What's in a word

It is infrequently that I come across an unknown word. Today however I was reading some hullabaloo (on both sides) about NZ sinking into the shadows of far right influence.An opinion piece was published by the Washington Post, "How the far right is poisoning New Zealand, " and duly responded to by Tim Watkin at RNZ.

Here's the sentence, from the first piece, containing the word:

"Appealing to ethnically homogenous, overwhelmingly cisgender male voters with limited education and economic prospects who feel they’re being left behind in a changing world is nothing new for the far right."

Cisgender. I had to google it.

 Cisgender is a term for people whose gender identity matches the sex that they were assigned at birth. Cisgender may also be defined as those who have "a gender identity or perform a gender role society considers appropriate for one's sex". Wikipedia

No surprises in a politically correct world that a new label has been attached to a group to categorise and explain with reference and respect to anyone who falls outside of it.

My interest is, am I the only one who wasn't aware of this term? Am I such a dinosaur? You see I think my ignorance of this word is just part and parcel of my whole ignorance about how to really solve problems.

In fact I can't even see the problem a lot of the time. Why are we trying to fix stuff that isn't broken? Why are we obsessing about problems in advance of them actually happening?

Cisgender first appeared in 1994. Our newest generation is full of anxiety. While there have always been global scares, the rate they occur at seems to have sped up. Now our young are worrying about manmade global warming, the 'future of work', inequality, and often the very personal nature of their own sexual identity. Labeling stuff helps them try to sort it, to make sense of it. To feel logical about the illogical.

Because so often much of what they spout is illogical - not all, but even thinkers struggle with the bombardment of paranoia engulfing them.

It is totally redundant to explain to them that they have been born into a world that is more peaceful and more prosperous than any other time in history.

That's not their problem.

The Minister for Child Poverty Reduction may very well succeed

The PM has made herself Minister for Child Poverty Reduction. Symbolically a good move for her. But crucial questions have to be answered.

How will she measure child poverty? I suspect there will be an emphasis on incomes. This mirrors what the UK Labour government did in 2000 when they legislated to reduce child poverty.

But this approach was highly controversial and eventually abandoned:

After the 2010 General Election, a Coalition government, made up of the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties, was elected in the UK. The Coalition remained committed to the Child Poverty Act, but there was a difference in approach. As part of a larger shift away from policy measures to increase income in favor of a focus on efforts to combat what the government identified as the “drivers of poverty” (family breakdown, low levels of education, worklessness, alcohol and drug dependency, personal debt, welfare dependency, and more), the Conservative-led government began to adapt the measurements of the target itself.

This is not dissimilar to the track Bill English was on, though he also concerned himself with lifting incomes via wealth distribution. Contrary to the picture of indifference that Labour painted, National was tackling poverty and, most importantly, its causes. There was a Ministerial Committee on Poverty which produced some strong work on who was poor and why.

In 2016 a follow-up report on progress was published. Here we see emphasis on a strong economy and welfare reform, particularly regarding teen parents, a "special area of focus".

Indications from the new far left government  (compared to the Clark/Cullen administration) to date are that welfare reforms will largely be abandoned and the economy is likely to weaken due to immigration cuts, new and higher taxes, and greater government intervention in the labour market.

On that basis the PM may very well succeed in reducing relative child poverty. After all, if median household incomes go down, a smaller percentage of families will be in relative poverty as highlighted by the UK experience. While,

"....relative low income declined during the recession, absolute low income increased."

Green's persist with Turei's campaign

Thanks to a reader for highlighting this blog post from Jan Logie, now the Under-Secretary to the Minister of Justice (focussing on Domestic and Sexual Violence Issues).

Logie has stepped straight into Metiria Turei's shoes. This is exactly the message she was pushing before her fall. The message that unsettled so many New Zealanders.

Under the cloak of compassion it promotes open slather access to benefits.

Greater benefit dependency is not good, for many reasons. Being born to unknown or unnamed fathers is not good for children. These statements are generalities but they are self-evident.

People who work have obligations to their employers, and vice versa. The same should apply to a system that purports to replace income from work, at the very least.

This Labour/Greens/NZ First coalition will be a different kettle of fish from the last Labour govt

This Labour/Greens/NZ First coalition will be a different kettle of fish from the last Labour government. If you doubt that, here's a perfect example.

Just heard on Radio NZ, Ardern talking about excessive sanctions in the welfare system like the penalty for not naming the father of a child. James Shaw then chimes in backing this concern.

When Steve Maharey was Minister for Social Development he too was concerned about mothers not naming the fathers of the children - a growing trend. So he increased the existing penalty against opposition from the Greens.

Most moderate New Zealanders back a welfare system that helps people in genuine need. I accept that. But they balk against  being forced to be financial fathers to children whose biological fathers  fly the coup.

HOWEVER, here is what NZ First MP Bill Gudgeon said in the debate relating to raising the penalty in 2005:


"The Social Security (Social Assistance) Amendment Bill goes part of the way to try to rectify this problem. An increase from 5.6 percent in 1993 to 16 percent in 2004, indicates an increase in the number of liable parents who are failing to meet their responsibilities. One result is that it makes it financially harder for the custodial parent to move off the benefit, as that parent would not receive child support. The crux of the matter in sole parenting is how the children receive physical and spiritual support. Is the benefit sufficient? Will the sole parent become independent of the State? Many in today’s society would consider these questions to be quaint and old-fashioned, yet I say that we should look at where we have been, where we are, and where we are heading.

The bill increases the rate of reduction in the benefit, and does so as an incentive for sole parents to carry out certain actions so that the other parent contributes financially to the upbringing of the child. Currently, under section 70A of the Social Security Act the rate of benefit paid to the sole parent is reduced by $22 per week for each dependent child where that parent fails or refuses to identify the other parent in law, to make an application for child support, or to attend a hearing and give evidence at proceedings brought under the Child Support Act. By July 2005 additional increases in the rate of reduction will be imposed, but this decision will be reconsidered should the beneficiary meet the section 70A requirements.

Let us look at the responsibilities that we have as parliamentarians, because within the four walls of this Chamber we have the power to pass laws. But what about the citizens of this country? New Zealand First is not judgmental of people who find themselves in this situation, but it is the responsibility of Parliament to help them to become independent of the State. It is our responsibility to ensure financial support is given to the sole parent from the other partner, who, in many cases, is the father. On too many occasions we sit here and debate with each other, and among parties, about who did this and who did that, but our prime responsibility as parliamentarians is to govern so that freedom prevails and assistance is given to people in need.

This legislation will be very difficult to implement, but New Zealand First supports it."

So what will Winston do in 2018? Without NZ First support, Labour and Greens are stymied. What price is NZ First prepared to pay for power?

Trotter's advice for Ardern

Writing in today's DomPost:

A "Real Change" Government, determined to reverse the draconian policies adopted by a Ministry of Social development advised by neoliberal "experts", would call upon the experience and expertise of Sue Bradford and Metiria Turei. Those who find themselves astonished and/or offended by the thought of two such bitter opponents of this country's actuarially inspired and excessively punitive welfare system being asked to advise Jacinda's government on its root-and-branch reform should, perhaps, pause and consider just how radical (albeit from the opposite end of the political spectrum) was the "expert" advice that created it.

What were those "draconian" policies?

- funding early childhood education so single mothers could return to the workforce
- providing intensive monitoring for teenage parents
- asking parents receiving benefits to enrol their children with a GP
- increasing penalties (that Labour had introduced) for people who failed to turn up for interviews or pass drug tests
- creating a new category of benefit with no work-testing at all, the Supported Living Payment...
to name a few

Trotter seems to have forgotten that the last Labour government also tried many ways to reduce welfare numbers. The Jobs Jolt is just one example that the far left bitterly opposed.

Again a reality check is sorely required. Not only regarding Trotter's description of National's reforms but the idea that the new government would let Turei anywhere near it. Even I do not think the PM would be that stupid.

"I'm intending to stay and critique these buggers pretty hard"

So said Steven Joyce. I hope he sticks to this. 

Explanations of policy concessions are now emerging and it appears National rejected those 'bridges too far'.

NZ First is also understood to have won concessions from Labour that National balked at, including work to progress a multi-billion dollar Northland port.
The deal will also cut property sales to foreigners - another policy National balked at, warning it would send an unfortunate message to our neighbours and be in breach of trade agreements.
Immigration was also crucial to NZ First's position - National rejected whole sale cuts. concerned about a labour shortage.

The last point mirrors my major concern with the new government.

New Zealand was built on immigration. I am an immigrant. The public services in particular - Health and Corrections I can personally attest to - are heavily supported by immigrant workers. Many rural sectors cannot operate without immigrant labour.

National could not support policies that would actively hurt the economy.

Effort needs to go into explaining this, relentlessly.

Unfounded statements - hallmark of PM Ardern

If you think I have a grudge against Ardern, you are partly right. She  publicly ridiculed my research. But my problem with Ardern is mainly impersonal. It's just another battle in the war against dishonesty.

From NewstalkZB:

She's told TVNZ's Q&A programme that leaving everything to the market simply hasn't worked for workers.

"Everything" is not left to the market though.

Working For Families subsidises employers. It allows them to pay their workers less (and the childless suffer as a consequence).

Ganesh Nana, left-leaning BERL economist, was lamenting this subsidisation last week. But he never drew the correct conclusion. Abolish the state subsidies. Certainly Jacinda isn't going to.

A state-mandated minimum wage  is hardly descriptive of "leaving everything to the market". And she plans to raise it.

Huge regulation/ compliance costs are hardly "leaving everything to the market". Those costs are reflected in wage constraints. They are passed down to employees and clients.

Company tax, GST, rates, etc. all dictate costs to the labour market.

"Leaving everything to the market" is the most absurd statement.

Oh, correction. There will be a more absurd statement shortly. Money on it.

And so the Prime Minister's prevarications begin

Well continue actually, but begin as Prime Minister

Let's start with this one:

"When you have a market economy, it all comes down to whether or not you acknowledge where the market has failed and where intervention is required. Has it failed our people in recent times? Yes. How can you claim you've been successful when you have growth roughly 3 per cent, but you've got the worst homelessness in the developed world?"

This was refuted earlier this year by NZ Herald reporter Isaac Davison who found:

New Zealand was ranked as having the highest homeless rate per capita in a piece of analysis published by Yale University last month.
The analysis was based on an OECD paper which said 0.94 per cent of NZ's population was homeless. The lowest homeless rate in the OECD was Japan, at 0.03 per cent.
The OECD paper said that NZ's high incidence of rough sleepers could partly be explained by its broad definition of homelessness.
As Social Housing Minister Amy Adams says, if NZ measured homelessness the same way Japan did, it would be ranked among the top of developed countries.
Japan only measures rough sleepers. According to the Otago study, New Zealand has around 1400 rough sleepers, or 0.03 per cent of the population - equivalent to Japan.
Conclusion: Mostly fiction. The study does not compare apples with apples, so it is unfair to say NZ has performed worse than every other country on the list.

Then the PM claimed that  most people's incomes are "not keeping up with inflation...."

Another lie. The official source for data on household incomes says:

 • From HES 2015 to HES 2016 median household income (BHC) rose 3% in real terms (3% above the CPI inflation rate)

And over a longer period?

It's going to be a long three years listening to fabrications, distortions and exaggerations ad nauseam. 

The " high quality of palliative care" argument not so strong

If the accuracy of this RNZ report can be relied on, those who argue against voluntary euthanasia using the high quality of palliative as support, are misinformed:

"[Hospice] Patients don't have access to stronger pain-killing drugs because they aren't fully-funded, top New Zealand hospice and palliative care doctors say."

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Benefit numbers at change of government

For your ongoing reference, here are beneficiary numbers, released today, at change of government. The slow but consistent reduction continued:

This illustrates just one of many positive social and economic factors for National, ignored by voters and Winston Peters (who insists on talking up a looming crisis for which he cannot be held culpable.)

Another one bites the dust

What a blow. Rodney Hide announces his last column for the Herald on Sunday. I suppose it'll save a few minutes of my day not having to open the Herald page of a Sunday morning but that's the only upside I can think of and it's not a very good one.

There are countless opinion writers, as mentioned yesterday. There are three I take note of. Karl du Fresne, Martin van Beynen and Colin James. Occasionally I will glance at other writers columns, if the headline interests. But rarely do I reach the end. Mostly because it's recycled pap. The same ideas get expressed repeatedly with little thought about the manner of expression even. Originality is a rare commodity. In part that is why I blog infrequently now. I have said all I have to say and don't want to bore the readers or myself.

But Hide always had a new twist on something. Sometimes the twists seemed implausible but they never failed to either entertain or turn over the grey matter.

Perhaps he could be persuaded to start a blog? Creative thinkers need an outlet. And Lord knows, the rest of us need to hear their thoughts.

Karl du Fresne on Winston Peters

In the on-line media age, where both 'writers' and readers are seemingly insatiably thirsty for content, opinion pieces have become all about quantity - not quality.

But this one is a cracker:

OPINION: As is well known, the MMP electoral system was created to ensure, as far as possible, that no party ended up wielding absolute power.

So far you'd have to say it has worked exactly as intended. In the eight elections since New Zealand adopted MMP, no one party has won an absolute majority. They have all had to compromise and negotiate with smaller coalition partners.

Now we find ourselves in the same position again. It should be familiar by now, yet something seems not quite right. What could it be?

Oh, that's right – Winston Peters, the 7.5 Per cent Man, is back in the mix, and making the most of his intoxicating moment in the spotlight.

He said he was out of phone range when Bill English called last Sunday. But what sort of politician goes bush, leaving his phone unattended, when he's in the hot seat and the country is waiting for a government to be formed?

Then there was his excuse that he was waiting for the 384,000 special votes to come in, as if these had the potential to skew the election night result by such an order of magnitude that any preliminary negotiations with other parties would be futile.

Peters wanted us to think he was delaying showing his hand out of respect for democracy, but I don't think anyone was fooled. We've seen it all before.

If he truly respected democracy, he would acknowledge that his party pulled a measly 7.5 per cent of the vote and stop behaving like some sort of vainglorious potentate from Berzerkistan. Heck, he couldn't even retain his own seat.

But this is Peters we're talking about. The "h" word that comes between "humidify" and "hummingbird" in most dictionaries apparently doesn't exist in the edition on Peters' bookshelf.

Perhaps MMP works best when you have politicians who are prepared to be conciliatory, to compromise and to make concessions. The Germans seem to manage it.

Unfortunately, Peters is not one of those politicians. Bluster and demagoguery, rather than consensus, is his default setting.

Politically, he's a living fossil: a relic of Muldoonism, with all its bullying, divisiveness and ad hoc state interventionism. From the time he first entered Parliament in 1978, his career has been marked by fractiousness and petulance. He is a settler of scores and a bearer of grudges.

Some of his policy ideas – reinstating the old Forest Service, introducing a police "flying squad", legislating to ensure free-to-air coverage of major sporting events – appear designed to exploit the nostalgic yearning of his ageing supporters for New Zealand the way they remember it.

Peters is a political Doctor Who, inviting us to join him in the Tardis for a trip back to a simpler time when an all-powerful state pretended it could solve complex problems with the pull of a lever. Look where that got us.

I said at the start of this column that MMP is working exactly as intended. Does this mean it's a good system? Not at all. It's a dog that replaced a turkey.

We weren't sure at the time that we wanted a dog. All we knew is that we desperately wanted to get rid of the turkey, and a highly motivated lobbying campaign convinced us – by a less than overwhelming majority, incidentally – that the dog would do the job better.

And so we ended up with a system in which a vain and egotistical politician whose party got 7.5 per cent of the vote determines who the next government will be; and where every solemn pledge made during the election campaign is now up for negotiation in a secret process that voters have no control over or input into.

We could, however, do a few things to improve the situation. For one thing, the media could stop stoking Peters' already rampant ego by refusing to give him daily opportunities to grandstand. And let's stop treating the post-election guessing game as some sort of diverting spectator sport or reality TV show. We're talking about the future of the country, for heaven's sake.

Oh, and here's another suggestion that might negate the Peters problem altogether.

You'd think that if any party "got" MMP, it would be the Greens. But at the very suggestion of a deal with National, they clutch at their skirts like startled virgins.

Well, Labour has never invited them into bed. If promiscuity is the price for getting some runs on the board, perhaps they should forget about virtue and get their knickers off.

 - The Dominion Post

Dreaded de javu

And so it came to pass. The self-serving, bad-mannered, boorish, duplicitous, Winston Peters has once more fooled some of the people, thereby visiting an unwanted prospect on all of the people.

Stephen Franks has a piece by his colleague, Rob Olgilvie, well worth a read:

Why just king-maker? Why not king?

Never a truer word...

Decades of state welfare and political paternalism have [since] conditioned some people to believe they cannot take care of themselves without government support. So they jeopardise their own freedom by giving government increasing authority over their lives while reducing the freedom of others too.

Source 

Only one party isn't promising to increase their authority over your lives this election. They are the only party promising to spend less, not more.

I will party vote ACT tomorrow. And despair over the vast majority who want to increasingly cede control of their lives. But I have long since stopped trying to understand why.

Jacinda Ardern will increase poverty because she doesn't understand the drivers

Last year I wrote a paper which explored the link between child poverty and family structure. The strongest correlate with child poverty is single parent families on welfare. Additionally, children born into de facto relationships - which had a much higher likelihood of dissolving than marriages - were much more likely to become poor.

In a Sunday Star Times column Jacinda Ardern attacked my research:

This week I opened the paper to find some astonishing "news" - a lack of marriage is to blame for child poverty.

I've spent the better part of six years reading and researching the issue of child poverty, and what we need to do to resolve this complex problem in New Zealand

And yet here it was, the silver bullet we have all been looking for. Marriage. Getting hitched. Tying the knot. It turns out that we didn't need an Expert Advisory Group on child poverty, or any OECD analysis for that matter - apparently all we really need is a pastor and a party.

At least, that's the world according to Family First, who commissioned a report this week which, they claim, provides "overwhelming and incontrovertible" evidence that when it comes to child poverty, a lack of marriage is our problem, and it's simply become "politically unfashionable" to talk about it.

I'm happy to talk about it; in fact all of Parliament is. We debated the ins and outs of the institution not that long ago - it was called the Marriage Equality debate. Oddly, I don't recall Family First supporting the idea of increasing access to marriage when it came to same-sex couples. But I digress.

The major piece of evidence Family First use to back up their claims? Child poverty has risen significantly since the 1960s, and more people were married back then. I am paraphrasing, but that's the general gist. And yes, those two pieces of information are true. But are they linked? You only have to look at where child poverty figures really jump around to figure that bit out. Back in the mid-1980s, child poverty numbers (after taking into account housing costs) were about half the levels they are now. What happened to cause the spike? De facto relationships and single parenting didn't all of a sudden become "on trend".

What happened was Ruth Richardson's Mother of all Budgets. Government support was slashed, unemployment rates were grim, and child poverty, as you would expect, went up significantly. Equally, you can also see a downward trend in child poverty numbers around the early 2000s when Working for Families was introduced.

So what about the other claims in the report? How about "51 per cent of children in poverty live in single-parent families". Stating the obvious, surely. Single parent equals single income.

So, Family First, here's my view for what it's worth. Families will take many forms. Some children will be raised by one parent, some will be raised by two, possibly with some distance in between, and some will be raised by four. But the other factors Family First was so quick to dismiss - low wages and staggering housing costs - mean we have 305,000 children in poverty. And this is the stuff that needs to change. It's time we faced reality.

I was allowed only 150 words to respond via a letter-to-the-editor, but you can read my full response here.

Because she doesn't understand child - no let's call it 'family' poverty, Ardern is on the brink of making it much worse.

Granted that particular paper was about incomes. But they account for only one aspect of the poverty problem.

When countries redistribute wealth to raise incomes it comes at a cost - joblessness. Peter Whiteford and Willem Adema write:

"...there is an unavoidable trade-off between providing generous assistance to the poor and improving incentives for people to work and provide for themselves. On average across OECD countries, there is a fairly strong correlation between the effectiveness of tax and benefit systems in reducing poverty and the level of family joblessness. The correlation coefficient is 0.63 – implying that every 1 percentage point increase in the level of poverty reduction achieved by the welfare state is associated with an increase in the number of jobless families by 0.63 percentage points. Among the English-speaking countries  the correlation is even stronger (about 0.92), so that Australia and the United Kingdom reduce child poverty very significantly and have very high levels of joblessness among families; while Canada and the United States reduce poverty much less, but have much lower levels of joblessness (although they have much higher poverty among working families with children). That is, in the English-speaking countries the argument made by Adam, Brewer and Shepherd (2006) appears to apply – more generous support to poor families is associated with higher levels of family joblessness."

Source

In a nutshell, for every percentage point family poverty is reduced, joblessness increases.

The possible future Prime Minister will substantially lift benefit incomes for young parents but reduce the incentive to work. Adding $3,120 annually per child aged 2 or under (and that's only one part of her policy) reduces, if not closes, the gap between incomes from work and incomes from benefits. And don't doubt that recipients factor this into a choice between working and staying dependent on the taxpayer.

"I get a good amount of money on the benefit, why bother working?"

Because work has many more benefits than money alone. Most importantly it teaches your children how the real world operates.

The last two decades has seen countries across the western world debating which is the best strategy to get families out of poverty - increasing work participation or redistributing income. National went largely with the former with their welfare reforms. Now there are fewer children benefit-dependent than since the 1980s (though there's a long way to go yet). Ardern though is predominantly choosing the latter. And if she needs the Greens, a softening of the reforms will be inevitable.

While claiming to have researched  child poverty extensively she has ignored the effect that redistribution has on both work participation and relationship status.

NZ Herald's Simon Collins summarized some of the research into the effect of welfare on relationships:

For parents on benefits or low incomes, the tax and benefit system actually created a financial incentive to separate. Economist Patrick Nolan calculated in 2008 that a mother earning $240 a week and an unemployed father would be $132 a week better off apart, even allowing for the extra costs of two households, because of the extra welfare top-ups the mother could get if she lived alone with the children.
Social researchers Paul Callister and David Rea, in a new draft paper, trace the other side of the equation - a worrying minority of mid-life men aged 30 to 44 missing out on both work and marriage. Mid-life men outside the labour force rose from 2 per cent to 11 per cent in the 30 years to 2006, and those living without partners rose in the past 20 years from 19 per cent to 33 per cent. 

Ardern is intent on reducing income poverty (with no guarantee the money will be spent on the children) but will unwittingly or worse, uncaringly, increase another kind of poverty. A poverty of purpose and spirit. These deficits are what drives the problems all New Zealanders want to see alleviated.

Farmers fight back

Great to see:

Maniototo farmers challenge Ardern to visit them on water tax

A group of Central Otago farmers are challenging Jacinda Ardern to visit their farms to discuss Labour's water tax plans.
The group of women, known as Water Maniototo, say they cannot afford a royalty on irrigated water, planned at one to two cents per thousand litres of water, and it could drive some off their land.

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Crucial good news stories ignored by 'change' voters

The number of teenage mothers granted a benefit has plummeted:

source

The percentage of children dependent on a benefit is falling and is lower than it has been for decades:

source

Not all are awestruck

Jacinda Mania hasn't struck everywhere:

Not a skerrick of interest in the royal party it would appear. Working too hard to notice.

Photo source

Election 2017

Muriel Newman accuses the Labour leader of being neither open nor transparent which Ardern claims "at every soundbite".

A democracy deserves politicians who are transparent and honest. Labour’s new leader is showing she is neither.
The reality is that voters deserve to know exactly how much proposed new taxes are going to cost them, before an election. That’s what openness and transparency is all about – revealing the truth to voters, no matter how unpopular it might be.

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While Rodney Hide questions Winston's moral entitlement to a pension and also reminds us:

As an aside, Peters is on his third pension entitlement.
Through a quirk of parliamentary history he has been entitled to two extremely generous parliamentary pensions.
His entitlements are gold-plated and make national Super look extremely mean.

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Saturday morning read

If you have a few spare minutes this morning  Jacob Hornberger is well worth reading:

The leftist shibboleth that undergirds America as a welfare state is that Americans, if left to their own choices, would never voluntarily help out others to a sufficient degree. Given such, it is necessary, liberals say, for the state to enter the picture and force Americans to do their moral duty.

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