First hand look at the Tea Party supporters

Classically Liberal has a most interesting post about attending a Tea Party rally and what he found there. For one thing, a great deal of anti-immigrant sentiment;

One woman was lecturing a camera about "my country is like my house." She thought that silly analogy valid."And I have the right to say who comes into my house." I couldn't stand it any more and from where I was seat yelled to her: "It's my house too." Not being too bright she smiled, pointed at me and yelled, "EXACTLY!" To that I replied: "And I don't care who comes in." She was not thrilled with that reply.

2 days to go

The lady with the feathers and pounamu has gone to Adelaide but I still have paintings for sale at the Academy Galleries, Queens Wharf, Wellington 10am - 5pm Saturday and Sunday.

Around the blogs

School holidays combined with an exhibition has left little time for writing. Fortunately there is plenty of interest on other blogs;

Winston Smith has written movingly about a rare success story from his supported housing experience but observes;

Now, instead of holding up the likes of Catriona as a shining example that one's childhood doesn't have to pre-determine your path in life I have to listen day in day out to the disempowering mantra that young people with anti-social behaviour problems behave the way they do due to their negative childhood experiences. A convenient theory that then allows the young person to self destruct and the agents of state intervention to abdicate all responsibility.

Labour MP Kelvin Davis gets angry about Iwi benefiting from the privatisation of prisons;

I see some iwi are rubbing their hands together in glee at the prospect of being able to get rich by locking their own up.

It goes to show how high the aspirations of some of our Maori leaders are. We now aspire to bung the bros in the hinaki and watch the dollars roll in. The longer and more often we can put them away, the sooner we will be able to afford to expand the prison and lock even more away.

The Frogblog laments what they claim is the stacking of the Welfare Working Group with the "far right".

Presumably under pressure from ACT, the Government seems to be unable to resist finding places for wingnuts on the various advisory groups it is setting up. Yesterday it continued this trend by appointing Business Roundtable communications consultant and former ACT Party President Catherine Isaac (formerly Judd) to its Welfare Working Group.

Karl du Fresne nails it in his usual concise fashion;

THE LEFT keeps moaning that wages in New Zealand are too low, which is perfectly correct. They complain that the government hasn’t delivered the promised higher-wage economy – again, all true.

But just let anyone suggest that something meaningful be done to free up the economy, increase productivity and stimulate income growth – such as reducing taxes and government spending – and who’s the first to howl in protest? Why, it’s the Left.

And last but not least my friend John Ansell has written about an exhibition he went to see earlier this week. Thank you John.

Maori and separatism

Is there an assumption amongst non-Maori that the Maori Party speaks for all Maori?

Perhaps the Maori Party MPs believe they do inasmuch as Maori who do not embrace the cultural and spiritual values of the Maori Party are not 'real' Maori.

The Maori Party is billed as a huge success yet their polling remains consistently around 3 percent despite being high profile, involved in the 'big' issues and appearing to have made some advantageous deals with National.

In Maoridom I am sure that there is no such assumption. The tribal politics and affiliations are strong. And there are plenty of business savvy Maori who don't naturally embrace the economic left and Maori who are inherently conservative.

There has always been disagreement between Maori leaders about what is the best way forward for Maori. Some preached assimilation. Others, like Apirana Ngata wanted Maori to retain their language, their customs and culture but also to take on the education and health services provided in the non-Maori world. To equip themselves for the future.

Remarkably I agree with Garth George today who writes about the Whanau Ora report;

The phrase "te ao Maori", which means "the Maori world", occurs at least 30 times in the taskforce report. I wonder about that. After all, the social welfare system, no matter how it is constituted, exists mainly in the modern Western world.

Many of the tens of thousands of people who are afflicted by poverty or otherwise disadvantaged may indeed be part of the Maori world, but they live in, and have to cope in, the modern Western world.

The Maori Party are most certainly pushing an increasingly separatist line. Yet they represent the aspirations of maybe 2 or 3 out of 12 voting age Maori (and that is assuming the significant Maori voting age population in Australia have a similar voting preferences to their NZ counterparts).

If many Maori are getting frustrated with the direction in which the Maori Party is taking Maoridom I am afraid the door will be re-opened to Winston Peters. Especially if Labour-voting Maori decide they are not wasting their vote at the next election. There is no doubt Winston has been ramping it up recently, opposing separatism but also stirring up anti-immigrant sentiment and economic nationalism. Ironically there are disaffected ex ACT voters, ultra conservatives, who might also lean his way. I say ironically because it was Rodney Hide that got rid of him.

My own frustration lies in not wanting separatism yet not wanting to deny Maori the chance to do things their way. But do most Maori want to "do things their way"? Isn't it about time we were talking about "our way"? I want to hear more from Maori who want to put aside the division but I don't want to hear it from Winston Peters.

Welfare Working Group announced

Members of the Welfare Working Group include:

• Ms Paula Rebstock (Chair)
• Professor Des Gorman
• Professor Kathryn McPherson
• Associate Professor Ann Dupuis
• Ms Catherine Isaac (formerly Judd)
• Ms Sharon Wilson-Davis
• Mr Adrian Roberts
• Ms Enid Ratahi Pryor.

According to the Minister's press release;

Based on past trends and current policy settings, the proportion of New Zealanders receiving long-term benefits is expected to increase unabated. The fiscal, social and economic costs of that are unsustainable.

Somewhat similar to what the header of this blog says.

I notice a number in there.

Taxpayers currently spend $7.6 billion per annum on main benefits.

A couple of weeks back I posted about the total of $4.8 billion being bandied about all over the media and said it was too low and the real cost is likely to be over $7 billion.

The erroneous $4.8 billion came directly from the Ministry:

345,000 New Zealanders currently receive a benefit, costing taxpayers $4.8 billion a year.

Anyway, good luck to them. One can only hope that if they offer up anything useful the government will have a more constructive response than to the Taskforce 2025 (which already made recommendations about reducing welfare)

When DPB pays more than the average female worker's income

From the Future Focus fact sheets we learned;

A sole parent, with two dependent children, renting in Auckland on DPB could receive approximately $580 per week including Accommodation Supplement and other allowances. A sole parent, with two dependent children, renting in the South Island on DPB could receive approximately $500 per week including Accommodation Supplement and other allowances

Using Statistics NZ Average Weekly Earnings (Employees) by Industry (ANZSIC06) and Sex (Qrtly-Mar/Jun/Sep/Dec) I produced a chart showing how these payments compare.



The point of this chart is to illustrate that choosing motherhood over work is entirely economically rational.

Comments and provisos

- tax applied 21c in the dollar
- a single mother (or other low income workers) employed in a low paying job may qualify for family tax credits, accommodation supplement etc
- the average earnings take no account of region whereas the DPB payments do
- If the DPB recipient has fewer than 2 children the weekly payment is lower; if she has more it is higher

(Inspired by Dynamic Benefits, produced by the UK Centre for Social Justice, undoubtedly the source of this piece by Fraser Nelson;

If an unemployed Pole gets a job as a barista in Starbucks, even for 15 hours a week, his situation improves dramatically. A young man in Britain would be just £10 a week better off than if he stayed at home on benefits. Why break your back for an extra tenner?

The situation is even more pernicious for young women who leave school with low qualifications, because the alternative to low-paid work is pregnancy. A woman with one child and on benefits has, on average, more disposable income than a hairdresser or teaching assistant. With two children, it's more than a receptionist or library assistant. With three, it's a lab technician, typist or bookkeeper. So there should be no mystery about why Britain came to have so many children in workless households (one in five, the highest in Europe). The young mothers, and the young men on benefits, are walking down a road to dependency paved for them by the state.

This is a peculiar definition of compassion. What Beveridge denounced as the "giant evil" of idleness is now being incubated on a mass scale by the very welfare state designed to eradicate it. As Britain positions itself for a recovery, this raises an ominous question for a prospective Conservative government: will it do any better? If the economy is to recover, might it simply suck in more of these industrious, hard-working immigrants while leaving between five and six million British people on out-of-work benefits?

Hat-tip also to The Welfare State We Are In)

Benefit statistics - what the numbers mean

Yesterday the Minister of Social Development pre-empted the release of the March quarter benefit numbers. The good news is total welfare benefits dropped by 20,662.

However, when the economy is not in recession that is a normal development.



Analysis of a similar drop between December 2006 and March 2007 shows that the drops on UB (10,000) and DPB (3,000) were larger than the Minister is indicating for the most recent quarter, respectively 6,000 and 1,000.

So a fair chunk of the drop is off benefits other than the 4 main benefits.

In December 2009 there were 12,096 unemployed students receiving the Unemployment Benfit - Student - Hardship. This compares to 7,997 in December 2006. So in December 2009 50 percent more students were on the dole and many of those will now have transferred onto a student allowance.

So we are beginning to see where most of the drop is and it isn't so much about leaving welfare but transferring onto another form of it.

If there had been any significant reduction in either the sickness or invalid's benefit I am sure we would have been hearing about it.

Contradictory crime figures

Reading two pieces back-to-back highlighted a significant error in the first. The error was immediately noticeable and I didn't think I could be bothered blogging about it. But the second caused me to reflect yet again about the misinformation that is spread via the media.

In the NZ Herald, Tapu Misa writes:

Crime went up last year, the biggest real increase in years. Murders were up by 25 per cent, the 65 recorded homicides being the highest in a decade. And violent crime was up by 8 per cent per capita.

In the DomPost, John Hartevelt writes:

Police statistics issued this month showed violent crime was up by 9.2 per cent to 65,465 offences last year. There was a jump in recorded homicide offences – up by more than 20 per cent to 134 last year.

Misa has reported homicides at less than half of the true number. There were 65 murders but it is a significant mistake to interchange the two.

In this column she rails against three strikes, blames increased crime on increased joblessness, discusses the causes of falling crime in the US (including the discredited abortion theory), pans the 'broken windows' revolution and the Californian application of three strikes. All of which is a discussion that will no doubt be addressed by Garth McVicar or David Garrett given the chance (although the NZ Herald doesn't appear to publish responses to Misa).

One theory about a cause of dropping US crime is neglected however. She wouldn't want to find anything in favour of welfare reform.

Strong families and employment are protectors against crime. Both are diminished by out of control welfare. Crime in the US dropped as welfare dependence diminished.

If lower socio-economic men continue to be displaced from their roles as father and provider then more crime is on the cards. And it is guaranteed to continue through to the next generation via any children he produces.

Matt McCarten's misapprehension

The left - and probably many on the right for that matter - do not understand what privatisation is.

Just because taxpayer funding is allocated to people who are not directly employed by the state, it does not follow that privatisation has occurred. The contracts are still publicly funded and the taxpayer has no choice about providing the means.

Whanau ora is not privatisation.

Privatisation of welfare would require that social services and cash assistance were provided by agencies that fund themselves through corporate backing, investment, business ventures, individual donations etc. That is, the funding is provided by willing contributors.

The wages and salaries of those practitioners of whanau ora will still be paid by the state, albeit indirectly.

To use Matt's quotation, "... big f***ing deal."

UK: life in state-provided 'supported housing'

Winston Smith has just updated his blog with his usual cutting-through-the-crap humour;

After reading about Cameron’s plan to turn the lives of yoofs around it got me thinking about all the harebrained plans and policies I have to work with. In fact, right outside the office on a notice board there is one outlining our policy on Keyworking (a.k.a Support Working, Link Working just in case anyone finds the term Keyworking offensive they have options). The policy outlines all the different qualities that the resident’s personal assistant, sorry KeyWorker, should exude, thus instilling at a young age that the state is there to serve you before you have done anything in service of the state. Most notable of all though is the definition of what keyworking purports to do: “helping you to realise your goals in order to move forward in life.” This definition doesn’t allow for the fact that many of our 16-25 year old residents don’t have goals beyond getting as wasted as they can on a regular basis. This then involves me having to support them in setting some goals all the while being “careful not to impose one’s own value system” as one manager put it to me recently. The residents who don’t have goals never turn up for their Keyworking sessions and have to be threatened with eviction to engage in setting goals they don’t aspire towards. All of this is recorded, monitored and audited by layers of state financed bureaucrats.

Then there are those residents, usually the older ones but not always, who have goals and aims and are progressing and just want to be left alone to do so which they should be permitted to do. They resent formal support plans that state obvious goals like: continue to pay your rent, go to work etc. etc. They can’t understand and neither can I, why all this needs to be written down and why they have to talk about it every two weeks for an hour. They feel patronised for having their lives interfered in and they are right. However, as they can’t afford to rent properties of their own due to unjust rents they are forced to adhere to the state’s ludicrous interference to qualify for a roof over their heads.

Getting stuff done

It's not much after 9am. David has gone to work and I have done the week's grocery shopping, have today's washing on the line, the dishwasher is emptied, animals fed, beds made, a couple of blog entries before that and...the day is mine. I can read, paint, garden, walk the dog, study horse form, do a jigsaw with Sam.

This post was prompted by a remark the checkout girl made to me earlier.(She's a student who has recently been studying in Leeds reading politics and art history). She said she wished her parents were as organised as I am. That they would do a proper shop instead of buying in dribs and drabs and that she had offered to do it for them but to no avail. I was surprised at her frustration but it caused me to reflect on why I am the way I am.

It goes back to a teacher. She was deputy principal and an utter battle-axe. She would yank an illegal piece of jewellery off your neck if she caught sight of it. But she was very kind to me when I was in the sick bay - a monthly unpleasant occurrence.

One day in assembly she told us that people regarded her as very efficient. "But you know what?" she said. "I am not. I am lazy. But I like to get what needs to be done out of the way so I can do what I want to do, which includes lazing around if I want to."

In a practical sense that is the philosophy I live by. It was bloody good advice.

Explaining what a libertarian is

Highly recommended article here for those people who can't tell the difference between liberals, conservatives and libertarians.

I used to be a Kennedy-style "liberal." Then I wised up. Now I'm a libertarian.

But what does that mean?

When I asked people on the street, half had no clue.

We know that conservatives want government to conserve traditional values. They say they're for limited government, but they're pro-drug war, pro-immigration restriction and anti-abortion, and they often support "nation-building."

And so-called liberals? They tend to be anti-gun and pro-choice on abortion. They favor big, powerful government -- they say -- to make life kinder for people.

By contrast, libertarians want government to leave people alone -- in both the economic and personal spheres. Leave us free to pursue our hopes and dreams, as long as we don't hurt anybody else.

More.

Read through to the last lines because that is the crux of it for me.

Boaz indicts the welfare state for the untold harm it's done in the name of the poor.

"What we find is a system that traps people into dependency. ... You should be asking advocates of that system, 'Why don't you care about the poor?'"

The "don't know" line is missing

The latest Roy Morgan poll. Not that I was asked, but if I had been, my answer wouldn't be represented.

We could try a mini (probably very mini on a Saturday) poll here. How many of you, if there was an election to be held next Saturday, don't know who you would vote for - or wouldn't vote at all?



There is a danger I will return to my non-voting status. With a big difference. When I was young I didn't vote because I didn't know or care enough.

What difference will whanau ora make?

Whanau Ora is a restructuring of welfare services. There is no indication yet that welfare benefits are involved. Whanau ora promises to work with and reduce dysfunctional families. Dysfunctional families experience a range of negative occurrences; truancy, domestic violence, drug and alcohol abuse, teenage pregnancy, criminal offending, poor physical and mental ill-health are some.

Dependence on benefits is a big driver of dysfunction. Benefits - or a guaranteed weekly payment from Work and Income regardless - absolve people from working for a living and having positive, constructive and co-dependent relationships with other whanau members. Benefits allow people to live outside of functioning society. Welfare services evolve as a response to this dysfunction. Services may ameliorate some of the problems but a significant reduction cannot be possible while the prime driver - benefits - remains unchanged.

The taskforce report used an example of a working single mother whose children were going off the rails and was having to deal with various authorities. This example isn't typical however. The Early Start programme, the only programme that has systematically identified the neediest families, provided services to them and compared the outcomes to a control group that did not receive services, found 90 percent of their clients were on welfare. The problematic working mother does fit however with Tariana Turia's view that women should be allowed to stay on the DPB until their youngest dependent child completes his or her schooling.

It is possible that Maori will be better providers of welfare services for Maori people. John Tamihere maintains his trust can reduce youth offending if given ample resourcing. But it is difficult to see by what mechanism whanau ora is going to ensure people 'meet their obligations' unless the trust also controls benefit inflow into the dysfunctional families they aim to assist. That eventuality may still be a whanau ora goal. In the past trusts or agents have been appointed to manage benefits. As it stands however there is no intimation this is going to happen. The report specifies that there is, "... no expectation iwi would fund core services such as health or unemployment benefits."

The government claims that the 20 new whanau ora contracts will be a fiscally neutral policy. Funding will be drawn from the existing Health, Social Development and Maori Development budgets. This can only mean that there will be winners and there will be losers. We have yet to see which service providers are going to have their funding cut or lose it altogether.

The whanau ora concept focuses on the family and their collective responsibility. But in my experience working in a voluntary capacity with needy families, there is usually one (or two) individuals that pull the whanau down. Who make their own problems everybody else's. For instance Corrections complains about imprisoned whanau members pressuring their relatives to bring drugs into prison. This can take the form of intimidation or physical threats. Hence the dysfunction multiplies. However the problem still begins with, and must be resolved by, the individual.

Perhaps it is time to start talking more about personal responsibility instead of collective responsibility. When the US decided to grab welfare dependence and all the attendant dysfunction by the neck and give it a good shake they did so via new legislation called the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act(PRWORA). President Clinton told Americans welfare, as they had known it, would change. In the majority of cases welfare became strictly short term assistance, the aim being to restore the incentive to rely on one's own efforts and avoid self-destructive behaviours .

Simply changing the way services are provided will only scratch the surface if the current benefit system remains unchanged.

Update; Talking to Larry Williams on NewstalkZB (starts 55:02)

Whanau ora - overhyped

Turia has been appointed Minister of Whanau Ora. The media is billing whanau ora as potentially the biggest shake-up in welfare in decades. But whanau ora is about welfare services - not welfare cash transfers. There is nothing in the report released today that would indicate whanau ora providers will take over administration of benefits.

How much can whanau ora be expected to achieve in terms of changing behaviour - or as John Tamihere would put it, getting beneficiaries/clients to meet their obligations - when services and benefits are separate? It is like tasking a group within a large company with lifting worker's productivity but giving it no capacity to penalise or reward either motivated or lazy workers. So while some are hailing this development as a great step forward, I will wait and watch.

Whanau ora is about the whole of family approach. Personally I have seen high risk whanau where one (or two) bad eggs keep pulling others down. 'Blood is thicker than water' does not serve Maori well in this respect. So increasing the well-being of the whanau still rests on the individual and his or her efforts.

The "lucky" country thinks big

The Age is reporting that the Australian Treasury has predicted their population will grow to 36 million by 2050. The roughly matches what the Australian Bureau if Statistics are forecasting as well.

Australia's estimated resident population (ERP) at 30 June 2007 of 21.0 million people is projected to increase to between 30.9 and 42.5 million people by 2056, and to between 33.7 and 62.2 million people by 2101. Series A projects the highest growth, while Series C projects the lowest growth.



In contrast Statistics New Zealand is predicting the following for New Zealand;

Low fertility and the ageing of the large baby boom cohort have raised the prospect of slow or no growth in the future. Regardless of which projection is chosen, the general demographic outlook for New Zealand over the coming decades is for slowing growth, a narrowing gap between births and deaths, and an ageing population. This is a radical departure for a society accustomed to a growing population. Any innovative or expansionist planning or business programme must take account of structural shifts in progress.



This graph is from 2000, but even latest population projections - June 2009 - are only slightly higher:

The latest projections of New Zealand's population have the estimated resident population (provisional) at 30 June 2009 as a base. Projection series 5 presented here assumes that:

* New Zealand women will have 1.90 children each on average in the long-term (below the 2.1 children required for the population to replace itself without migration)
* life expectancy at birth will increase to 85.6 years for males and 88.7 years for females by 2061
* there will be a net migration gain of 10,000 people each year from 2013 onwards.

Given these assumptions, New Zealand's population is projected to grow from 4.32 million in 2009 to 5.15 million in 2031 and 5.75 million in 2061.

There are people who celebrate low or zero population growth. I am not one. The economic reality is that dependency ratios are growing and without an expanding working-age pool (what might be expected from net migration) NZ is facing massive problems.

The distortion of the DPB

Yesterday beneficiary advocate Paul Blair was back in the news claiming the Ministry of Social Development is acting illegally. He is trying to get people who have been relegated from an invalid's benefit to a sickness benefit to come forward and form a body that will take the department to court. Mr Blair describes himself as a qualified barrister. Listening to him interviewed by Sean Plunkett this morning he lacks the discipline and gravitas one might associate with that of a practitioner of the law.

Mr Blair has nevertheless succeeded in his past endeavours to bend MSD policy to his will. In 2004 he and two other fathers took a case against the department described by the NZ Herald as follows;

Three Rotorua beneficiaries have forced a law change for single parents with split custody of their children through an out-of-court settlement with the Social Development Ministry.

On October 1, 1991, a law was introduced to stop two parents living apart, but who had split custody of their children, from both getting the Domestic Purposes Benefit.

One was eligible for the sole-parent benefit and all the benefits that went with it, while the other was entitled to the unemployment benefit.

Rotorua beneficiaries advocate and sole parent Paul Blair argued that this was not fair as the parent receiving the DPB was entitled to earn more when working than the parent on the dole.

Parents on the DPB were also entitled to childcare subsidies, a non-recoverable training incentive allowance if attending a course, and did not have to be work-tested.

Rotorua sole parents Leon Broughton, Richard Amoroa and Mr Blair started legal proceedings in the High Court at Rotorua against the chief executive of the ministry more than a year ago.

In the out-of-court settlement, the ministry agreed the second parent in split-custody cases would be entitled to the emergency maintenance allowance, paid at the same rate as the DPB and with similar advantages.

Justice Alan McKenzie ordered the ministry to review the plaintiffs' benefits, pay any arrears, treat all similar cases in the same way and review cases as far back as December 12, 2000.

This is an utter distortion of how the DPB was intended to operate; the state paying for the mother (or father) to care for the dependent children while the liable parent contributes to this payment through earned income.

Another Court of Appeal case, the Ruka Case, also saw the original intention of the DPB distorted by a ruling that stated where a women was living in a relationship with a man who was abusive and not financially or emotionally supportive she could not be legally described as 'living in the nature of a marriage'. Therefore she could continue to receive the DPB. Thousands of past decisions were scrutinised under the new ruling, overturned and financially recompensed. Note now that as long as a man is violent and doesn't support his partner she can stay on welfare. A bitter irony given an original aim of the DPB was to enable women to leave abusive relationships.

Of course there are many other ways in which eligibility for the DPB has been distorted. These are just two of the more counter-productive examples.

Shattered myth

Some news for those of us who had to be forced to eat fruit and veges as kids, continue to force ourselves to eat fruit and veges as grown-ups and force our children to eat fruit and veges because THEY WILL MAKE YOU LIVE LONGER.

All that angst and resentful compliance may have been a complete waste of time.

However, having believed it for so long I am not about to relinquish my prejudice and share this revelation with the children. When they ask, "What's to eat?" my standard response will continue to be, "Get a piece of fruit."

(They only listen to me sometimes but this at least reduces the amount of junk food they might otherwise consume. And I need to indulge myself. I always feel like a better mother when I feed them fruit and veges.)

Once a lag, always a lag?

A friend once described to me how she and two others had gone to prison to visit a gang president to 'buy' her partner's freedom. She stayed in the car but was quite explicit about the intent of the visit and which gang was involved. And I have no reason to doubt the story.

I recalled this episode just now when reading about Jack Yorke, who similarly struck a deal to obtain his release. Looking at the region it may well be the same gang. Unfortunately for Mr Yorke, when the person with whom he had struck the deal died, new blood started demanding money to uphold the agreement. It's so despicable. Yorke, probably something of a wreck from hard living and on a sickness benefit, stole some property to pay the ransom. Then he confessed to the police. It was his first conviction in the 6 years since being released from jail.

Now he is being sent back to prison for 15 months with "special release conditions to assist in rehabilitation."

This raises a few questions in my mind.

1/ What, if anything, is being done about the blackmailing of Mr Yorke?

2/ What is 15 months in prison supposed to achieve? Would it be preferable to spend the $91,000 it costs to house a prisoner each year on buying Yorke a new identity and shipping him off somewhere? In prison it is going to cost 6 times what it currently costs to support him and the fact he stayed out of trouble after 2004 would suggest he is over his life of crime, worn-out most likely.

3/ If Mr Yorke is subject to threats and intimidation on the outside, what chance the authorities can keep him safe on the inside?

4/ And, of course, is Mr Yorke telling the truth, but I am prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt.

But perhaps the hard-liners would say, tough. He has to be punished and if he didn't want to do the time, he shouldn't have done the crime. Perhaps Mr Yorke is about to get his comeuppance for his previous life of offending.

And that is exactly where I part company from the hard-liners. Yes, I actually have some sympathy for this character because I imagine he is a burnt-out shell of a man who no longer poses a threat to society. There are plenty more like him hence very few old men are in prison. But more importantly the way the justice system is dealing with him seems to defy logic. There must be better outcomes available for both Yorke and the taxpayer. Surely.

11 percent of 16-24 year-olds on welfare

At December 2009 there were 62,580 16-24 year-olds on welfare,

View the benefit type, age and regional breakdown here.

Only 36 percent of them were on the dole. 35 percent were on the DPB.

(One 16 or 17 year-old was on a Widow's benefit.)

Just over 1 in 10 may not seem remarkable but in higher socio-economic areas the number will be negligible. And in the poorest areas the number will be around 4 or 5 in 10. That's where being on welfare is normalised behaviour.