Pumping up those polls

Stephen Joyce opines in the NZ Herald today about the PM's "performative policy-making":

"I thought we'd reached peak performative decision-making when Jacinda Ardern took offence at Jack Tame pointing out how many of her performative policy announcements hadn't resulted in anything."

Turn the page to witness the PM at WOW last night - peak performative poll-pumping:

The previous post described how Jacinda Ardern has spent 14 hours on her Child Poverty Reduction portfolio in 20 months.  

I wonder what she spent on fittings, rehearsal and performance at WOW?

PM spends 0.2 percent of her time on Child Poverty Reduction?

 A reader sent me the following quote from a Bryce Edward's article at the BFD:

The Prime Minister took on the portfolio of Child Poverty Reduction, as a way of signalling her ambitions to fix the problem. But clearly she has had other priorities.

This was exposed in the release of ministerial diaries last month, which give an indication of how much time ministers spend on any particular portfolio. Between October 2020 and June 2022 Ardern was recorded as spending only 14 hours on this portfolio – an average of only 40 minutes per month. One calculation put this at a meagre 0.2 per cent of her working time on what she said was her most important portfolio.

Yes, I did check the calculations which would have her working eleven-hour days, seven days a week.

On child poverty, racism and colonisation

A just-published Listener article asks, "Why doesn't middle-class NZ care about child poverty?" It gathers views from half a dozen people including a principal, a teacher, an advocate against child poverty, a charity head, a Māori provider chair and Pasifika social worker. Apparently, they told the Listener that the middle-class has become indifferent to child poverty. Yet a careful reading of the piece finds it is primarily the Child Poverty Action Group advancing the idea that, "For middle white New Zealand, poverty is equated with being brown. This is where the indifference comes from." The Chief Executive of the Auckland City Mission goes further claiming active hostility to solo mothers, especially Māori: "As a society, the narrative is 'how dare you raise a child alone? We are going to make it as hard for you as we can - we will punish you.' And secondly, in our country, poverty has a colour. It is about racism and colonization."

In fact, there are more NZ European children in material hardship than all other ethnicities put together. The table below shows there are 53,000 NZ European compared to a total of 47,000 combined other ethnicities (these are the most recent data reported in June 2021):


Click to view

So poverty doesn’t have a colour. Saying poverty has a colour is a convenience for those who want to blame racism and colonisation.

The next thing of note from the above chart is that Asian children have relatively low rates of material hardship. Is this due to higher incomes? No.

The following chart shows that the percentage of Asian children in the poorest households is on par with Māori at 15%:


Click to view

So low household income does not have a direct relationship with material hardship. How money is budgeted and what it is spent on matters. Asian families are also more likely to derive their income from work. The Ministry of Social Development long ago established that, “Standard of living data show that poor children reliant on government transfers are more likely to be subject to restrictions in key items of consumption than are poor children in families with market income.”

And yet both the head of the Auckland City Mission and convenor for the Child Poverty Action Group call for more government transfers. The former wants anyone raising children to receive in-work tax credits and the latter wants more tax from the “richest ten percent” to fund a universal child benefit (oddly missing that a universal child benefit would go to the children of the richest ten percent.)

The social worker from South Auckland would like to see the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group established four years ago implemented. Either he or the writer of the piece claims a review “found that the Government had made no progress on implementing the report’s 42 key objectives.”

That is totally incorrect. For instance, sanctions for not naming the other parent were removed; the ‘subsequent child work obligation’ was abolished: the child support pass-on is implemented; benefits and abatement thresholds were increased; benefits were indexed to wage inflation and accommodation supplements were raised. (This is not an exhaustive list.)

The social worker who wants the recommendations implemented then goes on to argue that “Accommodation supplements hide the fact that rents are too high, so essentially the government is pouring money into private rentals.” High rents are at least partially a result of the government imposing unrealistic housing standards and scrapping tax deductibility, policies he would doubtless approve of.

This disconnect with economic reality characterises suggestions made when those “who see deprivation up close on a daily basis” are asked for their solutions to child poverty. Despite decades of redistributing wealth, the problem persists. Perhaps the prescription is wrong.

If the diagnosis is wrong, it probably is.

If the Chief Executive of the Auckland City Mission stopped for a moment blaming “society” for the poverty of sole parent children and instead reflected on where their fathers are, and why they are absent, a real remedy might reveal itself. Perhaps replacing fathers with the DPB all those years ago wasn’t such a good idea after all?

If the Māori provider chair stopped insisting that child poverty is the “product of colonisation” and reflected on why the children of low-income Asian parents do not suffer disproportionate material deprivation, a real remedy might reveal itself. Perhaps the strong work ethic that typifies immigrants to this country could be celebrated and emulated?

And if indeed the middle-class has become “indifferent to child poverty” perhaps it is because they can see through the many excuses for why it exists.

Likelihood of getting off a benefit decreasing

The longer people are on a benefit, the harder it is to get off it.

The following graph illustrates that. Someone who has been benefit-dependent for 1-6 months has a much higher likelihood of leaving for employment than someone with a duration of a year or more. Although the graph was released this month (September 2022) it only contains data to June 2020 unfortunately:

Two concerns.

In each of the years shown, the likelihood of leaving a benefit for employment has decreased.

Compounding that, in June 2017, 74% of all beneficiaries (203,772) had been on a benefit for more than a year. This grew to 75% in June 2022 (257,490).

For Jobseeker beneficiaries the respective percentages climbed from 57% (67,479) to 61% (104,985).

Most disturbing is this growing dependency is happening against a backdrop of employers across the board crying out for workers.

This scenario seals it. The welfare system has morphed well beyond a last-resort, safety net.

Self-responsibility surcharges?

 As it is now common practice to accord sentencing discounts to criminals with childhood experiences beyond their control, what about surcharges for not exercising self-responsibility?

Every individual has the ability to exercise personal agency. It might be argued for some it is reduced to a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea but it is usually evident that arriving at that impasse could have been avoided.

Compassion is one thing. But excuse-making is another. It is the latter habit that now defines this country and the wrong-headedness holding sway. 

Effort and persistence go unremarked while failure and indifference mark out the victims among us. And don't we love victims.

So long as, of course, the culprits are fashionable - colonization, capitalism, racism and patriarchal oppression.

In reality people have never been more able to control their lives than right now. There is more prosperity and choice than has ever existed.

If it were my call, there would be no discounts. They make a mockery of the free will that defines us. They are in direct conflict with the very reason laws exist. Worse, they send an ambiguous and confused message to offenders and society.

If they are going to be handed out, they should be delivered with a surcharge and explanation. 

"Yes, you had a terrible childhood, but so did many others who managed to avoid criminality. You knowingly chose the wrong path so here's a matching surcharge for not exercising the self-responsibility that others with similar backgrounds managed to."

Enough now

Our time, the Queen died very early Friday morning. Mike Hosking, a proud royalist and huge fan of Her Majesty ran an excellent show dedicated to her passing. I shed a tear listening to her longtime friend and lady-in-waiting Lady Ann Glenconner describing how they had known each other as young as eight. Listening to personal loss always moves me.

But what the heck? It's now Sunday and still NZ papers are dripping with dross dominated largely by royal gossip. I can't be more specific than the headlines allow because I'm not reading it. 

Her passing should have been treated with the dignity and restraint that personified the exceptional woman the Queen was.

The longer this garish 'grieving' goes on, the less sincere it all appears.

Propaganda writ large

An advert plays incessantly on the radio telling me that "Wearing a mask is an act of intentional kindness."

An intention cannot be ascribed to an action by a third party. How does the creator of this advert know why I am wearing a mask?

If I go into the supermarket maskless I will be asked to don one or leave. So I take my own. It is an act of resentful compliance. I resent the rule, the enforcer of the rule and worse, myself for complying.

Every time I hear the ad these angry feelings are reinforced.

My strategy for dealing with unwanted emotion is to rationalize. What if the ad said, "Be kind, wear a mask" which at least eliminates the absurd idea that someone else can live in my head and know my thoughts. But what is kind about wearing a mask? I'm not a surgeon. I have no illness and even if I did, isn't sharing germs part of how we have existed together for eons?

Perhaps the rational response is to understand the message in its inversion, "If you don't wear a mask people will think you are cruel and uncaring."

That I think is what's really going on.

We've had five f------g years of this 'be kind' guilt-tripping propaganda shoved down our throats and everywhere you look the results are crippled systems and crippled people.

Now I'm getting confused over what it is to be genuinely kind.  Maskless, I gave a girl some money the other day. Broke my own rule. She said she wanted to get a feed. I checked she had a roof over her head at night and some sort of support system and then gave her $20. Maybe she'll go and buy a bottle of wine or whatever it takes to get off her face but why shouldn't she enjoy a few hours escapism? I'd like a few myself but my meagre daily alcohol ration makes that an impossible option.

Perhaps I should have walked up to this kid and said, "Excuse me. Where is your mask? You do know that it's an act of intentional kindness to wear one, don't you?"

 

Why Do Our Young Lead Developed World In Poor Mental Health?

MEDIA RELEASE

28 August 2022

Report - Why Do Our Young Lead Developed World In Poor Mental Health?

In 2020, UNICEF ranked New Zealand last of 38 developed countries in child mental well-being. In a new report for Family First, “Child and Youth Mental Health: Why New Zealand's young lead the developed world in poor mental health”, researcher Lindsay Mitchell explores the UNICEF claim.

"What I found was NZ has the worst youth suicide, self-harm and bullying statistics. Mental disorders have risen significantly, as has consumption of antidepressants and anti-psychotics. These increases are above what is occurring in the general population,” says Lindsay Mitchell.

The report gathers data from the New Zealand Health Survey, Mental Health and Addiction Services monitoring reports, Pharmac, DHBs, various longitudinal studies, Oranga Tamariki, MSD and Youth 2000 surveys.

"On the available evidence, New Zealand undoubtedly faces a mental health crisis among the young. But this may be just part of the picture. For instance, the Growing Up in New Zealand study has lost touch with hundreds of children who are the most likely to be suffering poor mental health due to exposure to accumulating adverse experiences associated with transience; multiple parental relationship transitions; young, deprived, and poorly educated mothers who disproportionately experience hardship and depression.”

“According to Oranga Tamariki, '…the alcohol and drug issue is prolific / increasing' among Family Start clients, and various data suggests thousands of babies are exposed to alcohol and other substances in utero."

"This first scenario describes an environment that elevates the risk of children developing poor mental health,” says Lindsay.

"A second scenario is of a more pervasive depression and anxiety problem exacerbated less by mayhem and material deprivation, and more by recent developments such as social media-driven poor self-image, heightened sensitivity to parental and/or peer pressure, fear of failure, climate change anxiety and confusion over sexual and gender identity. The second group may also be dealing with separated parents, torn loyalties, school and home-life upheaval and adapting to stepsiblings."

“Based on the extensive data presented, both of these groups - which no doubt overlap - are growing, along with unmet need and wait times for treatment. New questions are arising regarding the effectiveness of medication and lack of alternative therapies. There are suggestions that over-reliance on medication is reducing capacity for self-help.”

"But most importantly, a reversal of this upward surge demands a wider appraisal and acknowledgement of societal changes that have lessened the likelihood that children will experience material and emotional security and stability throughout their formative years. If children were genuinely placed at the centre of the family, given time, given unconditional love, given space to explore but surety to return to, there may still be no guarantees. But the odds of that child developing good mental health will massively increase."

More children unsafe under Ardern's watch

Jacinda Ardern in 2017:

“...we are small enough that we can absolutely introduce child wellbeing policies so that New Zealand is once again a great place to bring up children and be a child.”

Since then, more children are being investigated for family harm incidents:

More children are victims of intentional injury and sexual assault:

Yes, I am being selective but so is the Prime Minister when she announces:

MSM and poor reporting

 A TV1 news item says about the inquiry into abuse-in-care:

"A report from the Inquiry shows one in three young people placed in residential care by the state between 1950 and 1999 went on to serve a prison sentence. The research shows Māori were even more likely to end up in prison, with 42% serving a custodial sentence as an adult. For the general population during the same period less than one in 10 ended up in prison." (My emphasis)

I got stuck on the last part of that. 'Less than' is indeterminate but suggests not much less than. Which seems way too high. From the actual report:

"Although there are caveats and limitations to consider, the principal results are nevertheless clear. The incarceration rate of people who were in State residential care is high. It is much higher than that of a cohort matched in age, sex/gender, and ethnicity."

So the denominator was not the "general population". It was a matched cohort which by necessity would have been disproportionately Māori.

But the 'fact' will be repeated frequently - Heather du Plessis has just done so. And this evening's One News did the same.  I will wince every time.

Nevertheless, the data is valuable and proves NZ is no different from the countries highlighted in the 2018 report I wrote for Family First, Imprisonment and Family Structure, which stated in the Executive Summary:

"The strongest predictor for imprisonment is growing up in state care."

Increased benefit rates drive increased deprivation

Increased benefit rates drive increased deprivation.

This is no surprise to logical thinkers. Simply upping benefits doesn't mean the extra money will be well spent. Benefit increases have the effect of drawing more people onto benefits, away from work and the structure work brings to people's lives.

But the following admission from the Rotorua Lakes District Council nevertheless surprised me:

"Millions of dollars in welfare has to deliver the desired impact of hope and positive change, instead, Rotorua has seen a steady increase in deprivation since the onset of Covid-19, largely driven by increased benefit rates."

It's an odd sentence though and I wonder if 'has' in the first line was meant to be 'was'?

If local body bureaucrats really believe that simply pouring more money into workless households will create "positive change" they are naive in the extreme. 

The report authors note also that Rotorua is second to bottom of 67 councils for crime. Yet isn't it a tenet of the left that decreasing benefits causes crime? Seems the opposite is happening.

Let's hope a few more officials start to cotton on.

Update

In this Bay of Plenty report Rotorua MP Todd McClay uses the term benefit rate to mean the number of people on benefits whereas 'benefit rates' normally mean payment rate.

Either way my contention holds up. Benefit payment rates AND benefit numbers have risen under Labour.

Prison population levels off

Labour's policy was to drive down the prison population. And they have.

But since March 2022 the population has levelled off. 2022 looks different to 2020 and 2021.

A change in policy? Time for a cup of tea?  Something has changed.

Source

Unemployment drops by a third - benefit numbers rise by a quarter

Unemployment drops by a third - benefit numbers rise by a quarter.

That's what's happened during (almost) five years under a Labour government.

The June 2022 unemployment rate has just been released. It's 3.3 percent. In June 2017 the rate was 4.8 percent so has fallen by nearly a third.

But in that same five-year period the total number on benefits increased by 25 percent - or 276,333 to 344,642.

Graphed:

If you have the constitution for it you can read Statistics NZ's technical and long-winded explanation for why the unemployment rate and benefit data are two different things. 

The point to be made is that Labour constantly, tediously, talks about the low unemployment rate (3.3%) but never the high benefit dependence rate (11.7%)

Labour affect to represent 'the workers' while quietly indulging the many thousands who are not interested in a paid job. 

Low wage workers are struggling in under-staffed workplaces because of closed borders and covid absenteeism but also because Labour has made life on a benefit increasingly easy and unpressured. 

The only rational reason people in low paid jobs continue to turn up is their work ethic and commitment to workmates and employers. 

I don't know how they tolerate a government prepared to pay their slack-arse neighbour to do nothing - let alone vote for them.

Benefit incomes - why it's not worth working

MSD have released a report on benefit incomes. I have long held that beneficiary advocates base their poverty pleading on the basic benefit rate, but those numbers are well under total incomes once the additional top-ups are included. Here is a selection of the graphs from the report:

(Left click on image to enlarge)

In this calculation $450 is nominated for a single person's accommodation costs in a high rental area. This reflects a one-bedroom apartment in Auckland perhaps but even then, the sum is quite generous. All of the young people I know share flats and houses. And they have jobs. Most try and keep their accommodation costs below $200 per week. The example is very odd.

The next example shows a couple with two children. The nominated rent in this one seems reasonable:

Note that their total income is $1,348 per week or $70,096. This is though just an example. 

Below are actual average incomes by family type before and after housing costs:

Averages reflect a range of living costs around the country.

The couple with two children receives $59,644 annually net.

It is immediately obvious that one working parent - let's say the father earning around $60,000 - can only support his family as well as income from a benefit.

For example a father working in construction, education, and automotive on the median salary. 

If he worked in customer services, transport and logistics, or hospitality and tourism he'd be worse off.

And we wonder why there is a labour shortage.

I am out of time but go look at the report, especially the section on inflation. (Don't be tripped up by the 'equivalisation' process.)

Afterthought: It occurs to me that the government is going to start pushing this line hard - that they've looked after families with children on benefits but now single people are falling behind. The report nominates an unrealistically large rent in the single person example to leave a small after-housing costs income. Why?

Because they are gearing up to push the unemployment insurance scheme on New Zealand whether it is warranted or wanted.

Graph of the Day

 

Heard any alarm bells ringing yet?

Carmel Sepuloni talks half of the story

 Carmel Sepuloni announces: 

Benefit numbers continue to fall

“The statistics show our investment into front line case management has worked, and while we are not out of the woods by any means, we are tracking in the right direction."

Not for children. Their numbers are going up.

Data source

Something else I would be worried about is that the "3,717 fewer people on a Main Benefit compared to March 2022" represents a 1% drop. 

Over the same period last year, the reduction was 3 percent.

MSD: More fraud investigators than prosecutions

The following pieces of information come from a published OIA response (the images are skewwhiff because that's how they appear at MSD's site):

But wait...there's more:

Read the response and draw your own conclusions.

Irreconcilable stats for April 2022

SEEK EMPLOYMENT REPORTS

SEEK Employment Report - Job ads soar to new highs in April

MSD REPORTS

Jobseeker Work Ready recipients increase by 345 in April

Main benefits cancels into work decrease by 3,678 in April

The Flaw in PM's Plan

In April this year the Prime Minister laid out the progress she has made towards child poverty reduction since taking office. She said her government has "lifted tens of thousands of children from poverty and improved the lives of many others."

She makes one specific comparison over the time frame since becoming Prime Minister - a "30% reduction in children aged 0-17 who live in low-income households after housing costs, over three years (from 2017/18)."

This was achieved primarily by lifting benefits and family tax credits - and in particular introducing a $60 weekly child payment called Best Start.

She failed to mention she has also overseen thousands more children becoming dependent on benefits.

Between March 2018 and March 2022 the number of children in benefit-dependent households grew by 22 percent or almost 37,000. To picture this increase, imagine about one hundred good-sized schools.

I spent a number of years as a volunteer working with dependent families and came to know the tragic circumstances of a typical child on a benefit. But my sample is small so let me construct a profile based on New Zealand statistics.

Let's call the child Sam. She's five and lives in Northland (which has the highest % of its working-age population on welfare). She is Maori and lives with her sole mother (more dependent sole parents are Maori than any other ethnicity). Sam's mum has debt to MSD of $4,000 (the average mean debt to MSD at June 2021) and receives hardship assistance for food (as one of  364,000 food grants issued in the March quarter). Sam lives in a private rental which is subsidised with a $160 weekly accommodation supplement. Sam has one older sibling, and her mum has been on thebenefit since leaving school (those entering the benefit system under twenty stay the longest). Sam's mum is 25 and will probably remain on a benefit well into her thirties (average future years expected on a benefit is 12.4 at 2021 - up from 10.6 in 2017).7 There is also a high chance Sam will herself become a beneficiary (looking at a group of 83,000 children born in benefit households between 1993 and 1995, 47% had entered the benefit system themselves by age 23.)

This then is a typical profile of a child in a benefit dependent household.

Less typical but still not statistically uncommon would be for Sam to have moved homes more than once since her birth; to be known to Oranga Tamariki; to have a mother with a substance use problem and/or suffering mental ill-health, and to have a father serving a community or prison sentence.

Benefit dependency is a known risk for children. The likelihood of children suffering abuse or neglect increases in proportion to time spent on a benefit. The correlation is probably due to the inherent dysfunction of non-working households. There is no need for a routine, no need to get to a job and no need for kids to get to school (Covid has only exacerbated the malaise.)

This mirrors what I saw as a volunteer called into help families in crisis (some on benefits cope admirably well but they are the exception).

   - A sixteen year-old heavily pregnant Maori girl with a controlling and menacing Pakeha boyfriend twice her age and fresh out of prison. She is living in the house of her alcoholic and criminal mother whom the Sallie Army has finally given up on.

    -A young Samoan man struggling to raise daughters (one not even his biological child) by a Maori mother who had abandoned them for gang life.

    -A self-absorbed immature European girl whose child was always exhibiting the latest Dr Phil acting-out syndrome eg pulling at her hair was apparently 'self-harming'.

    -Another older New Zealand European single mother deeply depressed and traumatised by a dark past she would hint at but never divulge. Not a fun game to participate in.

    -And yet another young, chaotic Pakeha female who'd lost custody of her child to her mother. She fantasized about being a human rights lawyer - also watching too much Oprah - but was only ever getting around to it. When I ferried her to the local polytech to be interviewed for a course in nail-care she insisted on wearing her pyjamas and dressing gown. Any excuse to stay on a benefit and watch daytime telly I expect.

None had any real incentive to change as long as the money came in.

These are the lifestyles of unemployed parents. They themselves have often not grown to adulthood but we pretend they can provide consistent and caring parenting ... if only the government just pays them more.

That's the major thrust behind the Prime Minister's mission to reduce child poverty. Paying everybody more whether or not they earn it.

That's the flaw in her plan. More money does not guarantee better child outcomes. In fact it does the very opposite when all it achieves is more children on benefits.

She is never challenged on the flaw in her plan.

Who asks the hard questions about where all the extra money goes? Who asks why New Zealand has apparently record low unemployment but over 200,000 children relying on a parent on a benefit? Who asks about appalling and worsening school absenteeism? Who asks why New Zealand ranked last in child mental well-being in the most recent UNICEF report card? Who asks why only one in five Maori babies has married parents?

Who cares so long as the PM can pat herself on the back and claim to have achieved what she came to parliament for.

Why Luxon can't win the war on gangs

 According to the Ministry of Social Development, “The harm inflicted by gangs is a serious issue in New Zealand. We have a complex gang problem that spans social, economic and justice issues." 

That was 2014 when there were 3,960 adult gang members known to police.

Last year, in 2021, it was reported: “As of June 30, there were 8,061 gang members on the list curated by police, up from 5,343 at the end of 2017.”  

Over an examined twenty-one year period 92 percent of gang members received a benefit at some point with the average duration of receipt at 8.9 years. 

Their rents are often paid through the accommodation supplement if not through income-related rents and emergency housing in motels etc. And their food is often paid for through hardship grants. 

Gang partners are also paid single parent benefits and child tax credits. Their weekly ‘package’ can amass more than $1,000.

In 2014:

There are in the order of 6,000 to 7,000 children known to be associated with gang members who are growing up in welfare recipient families, and are subject to high rates of abuse and neglect.

A total of 3,516 children of gang members were recorded as being the victims of abuse or neglect that had been substantiated on investigation by Child, Youth and Family. This is 60 percent of the total 5,890 known children of gang members.

The alleged perpetrator of abuse or neglect of gang member’s children was more often recorded as the child’s mother than the gang member father.

Gang members do not itch to attach themselves to clever, educated, and independent females. Gang women are often the female offspring of gang parents who taught them how to care for children.

But it is important to gang members to father children, and they do it more frequently than non-gang members - 2,337 gang members had benefit spells that included 7,075 dependent children. 

Lately there’s a lot of noise over the deported 501s and their contribution to escalating gang and gun violence.

But New Zealand does very well in amplifying its homegrown problem through strong welfare incentives and weak child protection services. 

Today National leader Chris Luxon released his getting-tough-on-gangs policy. To be honest I haven't even read it.

Because a couple of days ago Chris Luxon told Guyon Espiner that National would raise benefits under his government.

Now National leader, he rules out welfare cuts and says the party will raise benefits if it wins power (without specifying when and by how much).

"I can tell you right now, I'm not dreaming up a policy to reform welfare ..."

Then you aren't serious about gangs - this generation and the next ...and the next ...