The phoney war

A friend recently remarked to me that her dealer was on home detention. That's nice. Wouldn't want to see people who are perpetrating victimless crimes locked up in prison. And the dealer has found a lucrative job he can do from home.

I was reminded of this tidbit by new figures for home detention. There has been a 60 percent increase in people serving such a sentence since judges were allowed to impose one.

In 2007-08, 2677 people were on home detention sentences or orders, up from 1672 on home detention orders in 2005-06, a 60 per cent increase.

It occurs to me this may largely be another (new) aspect of the state's farcical war on drugs. Still I would rather live in a country that puts up a show of fighting soft drugs than one that actually brings all it legal might down on the activity.

Happy campers

Oh Golly. This is exciting. When did a political party last have a policy to create "new, affordable" campsites? Thank you National. That's high on my list of priorities for something a government should be focusing on.

UK tackles incapacity problem

While on the subject of incapacity benefits, the United Kingdom has the same problem. Here is their proposal for reform. Don't get too excited;

Incapacity benefits

From October 2008, the Employment and Support Allowance will replace Incapacity Benefit and Income Support claimed on the grounds of incapacity for new customers. The new system will consider what an individual is capable of, and what help they need to manage their condition and return to work.

A new test, the Work Capability Assessment, will be introduced in October 2008 alongside the new Employment and Support Allowance and will be applied to all those people claiming the new allowance. The new test is more robust, accurate and fairer. It will replace the current Personal Capability Assessment, which is weighted more towards a person’s physical disability and bases itself around assessing people’s incapability for work.

The Work Capability Assessment will look at people’s physical and mental ability, including conditions such as learning disabilities and other similar conditions. It will assess what an individual can do - rather than can’t do. Individuals with health conditions or disabilities will be given support and employment advice to enable them to return to work where possible. People whose condition causes very severe limitation of their ability, who are not able to engage in any work-related activity, will get a higer rate of benefit. They will still be able to volunteer to get support and employment advice if they want to.

This measure is part of The Welfare Reform Act 2007.


Now contrast this to what New Zealand has been doing. Here's a release from over three years ago;

Trials of a new work-focussed service for all beneficiaries will begin in 12 locations across the country next month as part of the government's reform of the welfare system, Social Development and Employment Minister Steve Maharey said...

"Rather than categorising people on the basis of why they are unable to work, the service will focus on what support people need to help them move into work, regardless of their benefit type."

Not much changes, the numbers keep rising.

The UK is simply embarking on an elaborate relabelling process. Still, people wanting to hold onto their public service jobs (and consultants) have to be seen to be doing something.

Six more CYFS offices to open

Here's some good news for fans of big government.

Six new CYF offices are to open across the greater Auckland area.

The first opened on Wednesday in Clendon.

Now why does the name Clendon seem familiar to me.

Ah yes. Because there are 1,616 people on the DPB using the WINZ Clendon service centre. And the number has risen over the past 5 years. Where DPB populations are concentrated, social problems are most prevalent. On that basis I should be able to predict where the next offices will open. Try Mangere, Manurewa, Otara, Papakura, Waitakare and Manukau, if they haven't already got one.

It's the old story of some government intervention leads to more government intervention. In their attempts to meet need, they create it. There is a massive problem of children in need of better parenting. The majority of them will live in homes where nobody works and nobody teaches them constructive values. What a bind this country has got itself in.

Another big rise in the invalid's benefit

The numbers on the invalid's benefit have increased by seven percent in the year to June 2008. In the previous year they had climbed 3 percent. The most common incapacity continues to be psychological or psychiatric conditions at 28.1 percent (up from 26.7 in 2004.)

Sickness benefit numbers dropped by 4 percent but the net gain over the two benefits was 4,000. The sickness benefit has the same most common complaint as the invalid's benefit with 39 percent (up from 35.1 in 2004) of claimants in this category.

As I have blogged before the DPB has stalled. No surprises there. In the year to June 2008 the total is down by ..... 27. I wonder how much by way have resources has gone into achieving that stunning result.

But I better mention the unemployment benefit, down by 5,000.

I calculate this to be an overall drop of 1,000 but the remaining factsheet - all main benefits - insists the drop is 3,000 so there must be some movement in the more minor benefits like widow's or emergency benefits.

DPB 96,440
IB 82,879
SB 46,271
UB 17,710
All main benefits 258,317

At this rate we are on track to return to the kind of numbers common in the sixties and seventies by 2087.

Smokers are a cash cow 2

Not PC was wondering about whether smokers paid their way. More than.

Current tobacco tax revenues amount to approximately $1 billion per year, and have been at that level for some years. This is just under 2 percent of total tax revenues.

- Of the approximate $1.6 billion per year retail spending on tobacco products, approximately 70 percent is tax revenue, including GST as well as tobacco excises.

- Thus, the average amount spent by New Zealand’s 750,000 smokers is approximately $2,135 each per year and approximately $1,500 is tax revenue.

NZ Medical Association, Tobacco Taxation In New Zealand, November 2007

The cost of smoking-related health care to the New Zealand taxpayer is about $250 million.

The Cancer Society, Cancer Society of New Zealand Inc September 2004

(BTW I just buried my dog in the garden. She had a invasive, inoperable tumour. She never smoke or drank, ate well and exercised every day. RIP dear Griffy.)

No 'contest of ideas'

Can I be bothered blogging about National's housing policy? The most noteworthy aspect is its similarity to Labour's - again. They will return tenants right to purchase their state home but if this happens the state home stock will be replaced.

"We won't be running down the state housing stock. We acknowledge that we need it."

Mr Heatley said the party would now keep Labour's policy of fixing state house rents at only 25 per cent of the tenants' incomes except for tenants on high incomes.

He promised to keep the accommodation supplement.

He also promised to keep Labour's Housing Innovation Fund, which provides $12 million a year in capital for community groups providing shared-equity and other subsidised housing to low-income people.

What is the point of this election? The Dominion Post comments in its editorial today, on the matter of the closing poll gap between National and Labour,

What this poll and others taken around the same time do show is that there will not be a walkover. This is healthy. Democracy thrives on the contest of ideas, policies and personalities, not on forgone conclusions.

Except there is no contest of ideas. "What this poll" actually shows is that we are not living in a 'thriving' democracy. A thriving democracy would be one that is flourishing, prospering and growing rich. We are living in a tired, cynical, paralysed democracy that is deeply dissatisfied with the status quo but too scared to change it.

Questions about meningococcal vaccine campaign

I am one of the hundreds of thousands of parents who reluctantly acquiesced to the request that my children be given the meningococcal vaccine. It now emerges that the immunity is reasonably shortlived.

Here is the official advice referred to in today's media articles;

Data from the MeNZB™ trials have shown that the detectable duration of immunity post-vaccination is measured in months rather than years.

1/ How many parents would have complied if they had known the immunity was short-lived?

2/ How are the parents of those children who experienced bad reactions to the vaccine now feeling?

3/ Was the $200 million campaign considered a one-off?

4/ Where has this site - www.immunise.moh.govt.nz - gone?

5/ How does one weigh up the risks against benefits when the real benefit is not known?

6/ Do any other parents out there recall being told that the vaccine was short-lived?

7/ How does the Ministry of Health propose to ensure all parents remain vigilant because their children may not have functional immunity? Another multi-million dollar information campaign?

Update; Today's NZ Herald editorial sums up the situation well.

Comparing homicide rates

This is from an Economist article about how violent the UK has become, in which we get a mention.

England and Wales are not unusually murderous (see chart). The homicide rate is higher than anywhere in western Europe except Finland, Belgium and indeed France (though Britain edges ahead of France when Scotland and Northern Ireland are included). But Britain looks gentle next to former colonies such as Canada, New Zealand and especially America. And it compares favourably with the EU average, thanks to the new eastern European states: in Latvia and Lithuania homicide is five times as common as it is in Britain.



In 2004 New Zealand had 2.1 homicides per 100,000

(The only comparable NZ figure for attacks and threats I can find comes from 1992 at 5.7 per 100)

Don't get sick here

Here are some interesting health statistics from the OECD databank;

In 2006 New Zealand had 2.3 practising physicians per 1,000 population. That ranks us 18th out of 24 countries. Behind us are Korea, Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Poland, Japan.

In 2004 there were 13,832 hospital discharges per 100,000 population also ranking us 18th - this time out of 27 countries. Well maybe that's because we are healthier?

Perhaps not. For example where we don't want to rank more highly is in malignant neoplasms. In 2005 there were 172.9 per 100,000 population making us the 8th highest out of 24 countries.

None of it is very encouraging. Relatively speaking, this is not a good country to get sick in.

I have said it before but will say it again. We are now relatively poor. It is not a coincidence that the first two rankings equate roughly to our GDP per capita ranking.

Wasted taxpayer money

Rodney Hide interview on Agenda.

It's straight and it's honest.

GUYON Which government departments do you want to close?

RODNEY Oh, which ones do you want to keep. We've had a massive expansion in size of the State, we've seen government expenditure grow in the last ten years by 80%.

GUYON Okay, two government departments.

RODNEY Oh well how about Women's Affairs, Pacific Island Affairs, Youth Affairs, the Families Commission and I've hardly started. We have government departments.

GUYON They should all be closed down?

RODNEY I think so what use do they do?

Sunday sketching

Spent some of today minding the Farsite Gallery in Petone. They are currently showing works of Eastbourne artists, myself included, so we take turns sharing the minding at the weekends.To occupy myself I had some pastels at hand. However I had no suitable paper to draw on. But I found some brightish blue card in the storeroom and based the following sketch on a photo of Daisy. Passersby are often drawn in by someone working and they are also frequently pet owners out exercising their hounds. The result was a larger-than-life elongated landscape with lots of blue to the left (not caught on camera here.)

Leading the way..... in economic suicide

The Australian Labour-proposed emissions trading scheme is insane.

Basically government places a huge tax on an industry (let's call it $1,000,000).

It then gives up to $300,000 back to said industry as an incentive not to move to a country where it won't be taxed $1,000,000.

It gives up to $300,000 to researchers trying to find better ways of not producing carbon emissions.

And it gives the rest to struggling households who have been charged far more by the industry trying to survive after losing $1,000,000 of it's previous profit to the government.

Do you think the industry is going to stay? I don't.

Do you think that the middle and upper income earners will be 'reimbursed' for extra household costs when the low income group is swelling in its ranks as job losses snowball? I don't.

And what will the spin-off for New Zealand be, given Australia is our biggest export market?

As the Wall St Journal comments today;

If the government-directed breakdown of free-market price signals sounds like creeping socialism, it is....the ultimate cost in terms of jobs and growth is unknowable.

Hot off the press

Check out the graphs below and understand why many New Zealanders get very frustrated about people being described as living 'in deprivation' in this country.





People living in the most deprived areas are the heaviest smokers, drinkers and eaters. The just-published New Zealand Health Survey proves it. Another fine example of how leftists have inverted the meaning of words.

ACT on ACC

Rodney Hide talks about ACC with Justin du Fresne on NewstalkZB (starts at 33.33).

Rodney makes the point (more than once) that it is the way ACC is funded that lays it open to abuse. "The incentives are all wrong. We have produced a nation of cheats and crooks."

He says change the system. The principles are wrong. Contributions should be made in our name, into a personalised account, then when we claim, we run down our own money. We can only rip ourselves off. That is what should have been done at the outset of ACC.

This prompted a call from someone asking why it is National is such a useless opposition and it is left to the likes of Rodney Hide or Ron Mark to say what the majority of us are thinking.

And no. It wasn't me.

Child support debt is just a symptom

Given it is National's policy to "intelligently intervene" in the economic and social lives of New Zealanders, I wonder what they will do about child support?

National MP Judith Collins, a long-time critic of the Government's failure to target payment dodgers, was unimpressed.

"This is a government that is happy to nab at the border, people with outstanding parking fines and speeding tickets, but turns a blind eye to the billion-dollar-plus problem of burgeoning child support debt. That's appalling."

More cracking down? More surveillance? More prosecutions?

The problem with the child support system is that it is inherently unfair and biased towards the custodial parent, usually the mother. What is financially required (and taken from the non-custodial parent) is not based on the costs of raising the child but on what the non-custodial parent earns.

But the child support system is only a spin-off from the DPB system. If there was no DPB, which acts as an incentive to become a single parent, there would be nowhere near the current number of liable parents - 157,858.

As I have argued many times, the state can't have it both ways. Not morally anyway. It can't replace the father and then expect him to pay the bills. Hence the growing mess this area has become.

Yes. As a general rule fathers should support their children. But they need to know that the child is biologically theirs (not currently possible if the mother resists) and the state has to stop putting up cash rewards to the prospective single mother.

Yes. It used to be difficult for mothers to chase support through the court system and fathers ran the risk of jail for non-support. But these are different times. Avoiding becoming pregnant and giving birth is straight forward. And in respect of relationship breakdowns women are much, much better equipped to handle being a breadwinner and men are much, much better equipped for sharing parenting.

Ultimately people have to work out their own problems. That's life. It's part of the process. If we won't accept that then we will continue on down this all-too-familiar road on which the state tries to sort every personal problem and leaves far bigger ones behind in its wake.

Making stuff up

This is the kind of journalism I really object to;

Every week in Palmerston North, more than 200 children cower in their rooms knowing the grown-ups in the house are fighting.

It's stated as fact. So how is this known?

Child advocate Rachel Smithers says police attend more than 70,000 family violence incidents throughout New Zealand each year, while more than an estimated four times as many go unreported.

Based on the figure of 400,000 incidents a year in New Zealand, there are 175 to 200 incidents in Palmerston North alone each week.

How did she arrive at 400,000?

Never mind. Palmerston North has 1.9 percent of New Zealand's population. So using the figure of 400,000 they have 7,600 family violence incidents. That's 146 per week. But it's still an estimation.

If the reported figure was used - 70,000 - we would be down to 26 incidents.

In two out of three cases, the adults think the children don't know and aren't affected.

But they're wrong.

What's that based on? Have the children been interviewed? No, but...

One Australian study has shown that only one in three abused parents realise their children know what's going on, when in fact, they all do, and they all want it to stop.

Ignoring what this sentence actually says (which is nonsensical) and what the journalist intended it to say, it is not OK to extrapolate the findings in one setting as fact in another.

And the following isn't the journalist's problem but highlights the silliness of some of these 'counsellors'.

Ms Smithers says while many agencies offer help to abused victims, and to the abusers, her role is making people think about how the children are affected.

There were almost always children affected when adults were violent, she says, even in cases like the alleged Tony Veitch incident.

"There will be children who really admire him, and now they are hearing that he hurt a woman."

So now even more of Palmie's children are victims of violence. Fallen role models. What a tragedy.

Now, to be fair, there is every chance that many children in Palmerston North are frightened by parents/caregivers who are violent. Probably more than the police have had dealings with. Victimisation surveys show that violence in the home is amongst the least reported crimes. By all means say so and make your own estimations but don't write them up as statements of fact.

"Intelligent intervention"

"What she said" - in case I need to say it again...


Only last week I blogged about the $1 billion Dear Leader has spent on the arts, heritage and culture;

It's pretty damn disgusting when there are people unable to access life-saving surgery and pharmaceuticals, schools that are in a state of disrepair, businesses being broken by increasing taxes.

Now Chris Finlayson has revealed National's policy;

The National Party's Arts, Culture and Heritage policy, announced today, confirms that National will maintain current levels of arts funding, should it be in the position to form a government following the 2008 election.

But wait! There's a difference!

National's approach is for intelligent intervention rather than constant interference.

That has got to be THE catch phrase of the campaign. Apply it to any sphere of government spending. That is what National voters are going to vote for. You thought Labour was arrogant. Hah. The next generation we-know-best government is on its way.

I love it

I've just enjoyed a really good belly laugh.

ACT Party leader Rodney Hide says his bright yellow jacket is stylish and he will continue to wear it throughout the election campaign despite it being lambasted as a fashion disaster.

The Newmarket Business Association has asked Mr Hide not to wear the canary-coloured garment which bears the ACT Party logo. Spokesman Cameron Brewer says it is an "intolerable sight" and does not help promote Newmarket as New Zealand's fashion capital.

"For sure we see the occasional fashion faux pas around the place, but this is completely unacceptable from someone in a leadership role. To be getting around in a crass canary campaign coat is simply offensive to Newmarket, particularly during school holidays."

Mr Hide says it is not the first time someone has told him to put the jacket back in the closet. He says Helen Clark has also tried to shut him down because the jacket has not been authorised under the Electoral Finance Act.

Cameron Brewer really said that? "Offensive .... particularly during the school holidays"!!!

I didn't think there was anything left is this country that could be offensive. Certainly not a politician whose ditched his me-too suit for something a little more colourful and fun.

Oh, it gets worse,

"What kind of message does this send out to our young people? It implies that when you're in position of power you can wear whatever you want no matter how inappropriate or horrid a garment may be. It's not right and so we're taking a stand," says Cameron Brewer.

Good God Cameron. Get a grip. This is the Liberal Party. Nothing demonstrates better how illiberal too many people have become when a man can't step out in whatever the hell colour he likes and not get flogged for it. You got to love Rodney's chutzpah.

Rampant research

How quickly complacency and abandon with taxpayer's money set in. This isn't big biccies but the percentage increase is.

Please note that as part of business-as-usual activities the Families Commission holds annual staff planning days. The total cost for each planning day including venue hire, food, travel, accommodation, facilities and miscellaneous costs is $2,363 in 2005; $8422 in 2006 and $14,194 in 2007.

The Families Commission now has 40 full-time staff. It is primarily a research unit on top of the massive research unit of the Ministry of Social Development. Yesterday I put up the stats showing the effect of rampant government. One reason - rampant research.

Knowledge, knowledge everywhere and not a drop of use. Could it be privatised? Not a chance. Nobody would willingly pay for what they produce. Get rid of it.