"Freedom to choose foolishly"

"Deepening social inequality" - where?

Venezuela maybe? How's that working out? The 'rich' are ordering food parcels on-line from Miami. The 'middleclass' is cutting out meals and going without basic necessities. The 'poor' are attacking food trucks and warehouses, stealing crops, foraging and storming supermarkets in border cities.The situation is deteriorating quickly. The country is being brought to its knees by socialism.

So it's Alice in Wonderland time reading the following complaints about New Zealand on the World Socialist Web Site:

"...the National Party government’s austerity measures since 2008 have “confiscated” billions of dollars from the poor and transferred this wealth to the rich. It has cut taxes for top income earners and corporations, increased the regressive Goods and Services Tax and pushed thousands of people, including single parents, off welfare payments. Spending on healthcare and education has been effectively cut, and thousands of jobs have been shed in government departments and publicly-owned companies, including Solid Energy, NZ Post and KiwiRail....the political establishment is seeking to wash its hands of any responsibility for the deepening social crisis."

The writers should seek sanctuary from this brutal regime in a country that has embraced and implemented their political ideals. Oh, but they would be out of a job. Nothing to complain about. Nothing to eat. Nothing to wipe their bottoms with.

The spousing crisis

The spousing crisis is leading to homelessness and child poverty.

Rental spouses are just too expensive.They are insecure and impermanent. You could get kicked out at any time and have to go looking for another. Some spouses have become P-contaminated and put children at risk. But there simply aren't enough solid, life-time spouses available, so more and more people are being forced into the rental spouse market.

The spousing problem in Auckland is worst. Auckland spouses are the most expensive and are driving people to look for spouses in other parts of the country. But it just gets worse. People are having to shack up with other people's spouses and share. Some even turn their backs on spouses to live in cars!

Some spouses wait, empty. Nobody wants them. they have been turned down for more attractive spouses.

Some say state-spousing is the answer but is it? State spousing (sometimes called the DPB) only makes poverty worse.

If Labour has a policy to solve the spousing crisis, I'll vote for them.

But honestly I think the only way to solve the spousing crisis is to stop meddling with the market.

A rare occasion on which I agree with the Greens

Why, after so long, has a prison volunteer's gang membership become an issue?

Someone is feeding stuff to Sensible Sentencing. SST is threatening to reveal numbers of guards with gang connections as well. This will develop.

Sometimes I can agree with SST. But I probably hold a deeper conviction about rehabilitation and taking whatever effective measures possible to achieve it.

Ngapari Nui should be judged on his work in prisons - gang membership is not illegal.

Disenfranchise the elderly!

It's a somewhat tempting idea. It'd do for Winston Peters.

Writing in the NZ Herald this morning Matt Heath says:

Should old people be allowed to vote?
Unsurprisingly the Brexit vote was carried by older people. Only 19 per cent of those 18-24 wanted to leave. Yet the young will have to live with the result for the longest time. Lumped for life with a decision largely made by pensioners. Older voters specialise in looking back instead of forward. So why should those on their way out decide a future they won't be around to see?
The same thing is happening here. There are clear changes NZ needs to make if we are to thrive in the modern world. Many of these changes are being stalled because politicians must appease baby boomers to survive.

Heath is correct to worry about the top-heavy demographic but wrong to assume they all vote similarly. They are not all grey power socialists looking to further feather their own nests at the cost of the rest of the population.

 If you're under 50, why the hell are you paying for Super you will never get yourself? Why aren't we increasing the age of retirement? Why is there no means testing on pensions? Why is there no movement on our property issues? Simple. There's lots of old people, they love to vote and backing changes they don't like is electoral suicide.

Well, I have a great deal of sympathy for these points and there is probably some truth in his reasoning. But the older generation will eventually be passing on their wealth. To force down property prices would mean carving value off assets and risking deflation. Property prices are what they are (under current legislation) because NZ is a very attractive place to live. That means it's also a country abounding in opportunity and looking at a better future than many others.

You can't blame the elderly for why they vote. We all vote selfishly. But it becomes unfair when the demographics shift so far that young voters are drowned out. At 65 a New Zealander has been voting for 47 years, surely that's enough time to get your point across.

I would challenge the statement that "we all vote selfishly". I vote primarily with a whole country view. And that coincides for what is best for following generations.

Old age is a time to relax. You deserve a rest at 70. Let the young people who live for the future mould that future. When I am old I hope I am brave enough to hand power over without a fight.
The world is a terrifyingly confusing place when you're elderly. You're being left behind. When you're young you jump up stairs two steps at a time. When you're old you stand at the top trembling. Unfortunately fear can lead to judgmentalism and bigotry. Which leads to illogical positions.

Uuumm. Isn't ageism a form of "judgmentalism and bigotry?" Isn't Matt's an "illogical position"?

Oldies say they paid taxes their whole lives and deserve a pay day. If that's the case, where is all that money? If you saved it, where is it? Why does so much of our tax today go to Super? The answer is clear. All the money has gone. Boomers and the Governments they voted in have already spent it on themselves. It was a massive, short-sighted, generational cock-up. Hopefully the current tax-paying population will be more responsible with their futures. Unfortunately much of the money we should be saving for our futures is being spent on covering a generation who voted to put nothing aside.

It's been a very long time since anything was "put aside" for Super. Fifty years at least. There used to be a few state forests owned by the social security fund but since the sixties pensions (and all the other not inconsiderable working-age welfare) has been funded from the current tax-take.

Though we do have KiwiSaver and start-up subsidies. How did that get voted in???

But Super is the real source of his anger I think. And again, I sympathise. So what Matt Heath needs to do is stop complaining, figure out which party is prepared to vote in his interests - start one if need be - and make sure he gets the message out to all of his like-minded generation.

But he should also remember that many of the people he wants to disenfranchise are grandparents and parents who will vote with their children's interests uppermost.

Increase in benefit fraud?

RNZ is reporting:

"Work and Income is owed $180 million from former and current clients who have defrauded the system - and that amount has doubled in five years."

Yesterday a journalist working on CheckPoint sent me some OIA data looking for comment.

I told him I've have never seen figures this big. That's because they represent cumulative debt. In the note it says: "The data has been produced from the Legacy Audit Trail (LAT) reporting. LAT information provides a fuller picture of debt owed to the Ministry and takes into account debt owed by current and former clients."

I advised that he look at this graph:

MSD is getting better at detecting fraud. Fraud detections doubled in 2013/14 because of MSD's IRD data-matching programme, It isn't getting better at recovering the debt. But I would be surprised if the behaviour of beneficiaries has changed particularly.


The second most common type of benefit fraud (after working while claiming a benefit) is people claiming a single parent benefit when they are in a relationship. In February 2014 MSD started a 12 month trial involving following up with 1,616 sole parent support clients to establish entitlement to a benefit.



Then, the Social Security (Fraud Measures and Debt Recovery) Amendment Bill passed into law in April 2014. It's purpose was "to make spouses and partners, as well as beneficiaries, accountable for fraud, and to enable the Ministry of Social Development to recover debt more effectively". Obviously not working yet.

Maybe he wanted me to say something derogatory about fraudulent beneficiaries to provide 'balance'. Because he didn't use any of my comment.

I hope she has plenty more where that came from

Just what this country needs. A bleeding-heart pop star with more money than sense.

I recently wrote about the Upper Hutt man who had failed to sell his idea of the private sector funding school lunches to local businesses.

Seems he has since started up a give-a-little-page to fund his Fuel the Need sheme. And Lorde has donated $20,000 with a message that she is "passionate about all kids having access to food at school".

I'm passionate about parents taking responsibility for their children. Every time something like this happens we chip away at the societal expectation of 'responsibility' being the flip side of  'right'.

It is each person's right to have children but it is increasingly everybody else's responsibility to look after them. And this super role model has just given that attitude the stamp of approval.

If she wants to give away her money it'd be better spent funding a local community group that goes into the homes of these 'hungry' kids and finds out what's going wrong; what needs to change and shows the family how. And stays involved until the situation is resolved.

I applaud her generosity but she needs to think very hard about what comes next.

Household wealth inequality and family structure

On the back of statistics released yesterday there has been some grizzling about the top 10% increasing their share of household wealth. I am not about to argue with the data. My position is that the inequality is being substantially driven by change in family structure. Look at the data from the tables:

The median household wealth at June 2015 was $289,000.

One parent households with dependent child(ren) have a median household wealth of just $26,000 - less than a tenth of the median.

The wealthiest households are empty-nest couples or those with adult children living at home.

In the tiny cohort of my children's friends, more than half of their parents split at some point after their birth. It's a fairly middle-class sample. About half of the separated mothers have stayed single.

We live in world characterised by relationship instability yet expect or want the division of wealth to remain what it was when marriage was almost universal and divorce unusual.

The following graphs depict household incomes as opposed to wealth but they illustrate the point I am making. I compared household incomes from the 1966 census to those in the 2013 census and adjusted to $2013:

In 1966 far more families were clustered in the two middle income bands. There were fewer families at the extremes.

(While the 1966 data only comprised  married families, just 4.3% of all families were excluded. They were predominantly widows. Even if those families were added to the lowest income bands, the bands' content would still be below 10%. In contrast, by 2013, 25 percent of families appeared in the lowest income bands.)

Yet the constant refrain is that growing inequality is the fault of factors beyond the individual's control.

I believe it's more a facet of personal choice. Don't get me wrong. I am all for personal choice. But there remains a distinction between good and bad choices, notwithstanding a 'bad' choice may be 'good' choice if you don't mind being poor. But don't then complain about it - personally or on somebody else's behalf - and blame a host of other factors like capitalism, unemployment, low wages etc.

The current  levels of income inequality and wealth will continue to grow if people continue to choose to raise children alone or have children by multiple partners. Not all, but most, will end up at the wrong end of the income scale.

Lawyer blames Moko's death on "extreme poverty"

Ron Mansfield, the defence lawyer for one of  Moko's killers, Tania Shailer, blames "extreme poverty" for her actions.

You can listen here.

Not twice but three times he said that 'we' need to deal with poverty or more of this will happen.

What an insult to the many thousands of parents who would be financially in the same boat as the killers were, but who still manage to make their children's safety and well-being paramount.

Resorting to the poverty excuse is just facile.

( I can agree however with Mansfield's assertions about mental ill health. But even that has many of its roots in the welfarism - not poverty.)

Update: RNZ has written up some of his statement to media:

"As a country we need to stand back and we need to look at how we're dealing with poverty. There's extreme poverty out there and where there's poverty there's stress. And all of the reports on child abuse show us that where there's stress there's going to be higher rates of child abuse."

Garth McVicar's open letter to the Solicitor General

23rd May 2016 By e-mail and post

Dear Ms Jagose,
Re: Moko Rangitoheriri – Decision to downgrade charges

I am the founder the Sensible Sentencing Trust (SST), an organization set up in 2001 to provide support to victims of crime, and to lobby for changes to the law. Our organization now has some thousands of members and many more supporters.

Along with many, I am both appalled and bewildered by the decision to replace the charges of murder originally laid against Tania Shailer and David Haerewa for the killing of Moko Rangitoheriri (Moko) with charges of manslaughter, to which the accused then pleaded guilty. Clearly this came about by what is popularly known as a “plea bargain”. It is unclear whether the prosecution or defence initiated the discussions which led to that deal. No one is talking.

SST has a number of qualified lawyers as legal advisors. All of those lawyers find the decision inexplicable, assuming the facts are as they have been widely reported. One criminal defence barrister with 25 years experience has said that if the facts are as reported, he would not even have bothered trying to get the charges against Moko’s killers downgraded. At no time since this story broke has there been any statement from your office which clarifies or contradicts the facts as reported in the media.

The Crown Solicitor in Rotorua has referred all queries to you. We understand that you – or one of your delegates – approved the plea bargain under which the murder charges were replaced with charges of manslaughter as required by law.

As I have said, we have sought advice from qualified and experienced lawyers both within and outside our ranks. No-one can explain – or even speculate on – the reasons for this deal being done. Most of our advisers say “there must be something more”.

On behalf of the members of SST, I would like to know if there is in fact anything more, and why exactly this decision was made and if indeed you or your office made it.

SST is organizing a number of rallies to be held at various Courts on the day of the sentencing for Tania Shailer and David Haerewa. While there will be a number of marches and rallies around New Zealand as a build up to the Court House rallies on the 27th. The purpose of the rallies on 27th June will be primarily to address the plea bargain issue.

We would like to read out a statement from you to hopefully allay the publics’ worst fears and I invite you to submit such a statement for me to action.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Garth McVicar 
Founder Sensible Sentencing Trust

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.