Highly unusual graph

The graph below shows child entry into state care by ethnicity from March to June 2020.

Can you spot what is unusual about it? Certainly I have never seen a graph representing NZ ethnicities like this one before. Ever.

Source

A debate coming our way

Whether or not to criminalise 'coercive control' - a precursor to family violence.

According to the Melbourne Age:

Coercive control - which can include isolating a partner from their friends and family, restricting their movement, monitoring their phone and controlling their finances - is the most common factor leading up to an intimate partner homicide.

A couple of Australian states have - or are in the process of doing so. 

What is striking about the linked article is how balanced it is with reasoned views from differing perspectives. In NZ a mainly one-sided argument would be presented featuring various anti-male campaigners and favoured by left-wing blogs like The Spin-off, and MSM like Stuff and RNZ in particular. 

I'd suggest criminalising coercive control in NZ is a foregone conclusion once the idea gains traction.

When group dissension becomes THE issue

Because of collectivism and identity politics, and RNZ's obsession with such, when one Maori disagrees with another THAT becomes the story.

Minister for Whanau Ora, Peeni Henare told Maori News that the head of Oranga Tamariki looked about to resign. Minister for Children, Kelvin Davis reprimanded him for stepping outside of his portfolio. Minister of Maori Development, Willie Jackson waded in and said the Maori caucus has a view on the head of OT.

So the story gets headlined that main players are "at odds".

It must be very frustrating for Maori who want to get beyond being Maori first and foremost.

In the same way that a female MP might be thoroughly frustrated if her every word and action was framed and critiqued from a feminist perspective with the actual content and intent overlooked.

The inexorable move to separatism

Maori and non-Maori partner at very high rates. StatsNZ: "In the 1996 census, 66 percent of partnerships involving people of Maori ethnicity were partnerships between a Maori and non-Maori partner."

After reading the statements by various government and state agency players speaking to the Waitangi Tribunal yesrday there is no doubt in my mind that a move to separate child protection systems is developing. For instance:

Assistant Māori Commissioner for Children Glenis Philip-Barbara said the government must determine whether iwi and hapū could take on a transfer of power from Oranga Tamariki.

"What we're asking for is for the government to recognise mana Māori by handing over the power to define, determine and decide what 'good' looks like for tamariki Māori to Māori.

"I don't think we've had a better time in our history as a nation to realise this dream. I'm hopeful that government will step back and understand how important it is to share power as a Treaty partner."

Putting aside the politics, what will this mean for real people?

If a child has any Maori blood, his or her interests will be decided solely by Maori?

Envisage a Maori whanau versus a non-Maori family vying for custody of their mokopuna/grandchild. It isn't difficult to imagine the heartaches that will be involved if the non-Maori family's rights are dismissed because whakapapa links are the most important consideration.

The principle is already given a great deal of weight under current legislation but it can't dominate to the cost of all else.

Stability and security must be paramount when deciding the best interests of children. It's a colourblind requisite. 

"In New Zealand today"

 Karl du Fresne has written the second of what I hope is a series of posts, "In New Zealand today" which highlights various media items that typify the way the country is immersing itself in identity politics. 

New Zealand has to decide what type of place it wants to be: a diverse, harmonious, tolerant, multicultural country with a common interest in prosperity and freedom, or a splintered one in which multiple groups jostle for special treatment on the basis of real or imagined differences of ethnicity, sexual preference, culture, religion, gender or any one of the many other divisive “identities”. I think I know which society most New Zealanders would opt for.

Karl's has to be one of the most important voices 'In New Zealand Today'. 

Pronoun ommission an offence?

The Public Service Commissioner is recommending employees include a pronoun in email signatures. This to signal their commitment to diversity and inclusion.

Get this:

Having pronouns in an email signature signals you as an LGBTQIA+ ally.

So, if you don't want to add 'she/her' or  'he/him' to your signature you are an LGBTQIA+ enemy?

This is exactly like the compulsion to actively support 'black lives matter' or be told your 'silence is violence'.

The use of coercion to make people think and behave in ways the state sees fit is reprehensible.

If a transgender or gender diverse person wants to adopt the practice, fine.

Surely we don't all have to be the same. Isn't that the point about diversity?

More upheaval coming at Oranga Tamariki?

 Back in July I questioned how long the stand off between the head of Oranga Tamariki and Maori advocates calling for her resignation would go on for.

Newshub/NZ Herald is now intimating Grainne Moss' resignation is imminent. With Tracey Martin out of parliament - who stood by Moss as Children's Minister - and her replacement, Kelvin Davis (as well as the PM) refusing to publicly express support for her, it's hardly surprising.

What a poisoned, politicised chalice that position is.

1999 - 2003 Jackie Pivac quit 10 months before contract end after a bad review of CYF

2003 Paula Tyler quit late 2005 just 14 months into a three year contract

2006 -2010 Public service veteran Ray Smith appointed

2010 Bernadine McKenzie appointed and quits in 2015 ahead of Rebstock report into CYF

2016 Grainne Moss appointed from the private sector and ....

Update: Grainne Moss says, "I'm not set to resign, I can confirm I'm staying in my role... I'm absolutely committed to the kaupapa, we've made lots of progress, but there's lots more to do and it's a privilege to be able to have an opportunity to improve the outcomes for tamariki, rangatahi and their whānau".

More tax...more love...more kindness

 

Source

Labour govt gradually increasing % of your income they spend

StatsNZ released household accounts data on Friday.

Important to note they apply to before the lockdown.

Of interest, spending on health, education and housing is increasing as a % of disposable income per capita:

And,

Income tax payable by households increased 7.2 percent to $41.5 billion.

The major point made in the StatsNZ release:

New Zealanders are spending almost everything they earn, with only about $700 million in household saving in the March 2020 year, slightly less than in 2019, Stats NZ said today.“That’s the equivalent of each occupied household, numbering 1.79 million in New Zealand, earning about $412 more a year than they spend,” national accounts senior manager Paul Pascoe said.

NZ's child protection agency is informed by...

 ... a recent Oranga Tamariki paper titled:

UNDERSTANDING MĀORI PERSPECTIVES:Tamariki and rangatahi who are victims of sexual violence or display harmful sexual behaviour

Excerpts:

"Sexual violence and harmful sexual behaviours were considered uncommon before the arrival of settlers."

 

"The idea that men have a right to dominate women or children was not a feature of Māori society and stories about interpersonal violence towards women and children in the past are not common nor was rape widely understood or embedded in Māori language." 

 

Has anybody told the Mob?

Could Oranga Tamariki researchers please approach them with this revelation?

They are bound to see the error of their ways once pointed out by accredited academics.

Aotearoa or New Zealand?

 Did anyone notice the irony of new Tourism Minister Stuart Nash speaking at Summit Aotearoa  saying " ‘Brand New Zealand’ is paramount"?

The government and the public service are determinedly moving to Aotearoa as the name of this country.

But the world they want to court knows it as New Zealand.

A government running with the hares and hunting with the hounds...

On whether our falling fertility rate matters

Talking to Heather du Plessis Allan on NewstalkZB this afternoon (the article was generated before the interview).

Update - Kerre McIvor picked up the theme and some of the interview this morning. Great. Exactly what the report was intended to generate. Discussion.

Two worlds

Using the Maternity Report web tool I have extracted birth profiles for the most southern region of New Zealand, the Southern DHB and the most northerly region, the Northland DHB. Ministry of Health definition, "Deprivation quintiles of residence range from 1 (least deprived) to 5 (most deprived)."

Note the almost mirror-like reversal of deprivation quintiles. In Southland most babies are born in the least deprived quintile whereas in Northland most babies are born in the most deprived quintile. What a fascinating contrast.

Just for good measure let's throw in the middle of the country, the Wellington region, Capital and Coast DHB:

Comparatively New Zealand is a great place to be born in but whereabouts in NZ predicts a great deal about outcomes.

Lowest birth rate ever

 StatsNZ today on September 2020 data:

The total fertility rate was 1.63, the lowest on record in New Zealand. 

This trend began in 2008. There have been 12 straight years of falling fertility which includes Maori fertility.

Some will welcome this fall. I don't. The essence of life is procreation and family. Used to be, grandchildren living overseas was a major regret for my generation. Soon it will be, no grandchildren at all.

The main reasons for the decline are females putting off having children until their thirties. The window gets smaller and conceiving gets harder. 

And more females are remaining childless by choice.

The trend is a major demographic development mirrored across the developed world and being slowly echoed in India and very faintly echoed in the African continent. Countries that don't have falling TFRs are experiencing only slight upturns (from already low rates) due to aggressive fertility encouragement policies. When I last looked Hungary and Japan were two but both are still under New Zealand's current level.

Colin James on Seymour

Colin James makes this prediction (echoing earlier statements elsewhere not least by National's leader):

David Seymour will have trouble managing his disparate bunch of new MPs. 

I think I know what 'disparate' means. Different from each other. But let's check a google definition to be safe:

 essentially different in kind; not able to be compared.

Well I am very pleased about that. A party that represents individualism - individual rights must not be subjugated to collective rights - should feature free thinkers with varying interests.

You wouldn't want ACT to behave like a herd of sheep, very similarly to one another.

Seymour may have trouble managing them but does he want to? He needs them to be able to manage themselves.

They are all mature people. Worldly even.

There are bound to be political missteps in an environment where the media is salivating for a slip-up and not past precipitating one.

But parliament was overdue for some new blood that's not running through the veins of conformists.

Beneficiary debt balloons under Labour

 Under Labour the culture at WINZ was deliberately changed. Far more resources were put into ensuring that clients were receiving their full entitlements and fewer into work brokering. There was an all round softening of attitude, more 'kindness' I expect. That might also include approving more grants and recoverable assistance. Which might have the unintended consequence of driving more beneficiaries into more debt? (A bit like those nasty money-lenders Labour detests).

Someone asked the question and I've charted the answer.

Note the acceleration occurred BEFORE Covid.

Total monies owed:

Still. Look on the brightside. It's not a billion yet. Chickenfeed compared to this government's borrowing.

Unfashionable truths

Bernard Hickey has joined the chorus calling for benefit increases. That's because beneficiaries will spend the money. But he fails to address the unintended consequnces of benefit rises.

1/ There is risk of landlord 'capture'

2/ All second tier assistance will be subject to reductions negating the benefit rise. If the assistance is redesigned so as to not reduce, then the margin between working and not working gets smaller and more people rationally choose not to work or to reduce their hours

3/ That will lead to even less productivity ...

4/ ... and more intergenerational dependence on benefits

5/ Finally there is no guarantee that the extra money will be spent on children (Hickey's implication with his final comment).

Which goes like this:

It’s worth leaving the last word to the Growing Up in New Zealand longitudinal study of 6000 children born in the Auckland, Counties Manukau and Waikato DHB regions in 2008/09. There’s now eight and the latest report was published this week. Nearly 40 per cent are living in cold, mouldy and damp homes. About a third are obese. About 20 per cent of the families surveyed did not have enough money to eat properly.

Of 4,828 respondents 6% had a major problem with damp and mould; 31% had a minor problem. My expectation would be that minor problems are fixable problems. My own home falls into this category (though perhaps into the former category after this week's deluge.)

And what is "eating properly"? If its chicken and veges ... cheap as chips - literally. It has been demonstrated repeatedly that a family can eat well and inexpensively with some application and planning.

But truths are very unfashionable in 2020.

Raising benefits is a quick-fix; a deceptively appealing but ultimately damaging policy.

Fathers forgotten again

 The Growing Up in New Zealand Study continues to frustrate me. Just released is their Now We Are Eight report. Yet again there is bugger all information about the fathers of these children.

The word 'father' appears 3 times in the 172 page report, ironically the last time in the appendix describing the study's "overarching research questions" which include, "How involved are fathers in children’s lives, and what are their influences over time on children’s development?"

The word 'mother' appears 468 times.

'Partner' crops up 18 times, the context of which relates only to

- partner conflict

- study methodology

Data relating to single or two parent households is inconclusive.

In the extracted chart 'parent alone' makes up a smallish percentage for each ethnicity, but the grey and green portions could contain either a single or two parent family. And the 'two parent' portion doesn't necessarily indicate two biological parents.

But that's all there is.

According to the Census 2018 (conducted around the same time as the Now We Are Eight report was compiled):

Twenty eight percent of families with children are one parent.

Next, in the past, the GUiNZ collection waves have included information about sources of income including benefits. Not this time.

Perhaps this is due to the Auckland University of Technology previously pointing out:

"A weakness of the GUiNZ data is that it may not be population representative and is not linked to administrative data.... Overall, 95% of GUiNZ children are born to mothers who are partnered. The GUiNZ sample seems to have low sole-parent status compared to a 2009 study that found one-third of families with dependent children were headed by sole-parents (Ministry of Social Development, 2010). This could be because being partnered in the GUiNZ data is not the same as their domestic-purposes benefit status, from which partnership status is inferred by other studies. We find that 70% of those who say they receive the domestic-purposes benefit also answer yes to the question of whether they have a partner – confirming that the sole-parent status derived from GUiNZ is essentially different to those studies which rely on benefit status to infer partnership status." 

Perhaps the GUiNZ survey designers do not want to 'compromise' the authenticity of reponses by including questions about benefits.

The media discussion created by the release of Now We Are Eight has been all about how the 8 year-olds responded to questions about gender identification.

More important than fathers, and whether or not they have one.

Briefly on partner violence being all one way...

Earlier last week Peter Williams, Magic Talk, decided to spend the morning discussing "men beating their wives". This was on the back of the Johnny Depp court case and the appointment of Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson as Minister for the Prevention of Family & Sexual Violence. His framing of the violence problem was decidely that it's a male issue. He recalled how he felt about the sickening violence portrayed in Once Were Warriors many years ago and how seemingly nothing much has changed. (I was simultaneously recalling that the author, Alan Duff, was blessed with a peaceful father but suffered a violent alcoholic mother.) 

Anyway, very quickly Williams  began receiving text after text taking him to task, and then callers describing female aggression and manipulation, a couple from grown children who had witnessed it with their mothers. A few people referenced David Fergusson's work in this area who steadfastedly maintained domestic violence is a problem with both genders.

Consequently I have been meaning to write something very brief and gather some international stats from GOVT sources ie crime surveys conducted by state agencies which canvas victim experience as opposed to police prosecutions, convictions, etc which always predominantly feature male offenders,. the type of statistics Williams was citing. Male victims generally don't report violence to the authorities.

But first, I came across this. A fact sheet from the US National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. It is hard to imagine NZ's White Ribbon organisation being as even-handed in their advocacy:

1 in 4 men have been physically abused (slapped, pushed, shoved) by an intimate partner. • 1 in 7 men have been severely physically abused (hit with a fist or hard object, kicked, slammed against something, choked, burned, etc.) by an intimate partner at some point in their lifetime.  • Nearly 1 in 10 men in the United States has experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner and reported at least one measured impact related to experiencing these or other forms of violent behavior in the relationship (e.g., being fearful, concerned for safety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms, need for healthcare, injury, contacting a crisis hotline, need for housing services, need for victim’s advocate services, need for legal services, missed at least one day of work or school). • 1 in 18 men are severely injured by intimate partners in their lifetimes. • Male rape victims and male victims of non-contact unwanted sexual experiences reported predominantly male perpetrators. Nearly half of stalking victimizations against males were also perpetrated by males. Perpetrators of other forms of violence against males were mostly female.  • From 1994 to 2011, the rate of serious violence (rape, sexual assault, robbery and aggravated assault) committed by an intimate partner declined 64% for males • During the most recent 10-year period (2002-11) for which data is available, nonfatal serious violence accounted for more than a third of intimate partner violence against males (39 percent).

So to my unofficial chart:

The US numbers reflect an earlier period  (2003 to 2012) than the others (2018-19) . The percentages reflect lifetime experience. IPV is expressed in different ways in different jurisdictions so I'm not 100% satisfied apples are being compared with apples. But the consistent gender proportions lend credibility to the reporting.

Before I leave the subject, remember these two? Exhorting men to march in the streets of South Auckland and "own the issue"?

National MPs Agnes Loheni and Alfred Ngaro. Never happened. Both gone. Out of touch.

Intergenerational reliance on benefits

Australian data depicting young Australians’ chances of receiving welfare (aged 18–26) by parental welfare receipt: