Banks' response to PM's 2013 opener

This isn't a bad message - shame about the messenger.

What would your response have been as the single ACT MP holding a ministerial position?

In three sentences, mine:

Direction passable.

Speed not.

Acceleration barely discernible.

Child sponsorship in New Zealand

Variety has started up a scheme for New Zealanders to sponsor a New Zealand child. The money involved is the same as international sponsorship - $35 monthly.

I'm not going to write in criticism of the scheme. It's charitable and voluntary. Whether the need being met could be sorted differently, or whether meeting the need will just grow more of it are issues for consideration. But assuming donors have thought through these it's their prerogative to give.

But this is what I want to point out.

Variety chief executive Lorraine Taylor said donors could write to their sponsored child, receive regular updates about their health and wellbeing, and were provided with a breakdown at the end of the year detailing where their money went.

This is exactly why private charity trumps state aid. The charity has to be accountable, which in turn means the person receiving the donation has to be accountable. Real progress can be made.

So why not apply these principles to government assistance? Heavens no. Imagine the administrative costs, the invasion of privacy,  and the denial of human rights!

Imagine government having to report on the health and well-being of every individual child on a benefit. Some of the reports would be deeply disappointing and deeply disturbing. The donor would immediately withdraw or turn to a different charity with a better track record.

Oh but I forget. We are taxpayers, not willing donors. We must put up and shut up.


(Update. The Greens say, "We shouldn't need to sponsor kids in NZ". Their variety of caring and sharing must be monopolised by the state.)

Damien Grant on child poverty

Damien Grant has written a very unusual column in today's NZ Herald. I don't really follow the logic but was engaged nevertheless. Let's see if I can paraphrase, making some sense of it in the process.

First he says child poverty doesn't exist in NZ. Not by the UN definition. And the NZ definition is  a silly invention, based on the latest Children's Commissioner report.

Then he leaps to poor African children saying he'd rather spend any available money he had upgrading his cellphone than sending it to them. Hence he doesn't care and neither do many others (unless they are sponsoring a child to massage their own ego.)

So if we don't even care about real child poverty in Africa why should we care about invented child poverty in NZ?

Then he ends with an after thought about the office of the Children's Commissioner being abolished.

Um. Well, I agree with some of sentiments, especially the last. But comparing Africa and NZ doesn't work for me.

We've sponsored children for longer than we've had our own. But their photo is not on our $2,000 fridge. Frankly I find the idea of being some sort of phantom parent onerous and worry when World Vision sends cards for you to write a little message to your assigned child. Personally I think it's pointless but do it because I'm concerned that other sponsored children will get messages and photos, and mine will feel left out if they don't. The reason we sponsor World Vision is because we believe in the work they do in making communities self-sufficient or more self-sufficient.

But child poverty in NZ is an entirely different kettle of fish. Here we hand out fish instead of fishing rods. Trite. I know.

My views on how welfare has created child poverty have been well and truly canvassed so no more to say there. But instead of simply not caring we need to be saying to idiots like the Children's Commissioner, I care about the problem (neglect, under-achievement, avoidable ill-health for instance) but I don't give a fig for your diagnosis or solution.

I don't know where I fit into Damien Grant's world.

DomPost on drug test bill "unfairness"

The DomPost editorial this morning claims an "inherent unfairness in drug test bill."

It does so on the assumption that employers with jobs that don't have "obvious health and safety implications" may require a beneficiary to pass a test. Therefore beneficiaries will be subject to an "invasive and deeply personal procedure that most people in the workforce never have to face."

I think the writer is being over-imaginative.

The Ministry of Labour advises:

"If an employment agreement gives an employer the right to require employees to undergo drug testing then, provided the provision in the agreement is reasonable and does not contravene the protections contained in any relevant laws, it is more likely that the employer will be able to require drug testing. Similarly, it will be difficult for an employer to introduce drug testing if that right is not contained in the relevant employment agreement, unless the employee gives the employer informed consent."

Beneficiaries will be covered by the same laws.

Those opposed to welfare reform or National in general are trying very hard to find fault with the legislation aimed at stopping people using drugs to avoid work.

The other problem the new law addresses is the employer bias against beneficiaries who they consider, from experience, won't be drug free, so won't even interview them or list jobs with WINZ. In the past, when employers have drug-tested beneficiaries they carried the cost, pass or fail. Now the cost of a failed test will fall on the beneficiary.

But it should be made clear in the legislation that drug tests can only be required when they are standard practice for that employer.

Peters says Maori do better when all NZers treated equally

Winston Peters went to Ratana and had a go at the Mana and Maori Parties.

Speaking to Ratana elders at the Ratana celebrations today, the New Zealand First leader said it was unsightly and unseemly to watch the four locked in a power struggle while ordinary people are struggling with issues such unemployment, serious health problems, education and housing.

“They have the warped view that Maori will only progress if they have a separate system for everything whereas history shows the most progress has been made while all New Zealanders receive fair and equal treatment.”

I don't know if he has the evidence to substantiate this claim but I am sure it's true. And I'm even more sure it's the only way Maori will progress in the future.

$13 billion on working-age welfare

Here's a useful sort of chart which unusually includes WFF in working-age welfare spending. It's from a January 2013 draft Treasury paper:
 

Employ force if you have to

Hone Harawira has a bill due to go to select committee that legislates for the state to provide breakfasts in all decile 1 and 2 schools.

In their typically co-ordinated efforts the child poverty political activists all issued supportive media releases yesterday.

The Auckland Action Against Poverty had this to say:

“As the Bill recommends, the provision of this food shouldn't be left to charity but should be taxpayer funded - this will ensure greater access country-wide and decrease the dependance on the whims and follies of individual charities and businesses"

So charities and businesses have whims and follies, but government provides surety.

That's because government uses force. Government can force you and me to pay for school breakfasts whether we want to or not. Charities and businesses have to persuade us that it's a good idea.

And AAAP want to "decrease dependence" on willingness and increase dependence on force.

Note too the disdain with which AAAP regards the private sector. Whims (sudden fancies) and follies (foolish actions or ideas). Make no mistake, the child poverty activists are socialists and anti-capitalists through and through. If their bottom line was easing child poverty they'd be appreciating and applauding help wherever it came from.

Finally, by using children as the object of their forced redistributionist campaigns they make it extremely difficult for people to oppose them.

Goodbye Gareth

I'm not giving Gareth Morgan's latest publicity grasp any air. He has progressively pissed me off over the past couple of years with his steady transformation into a redistributionist, statist, sometimes nasty non-respecter of property or individual rights, smug know-it-all.

There is a better way to register my disapproval than writing about it.

This was a welcome arrival in our letterbox today:

PS I realise that GM no longer owns the scheme. But demonstrating against the commercial usefulness of his name is still worth the effort.

Today it's Jacinda Ardern

Every day of late I am having to write posts correcting misinformation put about by journalists. For a change, today it's a politician. Jacinda Ardern  has sprung to life with a very weak criticism of Bill English containing this emotive assertion (she must have been reading the NZ Herald):

"In the meantime the number of young Kiwis not in education, work or training continues to soar."

Here are the NEET (Not in Employment, Education or Training) rates for 18-24 year-olds for the last 9 quarters ending with September 2012:

 

12.9
13.2
14.3
12.8
12.4
13.1
13.5
13.1
13.4

Any line that plotted those percentages couldn't possibly be honestly described as "continuing to soar".

I don't rate Ardern. This isn't the first time I've pointed out her incompetence. Labour needs to get a better spokesperson into that job for what could be National's most vulnerable portfolio this year. Then again, have they got anyone more capable?

NZ Herald misleads again

Last week I posted about the NZ Herald getting it wrong on youth unemployment. Today it misrepresents welfare reforms currently at select committee:

The bill also requires jobseekers to be drug-free, and requires beneficiaries with children to immunise them and have toddlers enrolled in early childhood education.

Not quite. The Bill actually says:

Changes in this Bill give effect to the Government’s manifesto commitment to introduce pre-employment drug testing requirements for beneficiaries. The requirements will apply where undertaking and passing a pre-employment drug test is required as part of a job application, or as part of a training programme to which beneficiaries  are referred by Work and Income.....Beneficiaries will not be referred to jobs with pre-employment drug tests if they are dependent on drugs or undergoing drug treatment. Sanctioning these people for their drug use would be ineffective, as sanctions are about changing behaviour, but those dependent on drugs are generally unable to change their behaviour without support.  Instead, people addicted to or dependent on drugs will be offered support to deal with their addiction.

 The reality is only a minority, probably quite small, of jobseekers will be required to be "drug-free".


And on the matter of immunisation which cannot be administered without parental/caregiver consent, the legislation will,

  ....require beneficiary  parents to take all reasonable steps to have their dependent child:
•        aged 3 years or over, enrolled in and attending early childhood education until they start school; and
•        enrolled in and attending school from age of 5 (or 6) years depending on when the child first  starts school; and
•        enrolled with a primary health care provider; and
•        up-to-date with the core Well Child checks.

The reality here is that a beneficiary parent can refuse to have his or her child or children immunised in the same way as any other parent.

Legal expertise required

Regarding the matter of beneficiaries adding children to an existing benefit, legislation currently before select committee states,

Where a sole parent has a subsequent child on benefit, their
work expectations will be deferred for 12 months and will resume
based on the age of the previous youngest dependent child.

 Further into the bill (pg 16) the following appears:

Beneficiaries   having additional
dependent child:  exempting people
resident in certain overseas countries, and
eligibility for sole parent support


.....The third amendment inserts a new section 60GAE(3A), which varies section 60GAE(2) as applied to a determination of a specified kind of beneficiary’ s eligibility for sole parent support. The variation re-quires an additional dependent child of the beneficiary not to be included in the determination not merely once that child is aged 1 year old or over, but instead at all times after that child is born.

Am I correct in interpreting this as meaning at discretion Work and Income can decide not to include a newborn when assessing eligibility for benefit type? So if a sole parent beneficiary has been assessed eligible for Jobseeker Support, and is being work-tested accordingly, the birth of another baby will not change that?

It's complicated and requires reading of the section from pg 16-17

Politics kills progress

Listen to this interview.

My post title is based on more than the block that is bureaucracy; it's listening to Don trying not to say what he wants to.

You are not a politician any more Don. Just spit it out.

All and any hands to the pump. Amnesty for over-stayers.


(Observation to self: how many times have you self-censored on radio Lindsay?? The lesson is, those outside of political parties with any ability to influence, any skerrick, should exercise their freedom-from-vote-buying  lavishly.)

Another murder - ho hum

I thought I'd heard yesterday about another delayed death as a result of violence, and a subsequent upgraded assault charge to murder. But a search has revealed nothing new since the death of a Kawerau man. Perhaps the report I heard related to the accused's appearance in court.

But here's the thing. There have been so many murders since January 1 - seven - they blur into each other. They are now so common place I struggle to recall the individual details of each case. That in itself is shocking yet I don't feel shocked.

Recently I have started reading bits and piece written by people far younger than me who claim this violent crime stat or that violent crime stat is slightly better than the 1980s and 90s as if cause for celebration. But I go back to the 1960s and 70s when murders were remarkable occurrences.

Plus we are constantly bombarded by the media over road deaths and drownings. Accidents, even if avoidable. By comparison I read little if anything about deaths from violence - excluding domestic violence that is.

I think it's a reality. We are now desensitised to murder. And that very desensitisation means a return to days when murders were rare and  dominated the news is highly unlikely.

Bennett over-egging success of new policy

Further to my last post questioning the drop in sole parents on the DPB, I remain very sceptical about the spin being put on this. Here's why.

Yesterday's NZ Herald headline was:

Bennett trumpets 5000 fewer on DPB 

"The number of sole parents on the domestic purposes benefit dropped by 5000 last year - a drop Social Development Minister Paula Bennett is attributing partly to her new policy requiring sole parents to get jobs when their youngest child turns five...Figures released yesterday showed there were 95,138 sole parents on the DPB at the end of 2012 - down from 100,266 the year before."

Nowhere in the article does it mention that some of the decrease is down to 18 and 19 year-olds being moved onto the Young Parent Payment. I've had that confirmed by a spokesperson from MSD:

The number of sole parents receiving DPB reduced by around 5,000 in 2012; this includes around 1,000 18 and 19-year-olds who transferred to YPP in August.

Bear in mind that for the last quarter no new 18 year-olds could have gone onto the DPB either. Back to the NZ Herald:

More than half of that drop happened in the last three months of the year, after the introduction of Ms Bennett's policy required sole parents to get part-time work when their youngest child turned five and fulltime work for those whose children were older than 14. Ms Bennett said 3221 sole parents had returned to work since that came into force in October.

Now I am going to get quite technical and pedantic here. 5,000 over the year is a net loss. The difference between those who went on and those who went off. So to claim that "more than half of that drop happened in the last three months" is a nonsense.

Typically an average of 13,000 people will leave the DPB each year because they "obtained work". These are the figures for the financial years 2007/08 forward:

Obtained paid work 16,223 14,755 11,706 10,714 12,834

So there is nothing remarkable about 3200 finding work in one quarter.

The numbers of sole parents on the DPB (which excludes carers of the sick and infirm, woman alone and those on the emergency maintenance allowance) for the years 2007-2011:

Domestic Purposes Benefit – Sole Parent

87,601

86,695

93,404

99,284

99,945

A return to 95,000 is a good thing. But to be expected as we moved out of recession.

DPB numbers dropping?

The Minister of Social Development has just announced that there were 339,095 people on benefits at the end of December 2012. She hasn't released much more by way of detail about individual benefits and MSD don't have the data available at their site yet.

But she does say:

The number of sole parents on the DPB dropped 1.6% over the quarter to 95,138 and 3,221 sole parents went off this benefit into work in that period.

What she isn't saying is that single parents aged 18 now go onto the Young Parent Payment.

This will be accounting for some of the decrease. For instance between the June and September quarters the percentage of those on the DPB aged 18-19 dropped from 2.7 to 1.7%. It's never been that low.

While 3,221 left for work, that's typical. People go off, people go on, year long.

No. I reckon the drop the Minister is claiming as a 'positive' is a sleight of hand. Perhaps not intentional.

But I'll ring the MSD media team and find out where the Young Parent Payment statistics are being recorded and published.

PPTA attack charter schools

No surprises really that the PPTA want education dominated by the state. The following full page advertisement is apparently running in major newspapers today. I wonder how teachers feel about paying for these campaigns?

On the subject of the state monopolising education recall my post from Tuesday which quoted research showing those European countries which had the lowest percentage of young people not in employment, education, or training had dual education systems.

But the PPTA displays their stupidity in other ways too. For instance the first line of their ad:

"Family time, beach time, down time...that's the agenda for most of us right now."

If you are a teacher maybe. Most self-employed tradespeople, farmers, shop-workers, factory workers, health service providers etc etc are back with their noses to the grindstone, if they ever stopped.

I have a lot of time for teachers. Most that have taught my kids have been decent, hard-working, capable, sometimes inspirational people. But their union does their public image no favours.

No welfare for Kiwis in Australia? So be it

I'm out of step with public opinion on this one. Australia has every right to its political autonomy. If the government doesn't want to pay welfare and accord other privileges to New Zealanders who move there, that's their call. You can out up all the arguments the NZ Herald is making about paying tax, being productive etc. But the current rules have been in place since 2001. People heading over there should be well aware that they will need to support themselves through work or savings. It's just a damn shame that people prepared to do this are lost to New Zealand.

Herald wrong about NZ's youth unemployment

Writing in the NZ Herald about youth unemployment in NZ, calling for the PM to make it his priority, Fran O'Sullivan said this:

In the European Union, one in five young people under 25 who is willing to work can't get a job. That's Europe's problem, but in fact the ratio is much higher in New Zealand.

What is that claim based on?

Tables here show that in September 2012 of the 15-24 age group, officially unemployed are 65,200 out of a labour force of 376,500 - 17.3 percent.

Data from Eurostat :

In November 2012, 5.799 million young persons (under 25) were unemployed in the EU27, of whom 3.733 million were in the euro area. Compared with November 2011, youth unemployment rose by 329 000 in the EU27 and by
420 000 in the euro area. In November 2012, the youth unemployment rate was 23.7% in the EU27 and 24.4% in the  euro  area,  compared  with  22.2%  and  21.6%  respectively  in  November  2011.  In  November  2012  the  lowest
rates were observed in Germany (8.1%), Austria (9.0%) and the Netherlands (9.7%), and the highest in Greece (57.6% in September 2012) and Spain (56.5%).

The unemployment rate for under 25 year-olds in EU27 in November 2012 was 23.7 percent compared to New Zealand's 17.3 percent. The ratio is not "much higher" here. In fact it is substantially lower.

Could the claim refer to the other measure of youth inactivity - the NEET (not in employment, education or training) rate?

The European Union NEET rate in July 2012 was 12.9 percent. In NZ in September 2012 it was 13.4 percent. Still no basis.

Anyway, this is interesting.

Scanning a European  report about NEETs  I came across this description of those countries with the least problem:

This cluster groups together continental and Nordic countries and includes Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK. This is a mix of countries that have pursued flexicurity policies, neo-liberal countries and countries with a dual educational system. With the exception of the UK, all these countries are characterised by a low NEET rate. 

(Flexicurity  definition - "It combines flexible hiring and firing with a generous social safety net and an extensive system of activation policies")

So the government's pursuing more flexible employment laws, putting more stringent work-testing on benefits and avoiding monopoly public education look like the right approach.

Truth column January 3

The Truth website is still being updated.

Here's my first column for 2013. A look at the year ahead in politics:

Ten things that might happen in 2013

1/ Labour MP Maryan Street's bill to legalise voluntary euthanasia gets pulled from the ballot triggering a scorching debate about one person's right to impose their religious beliefs on another. If you thought the smacking and prostitution debates were hot, to quote a famous lyric, "you ain't seen nothing yet".

2/ ACT doubles its parliamentary representation by making Brendan Horan its third leader in as many years.

3/ The mercurial John Tamihere - nicknamed "flip-flop" by his mate Willie Jackson -  ditches Labour for National announcing he'll  challenge Paula Bennett's nomination for Waitakere in 2014 (much less work than actually trying to win the seat as a Labour candidate.)

4/ Russell Norman escalates his demands on prospective coalition partner Labour, from Finance Minister to Prime Minister.

5/ Recently resigned shock-jock Michael Laws founds a new party and calls it Conservative Laws or CLAWS.

6/ Prime Minister John Key continues to say whatever comes into his head, alienating or endearing in equal numbers. Opposition leader, David Shearer continues to over-think whatever he says neither alienating nor endearing anybody.

7/ Green co-leader Metiria Turei is once more observed abusing her political position by campaigning in primary schools.

8/ Tariana 'should I stay or should I go' Turia holds a hui to get a better answer.

9/ The 'expert' group consulting on a constitutional review publishes recommendations that have as much impact as every other powwow required under a government support party agreement.

10/ Justice Minister, Judith Collins hands David Bain a $1.3 million compensation payment - along with an invoice for board and keep provided in error: 13 years @ 100,000 per annum.

Children's Commissioner ignores context

The Children's Commissioner has started the year off with another condemnation of New Zealand's child poverty statistics:

Dr Wills is incredulous as he explains that no other OECD country had the same rise in child poverty or inequality in the 1990s.

Measured by the Gini coefficient one other country did have the same rise in inequality - Sweden.

And many other countries weren't far behind.

Those countries that didn't experience inequality growth - where income became more evenly distributed - were....

...France, Greece, Ireland, Spain  and Turkey. All countries with economies that are in trouble.