I wish him luck.

Report summarized in NBR

The NBR has kindly run an op-ed summarizing my report as 'free' content over the long weekend:

"On the back of last week's budget, opposition politicians, academics and other advocates again expressed outrage at the incidence of child poverty. The culprits routinely blamed are unemployment, high housing costs and insufficient benefit payments.
But there is another factor – probably the most important – that is constantly overlooked. That is the rapid change in family structure.
In 1961, New Zealand experienced peak fertility. The average number of births per woman was 4.3. There were more babies born that year than ever before or ever since."

More

The inconsistency of the Left - featured comment

From Jim Rose:

"One of the oddities of the 21st-century left is if you are gay, your life is incomplete unless you can marry and have children. If you suggest others, in particular parents, have an incomplete life if they do not marry, you are some sort of throwback."

I did not oppose same-sex marriage. I think marriage is a great institution. But it is odd how hard the left fought for gay inclusion and yet, when you put up data that shows de facto relationships are far less stable than marriages and therefore contribute more to child poverty, their defence of cohabiting as equal to marriage is strident.

Responding to criticism that goes beyond mere dismissal - there's not much of it

On the back of the release of Child Poverty and Family Structure on Monday, I had a busy day talking to media, dealing with e-mails, etc.

The attacks started around midday from the likes of Nigel Latta, Max Rashbrooke, Susan St John, Marama Davidson  and Janet Wilson. In a nutshell, after much uncomplimentary preamble, Latta said "... correlation does not equal causation". Rashbrooke said my stats were high school level. Green MP, Marama Davidson said I had misinterpreted  the statistics and NewstalkZB panelist Janet Wilson said Bob McCoskrie had made me write stuff I didn't believe.

Susan St John is the only one who has chosen to actually argue against elements of the report.

So I am going to respectfully address her objections.

"To say that parental breakup is the prime cause of child poverty is a bit like saying spots are the prime cause of measles."

The report says that sole parent families are the poorest in NZ (quoting MSD). It identifies the various pathways into sole parenthood, with especial attention given to those females who are single parents from the time of their child's birth (sole parents from the get-go as Larry Williams puts it). 2015 birth registration data showed 5% of babies had no father details recorded, and a further 15% had fathers with different residential addresses to the mothers. This is further reflected in 17.5% of babies born last year being reliant on welfare by the end of the year. At no point in the report did I say "parental breakup is the prime cause of child poverty."

"We can agree with her that sole parents and their children have higher rates of child poverty compared to married or defacto couples with children.  But around 50% of poor children come from two parent households."

Again I address this in the report saying,

While child poverty also occurs among two parent families, its severity and longevity tend to differ, primarily because two parent families generally derive their income from the market which is subject to fluctuations; single parents are more likely to derive their income from a benefit which is reasonably static and not subject to market fluctuations. Ironically, while benefit income is more secure, market income is more likely to improve over time. Sometimes a reported low annual income can mask a family’s financially stronger position when home ownership and savings are accounted for. But home ownership rates are also low among single parents. In 2001 only 9.7%
of single parent householders owned their own home. The largest group of homeowners was couple-with-children at 42%.
When debt ratios – dollars of debt versus every $100 dollars of assets – are measured, single parents have $56 for three or more children whereas couples have $18 for three or more children. 18

 St John continues:

It is deeply offensive to read this:
“It is not the intention of this paper to explore at length why marriage has fallen out of favour with most social science academics and policy-makers. The aim has been to show that marriage provides the best economic environment for raising children. The evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.“
Apart from the blanket statement that marriage is best when often it clearly is not, her snipe at left wing academics is misplaced.

Marriage does provide the best economic environment. I demonstrate it with the statistics extracted from customised Census 2013 data. I couldn't doctor that data. St John continues,

"Thinkers on the left favour strong, caring, mature relationships of equals. The left reject the limitations of traditional marriages where the woman is assumed to be dependent on the man. Parents who are respectful and caring of each other do provide a good environment for children- this can often be found in ‘unwed’ groups,  but is too often not found in those who are traditionally  ‘wed’. "

All the paper differentiates between is sole parent families, cohabiting families and legally married families; their incomes and, in the case of two parent relationships, propensity to separate over time (though I do briefly comment on the increasing incidence of dual earner families with children, adding to household income inequality - these are hardly 'woman dependent on man' families.)

"Lindsay Mitchell wants to claim child poverty is caused by marriage dissolution at the same time as she claims policy encourages that dissolution because separated couples are better off on welfare."

It took me a while to sort this one out. What the report says is that benefit settings incentivised separations if a mother preferred to get an income in her own name because 1/ it would match her partner's unemployment benefit and 2/ she won't have to share it. But it'll still be a low welfare income leaving her and the children around or below the poverty threshold.

"What exactly does Lindsay Mitchell want here? Less welfare? Policy implications of this report might be taken that she intends a reduction in the safety net yet further to limit ‘incentive to separate’ and to further stigmatize the unwed. These moves would be extremely dangerous. It is best to accept the world the way it is, rather than make policy for the world the way family values ideologues think it ought to be."

The report did not suggest any policy solutions. The only suggestions are St John's.

(On this post I won't publish any borderline comments.)

Family Structure and Child Poverty: What is the evidence telling us?

Very busy with media this morning.

Read the report, commissioned by Family First, here.

On with Leighton Smith at 9.30am.


Executive Summary

Despite families being much smaller, parents being older, mothers being better educated and having much higher employment rates, child poverty has risen significantly since the 1960s.

In 1961, 95 percent of children were born to married couples; by 2015 the proportion had fallen to 53 percent.

For Maori, 72 percent of births were to married parents in 1968; by 2015 the proportion had fallen to just 21 percent.

In 2015, 27 percent of registered births were to cohabiting parents. The risk of parental separation by the time the child is aged five is, however, 4-6 times greater than for married parents.

Cohabiting relationships are becoming less stable over time.

Cohabiting parents are financially poorer than married parents. They form an interim group between married and single parent families.

Single parent families make up 28 percent of all families with dependent children. These families are the poorest in New Zealand.

51% of children in poverty live in single parent families.

Single parents have the lowest home ownership rates and the highest debt ratios.

Children in sole parent families are often exposed to persistent poverty and constrained upward mobility.

Of registered births in 2015, 5% had no recorded father details and a further 15% had fathers living at a different home address to the mother.

Of all babies born in 2015, 17.5% (10,697) were reliant on a main benefit by the end of their birth year, over two thirds on a single parent benefit. Over half had Maori parents/caregivers.

The higher poverty rates for Maori and Pasifika children are reflected in the greater number of sole parent and cohabiting families.

Rapidly changing family structure has contributed significantly to increasing income inequality.

Child poverty is consistently blamed on unemployment, low wages, high housing costs and inadequate social security benefits. Little attention has been given to family structure.

Despite marriage being the best protector against child poverty it has become politically unfashionable – some argue insensitive – to express such a view.

But if there is to be any political will to solve child poverty the issue has to be confronted.

Hitting the nail firmly on the head

Absolute must-read from Martin van Beynen published in today's Dom Post under the hard-copy headline, The dysfunctional are exasperating our patience:

"We have tried everything and all we have created is a culture of dependence, entitlement, helplessness and irresponsibility."

Bennett being a bully?

From today's DomPost:

This is an injudicious response from Bennett.

1/ It sounds threatening

2/ The question is entirely reasonable given the data now available about at risk children and long-term welfare dependence

3/ The government is doing quite a lot to reduce the incidence of "young, incapable and irresponsible" parents through various policies. Does Bennett stand behind those policies?

4/ In light of this, her taking aim at a particular question/er displays illogical defensiveness and  animosity


I have only ever had one direct piece of correspondence from Bennett when she objected to my pointing out that while many sole parents came off welfare, they also returned. She was offended on their behalf. At least they were trying. And she herself had tried to come off welfare and had to return.

It's a little like the Left's 'walk a mile in my shoes' deflection whenever someone questions the circumstances of a needy person. It doesn't wash with me.

An MP or  Minister's job is to deal with questions objectively. I am sure that the questioner knows what Paula's background is. It's been well-publicized.

(Disclaimer - My reaction is based purely on the DomPost snippet. I have no further context. But nether do the thousands of other readers.)

"No cost control mechanism and not under active review"

MSD has just released its Four Year Plan. The stats are only current to June 2015. Not much caught my attention bar this diagram:

(Left click to enlarge.)

The most worrying aspect of this is the note attached to Super:

"No cost control mechanism and not under active review".