Another one bites the dust

What a blow. Rodney Hide announces his last column for the Herald on Sunday. I suppose it'll save a few minutes of my day not having to open the Herald page of a Sunday morning but that's the only upside I can think of and it's not a very good one.

There are countless opinion writers, as mentioned yesterday. There are three I take note of. Karl du Fresne, Martin van Beynen and Colin James. Occasionally I will glance at other writers columns, if the headline interests. But rarely do I reach the end. Mostly because it's recycled pap. The same ideas get expressed repeatedly with little thought about the manner of expression even. Originality is a rare commodity. In part that is why I blog infrequently now. I have said all I have to say and don't want to bore the readers or myself.

But Hide always had a new twist on something. Sometimes the twists seemed implausible but they never failed to either entertain or turn over the grey matter.

Perhaps he could be persuaded to start a blog? Creative thinkers need an outlet. And Lord knows, the rest of us need to hear their thoughts.

Karl du Fresne on Winston Peters

In the on-line media age, where both 'writers' and readers are seemingly insatiably thirsty for content, opinion pieces have become all about quantity - not quality.

But this one is a cracker:

OPINION: As is well known, the MMP electoral system was created to ensure, as far as possible, that no party ended up wielding absolute power.

So far you'd have to say it has worked exactly as intended. In the eight elections since New Zealand adopted MMP, no one party has won an absolute majority. They have all had to compromise and negotiate with smaller coalition partners.

Now we find ourselves in the same position again. It should be familiar by now, yet something seems not quite right. What could it be?

Oh, that's right – Winston Peters, the 7.5 Per cent Man, is back in the mix, and making the most of his intoxicating moment in the spotlight.

He said he was out of phone range when Bill English called last Sunday. But what sort of politician goes bush, leaving his phone unattended, when he's in the hot seat and the country is waiting for a government to be formed?

Then there was his excuse that he was waiting for the 384,000 special votes to come in, as if these had the potential to skew the election night result by such an order of magnitude that any preliminary negotiations with other parties would be futile.

Peters wanted us to think he was delaying showing his hand out of respect for democracy, but I don't think anyone was fooled. We've seen it all before.

If he truly respected democracy, he would acknowledge that his party pulled a measly 7.5 per cent of the vote and stop behaving like some sort of vainglorious potentate from Berzerkistan. Heck, he couldn't even retain his own seat.

But this is Peters we're talking about. The "h" word that comes between "humidify" and "hummingbird" in most dictionaries apparently doesn't exist in the edition on Peters' bookshelf.

Perhaps MMP works best when you have politicians who are prepared to be conciliatory, to compromise and to make concessions. The Germans seem to manage it.

Unfortunately, Peters is not one of those politicians. Bluster and demagoguery, rather than consensus, is his default setting.

Politically, he's a living fossil: a relic of Muldoonism, with all its bullying, divisiveness and ad hoc state interventionism. From the time he first entered Parliament in 1978, his career has been marked by fractiousness and petulance. He is a settler of scores and a bearer of grudges.

Some of his policy ideas – reinstating the old Forest Service, introducing a police "flying squad", legislating to ensure free-to-air coverage of major sporting events – appear designed to exploit the nostalgic yearning of his ageing supporters for New Zealand the way they remember it.

Peters is a political Doctor Who, inviting us to join him in the Tardis for a trip back to a simpler time when an all-powerful state pretended it could solve complex problems with the pull of a lever. Look where that got us.

I said at the start of this column that MMP is working exactly as intended. Does this mean it's a good system? Not at all. It's a dog that replaced a turkey.

We weren't sure at the time that we wanted a dog. All we knew is that we desperately wanted to get rid of the turkey, and a highly motivated lobbying campaign convinced us – by a less than overwhelming majority, incidentally – that the dog would do the job better.

And so we ended up with a system in which a vain and egotistical politician whose party got 7.5 per cent of the vote determines who the next government will be; and where every solemn pledge made during the election campaign is now up for negotiation in a secret process that voters have no control over or input into.

We could, however, do a few things to improve the situation. For one thing, the media could stop stoking Peters' already rampant ego by refusing to give him daily opportunities to grandstand. And let's stop treating the post-election guessing game as some sort of diverting spectator sport or reality TV show. We're talking about the future of the country, for heaven's sake.

Oh, and here's another suggestion that might negate the Peters problem altogether.

You'd think that if any party "got" MMP, it would be the Greens. But at the very suggestion of a deal with National, they clutch at their skirts like startled virgins.

Well, Labour has never invited them into bed. If promiscuity is the price for getting some runs on the board, perhaps they should forget about virtue and get their knickers off.

 - The Dominion Post

Dreaded de javu

And so it came to pass. The self-serving, bad-mannered, boorish, duplicitous, Winston Peters has once more fooled some of the people, thereby visiting an unwanted prospect on all of the people.

Stephen Franks has a piece by his colleague, Rob Olgilvie, well worth a read:

Why just king-maker? Why not king?

Never a truer word...

Decades of state welfare and political paternalism have [since] conditioned some people to believe they cannot take care of themselves without government support. So they jeopardise their own freedom by giving government increasing authority over their lives while reducing the freedom of others too.

Source 

Only one party isn't promising to increase their authority over your lives this election. They are the only party promising to spend less, not more.

I will party vote ACT tomorrow. And despair over the vast majority who want to increasingly cede control of their lives. But I have long since stopped trying to understand why.

Jacinda Ardern will increase poverty because she doesn't understand the drivers

Last year I wrote a paper which explored the link between child poverty and family structure. The strongest correlate with child poverty is single parent families on welfare. Additionally, children born into de facto relationships - which had a much higher likelihood of dissolving than marriages - were much more likely to become poor.

In a Sunday Star Times column Jacinda Ardern attacked my research:

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 was allowed only 150 words to respond via a letter-to-the-editor, but you can read my full response here.

Because she doesn't understand child - no let's call it 'family' poverty, Ardern is on the brink of making it much worse.

Granted that particular paper was about incomes. But they account for only one aspect of the poverty problem.

When countries redistribute wealth to raise incomes it comes at a cost - joblessness. Peter Whiteford and Willem Adema write:

"...there is an unavoidable trade-off between providing generous assistance to the poor and improving incentives for people to work and provide for themselves. On average across OECD countries, there is a fairly strong correlation between the effectiveness of tax and benefit systems in reducing poverty and the level of family joblessness. The correlation coefficient is 0.63 – implying that every 1 percentage point increase in the level of poverty reduction achieved by the welfare state is associated with an increase in the number of jobless families by 0.63 percentage points. Among the English-speaking countries  the correlation is even stronger (about 0.92), so that Australia and the United Kingdom reduce child poverty very significantly and have very high levels of joblessness among families; while Canada and the United States reduce poverty much less, but have much lower levels of joblessness (although they have much higher poverty among working families with children). That is, in the English-speaking countries the argument made by Adam, Brewer and Shepherd (2006) appears to apply – more generous support to poor families is associated with higher levels of family joblessness."

Source

In a nutshell, for every percentage point family poverty is reduced, joblessness increases.

The possible future Prime Minister will substantially lift benefit incomes for young parents but reduce the incentive to work. Adding $3,120 annually per child aged 2 or under (and that's only one part of her policy) reduces, if not closes, the gap between incomes from work and incomes from benefits. And don't doubt that recipients factor this into a choice between working and staying dependent on the taxpayer.

"I get a good amount of money on the benefit, why bother working?"

Because work has many more benefits than money alone. Most importantly it teaches your children how the real world operates.

The last two decades has seen countries across the western world debating which is the best strategy to get families out of poverty - increasing work participation or redistributing income. National went largely with the former with their welfare reforms. Now there are fewer children benefit-dependent than since the 1980s (though there's a long way to go yet). Ardern though is predominantly choosing the latter. And if she needs the Greens, a softening of the reforms will be inevitable.

While claiming to have researched  child poverty extensively she has ignored the effect that redistribution has on both work participation and relationship status.

NZ Herald's Simon Collins summarized some of the research into the effect of welfare on relationships:

For parents on benefits or low incomes, the tax and benefit system actually created a financial incentive to separate. Economist Patrick Nolan calculated in 2008 that a mother earning $240 a week and an unemployed father would be $132 a week better off apart, even allowing for the extra costs of two households, because of the extra welfare top-ups the mother could get if she lived alone with the children.
Social researchers Paul Callister and David Rea, in a new draft paper, trace the other side of the equation - a worrying minority of mid-life men aged 30 to 44 missing out on both work and marriage. Mid-life men outside the labour force rose from 2 per cent to 11 per cent in the 30 years to 2006, and those living without partners rose in the past 20 years from 19 per cent to 33 per cent. 

Ardern is intent on reducing income poverty (with no guarantee the money will be spent on the children) but will unwittingly or worse, uncaringly, increase another kind of poverty. A poverty of purpose and spirit. These deficits are what drives the problems all New Zealanders want to see alleviated.

Farmers fight back

Great to see:

Maniototo farmers challenge Ardern to visit them on water tax

A group of Central Otago farmers are challenging Jacinda Ardern to visit their farms to discuss Labour's water tax plans.
The group of women, known as Water Maniototo, say they cannot afford a royalty on irrigated water, planned at one to two cents per thousand litres of water, and it could drive some off their land.

More 

Crucial good news stories ignored by 'change' voters

The number of teenage mothers granted a benefit has plummeted:

source

The percentage of children dependent on a benefit is falling and is lower than it has been for decades:

source

Not all are awestruck

Jacinda Mania hasn't struck everywhere:

Not a skerrick of interest in the royal party it would appear. Working too hard to notice.

Photo source

Election 2017

Muriel Newman accuses the Labour leader of being neither open nor transparent which Ardern claims "at every soundbite".

A democracy deserves politicians who are transparent and honest. Labour’s new leader is showing she is neither.
The reality is that voters deserve to know exactly how much proposed new taxes are going to cost them, before an election. That’s what openness and transparency is all about – revealing the truth to voters, no matter how unpopular it might be.

More

While Rodney Hide questions Winston's moral entitlement to a pension and also reminds us:

As an aside, Peters is on his third pension entitlement.
Through a quirk of parliamentary history he has been entitled to two extremely generous parliamentary pensions.
His entitlements are gold-plated and make national Super look extremely mean.

More 

Saturday morning read

If you have a few spare minutes this morning  Jacob Hornberger is well worth reading:

The leftist shibboleth that undergirds America as a welfare state is that Americans, if left to their own choices, would never voluntarily help out others to a sufficient degree. Given such, it is necessary, liberals say, for the state to enter the picture and force Americans to do their moral duty.

More 

ACT well shot of this one

John Banks never appealed to me at any level. Not as a National MP, not as a talkback host, not as a mayor. But most certainly not as an ACT MP.

Follow the link to court decision from here.

Of particular note, Banks alleged reaction on finding his 19 year-old girlfriend was pregnant.

As a committed opponent of the DPB I struggle with the bona fide reasons for its introduction - abandoned pregnant females. If the DPB had only ever been extended to those women, it would never have become the social undoer it did.

The Honourable John Banks. It jars.

Jacinda versus Bill: TV One Debate

Jacinda would be great cast as the humble, charismatic  up-and-coming politician who wins hearts and minds. Tom Hanks would play the male equivalent.

But this is an election. Not Hollywood.

Bill wouldn't be cast by any director. He gets tongue-twisted, he misses his cues and he resides very much in the head space where facts are a given and don't need ardent defence or advocacy. They speak for themselves - thank goodness. Because he does't.

But on a more subtle level, Bill versus Jacinda found a perfect performance in him. There was not a skerrick of anything  unsightly or ugly. He looks like the man who continues to do the business; who gets what aspiring NZers are about, and is respectful. We might have preferred more sass and sparks but that wasn't going to happen.

Bill is a bit of a bumbler. The crew had to contain him when the show ended. He went to move away and then realised he was supposed to stay still. Is that the man who can't wait to get out of the limelight or the man who needs to move on to the next task?

Personally I just think it's the man who has a job to do and finds all of the media stuff an unwelcome intrusion and burden.

That's the kind of character I would to prefer running the country.

Let's never forget that as Minister for Social Welfare Steve Maharey spent his period in office defending welfare dependency. Bill English turned that on its head. He sought to understand what drove it and what would reduce it. English goes deep when it comes to social deprivation.

Jacinda would return to pulling the levers that drive it.

Is Jacinda the next Michael Joseph Savage?

Is Jacinda the next Michael Joseph Savage?

Will the portrait of Adern adorn walls for decades to come?

Jacinda has evoked Savage for some time now.  She frequently drops his name and talks  about how his welfare ideal degenerated into a judgemental and unjust system under National. She is a little bit Turei, and a little bit Clark.

But no bit Savage.

His goal was to provide assistance for people who were utterly down on their luck through no fault of their own. 

Savage's social security, following in the tradition of the Old Age Pension and even the Widow's Pension, required applicants to prove they were worthy of state support - that provided by their unknown fellow New Zealanders. There was a strong and shared understanding about the deserving and the non-deserving.

That may seem archaic today - certainly to leftists (but not insurance companies). The 'societal social compact' the Left strongly champions was necessarily based on the deserving/non-deserving concept. Without it, the common understanding that held the compact together as a successful policy for so many decades was gone.

Now Ardern  talks forcefully about a better and fairer NZ. But she has no idea - or chooses to ignore - what fairness on Micky Savage's terms would look like.

He wouldn't have been trying to convince Labour supporters they need to pay a young woman $3,000 a year for her newborn. He would have been demanding that a father support his child. He would have strongly rejected any idea that the state should pay for what  Jacinda advocates.

She should quit exploiting past leaders to build support for her own senseless spraying of social subsidies.

"We don’t have huge numbers sitting on welfare..."

David Farrar has a post about New Zealand's increasing workforce participation in contrast to both Australia and the US.

"We don’t have huge numbers sitting on welfare and/or out of the job market. We have lots of people in work or looking for work."

Regarding the first statement, I beg to differ.

Around one in ten of the working age population relies on a benefit. Granted that is better than during the nineties but it's historically still high. Too high:

Think about the likelihood of Judith Collins, back in 2008, campaigning against Labour,  saying "...we don't have huge numbers sitting on welfare". Yet at that time, the rate was the same as today.

One of the the first things National did after becoming government was establish the Welfare Working Group to investigate the high level of dependency.

Memories are very short at election time.

NZ didn't go to the moon but any other difference?

A cut and paste from Samizdata. Appealed to me.


The progress of social programs and the debt

Dale Amon (Belfast, Northern Ireland/Laramie, Wy) · North American affairs

1960’s: Lets eliminate everything bad. We can go to the moon so why not end poverty!
“Yes, do it.”

1970’s: Well, it doesn’t look so easy. We’ll have to spend more money.
“Well, okay.”

1980’s: It is actually not working. Maybe we should spend some more slightly differently.
“Well, give it a try.”

1990’s. We’ve got so many people depending on this! We have to spend more to keep them afloat.
“Well, I don’t want to look like a terrible person, so okay.”

2000’s: The debt is growing, and the social programs are actually having negative effects, but we have to keep trying! We’re nice people! We have to DO SOMETHING!
“Well, is this really necessary… why not cut back… oh, okay, don’t look at me that way.”

2010’s: The country is in debt and things are awful! We must help those who are least able to help themselves. We have to let the world see what nice people we are!
“Well… no.”
You can’t say that! You EVIL RACIST HOMOPHOBIC ANTI-WOMAN OLD WHITE MALE SUPREMACIST!!!!!”
“Oh, bog off.”

Source

Metiria goes but the welfare policy stays

The uproar over Metiria Turei wasn't just personal. People were polarized about her past actions and continuing attitude of stubborn, arrogant, defence but the problem for the Greens was multi-faceted. Not least was the reaction to their welfare policy.

Marama Davidson is now leading the 'poverty' policy but there is no talk about changing it. The Greens are still advocating that it is perfectly acceptable not to name the father of a benefit-dependent child, and that failing a drugs test is also OK.

When the state first began financially aiding deserted women it did so under the strict condition that the father had been pursued through the courts, and he would not or could not pay. He could be jailed.

Anyone who was considered to have caused their own incapacity to work was ineligible for social security assistance.

Some would call those conditions draconian. But they kept a lid on welfare numbers for many decades.

Patently the Greens are not going to form a government alone but one of these ideas might slip through. The first. Match that up with Labour's $3000 baby bonus and it isn't hard to predict what will happen.

On Jacinda vs Bill

Somewhat lacking in my own opinion about the overnight sensation that is the new Labour leader, I am borrowing this one:

Metiria standing in Te Tai Tonga

Metiria standing in Te Tai Tonga. She's not on the list.

2014 Candidate results for Te Tai Tonga

Labour Rino Tirikatene 8445
Māori   Rahui Katene 4891
Green Dora Roimata Langsbury 3173
Mana BEYER, Georgina 1996
Legalise Cannabis Emma-Jane Mihaere Kingi 1005

Can she win it?

As much as I like to see justice served, I also like hard work redemption stories. If there is nothing else to bite her, and she co-operates with WINZ in the way other beneficiaries are required to, and she expresses at least some understanding and remorse about lying to them in the past, she could yet turn into a worthy MP. Writing people off serves no purpose.

She's a talent. Has tremendous tenacity. But currently misguided.

Where does Jacinda's Labour Party stand on benefit fraud? (Updated)

Who said this?

"This Government wants to make sure that everyone who is entitled to support gets it. Benefit abuse and fraud are unacceptable and will not be tolerated. All cases of deliberate fraud are prosecuted. It is a disappointing fact that some people attempt to defraud our system. Where debts are incurred they will be recovered."

(Hint - this time it is not Steve Maharey)

Update:

WWallace is correct. David Benson Pope as Social Development Minister under Helen Clark.

Will a future Labour/Green government ever be able to be unequivocal about benefit fraud and back their Ministry's actions again?

Green's irresponsibility can't even be costed

The Greens want to stop what they call punitive sanctions on benefits and raise core benefit payments by 20 percent. The sanctions abolished include drugs-testing and requirement to name the father of a child.

Many low-skilled, low-pay jobs are currently drug-tested and the trend seems to be for the practice to expand. Consider a scenario whereby the worker can fail an employment drugs test but receive a commensurate non-drugs-tested income from a benefit (the Green's benefit package will push many incomes above minimum wage). It's not hard to envisage which way the foot traffic will be flowing.

And when mothers are no longer required to name the father/s of their children, you can bet many more won't. Why would they? With no financial penalty, there is no economic reason to.  So the money currently collected in child support will reduce. This is effectively a further debit on the welfare bill.

Have we seen any modelling of the possible effects of these policies? You bet we haven't.

But a lift in taxes in higher earning brackets won't cut it.