The re-abuse of children in state care

One of the longstanding debates regarding the removal of children who have been abused or neglected is whether Maori children should be placed with whanau/ returned to their families versus removal elsewhere. So new data about the re-abuse of children who are already officially in state care is interesting from that perspective alone.

In the quarter to September 2018 there were 200 findings of physical, emotional, sexual abuse and neglect concerning 130 individuals. Fifty nine percent of children in state care are Maori but accounted for 71% of the abuse findings.

A majority of the re-abuse occurred in a family placement (family member) or return to family care (usually parent). Most (60%) of the re-abuse was physical.

Most of the physical abuse occurred in a family or return/remain home placement. Almost all of the neglect occurred in these two categories, and most of the emotional abuse. Only sexual abuse (19 findings) had a different pattern and over half of that had occurred when the child was away from care eg had absconded.

Based on these statistics the evidence for keeping children within the whanau is not great. BUT there are around 6,300 children in state care so 130 isn't a high proportion.

(At this Stuff link there are also stats to December 2018)

The day the music died

Michael Jackson's music has made me and millions of others happy over decades; indeed, over half a century. Whatever else is or isn't true, I know for a fact I will be poorer for not hearing his music.

But apart from my bias, some questions:

How is this new phenomenon of retrospective 'catalogue cleansing' to be administered?

With or without criminal conviction?

Based on what type of crime and determined by whom?

Forever? For how long?

Before or only after the offending occurred?

And what about associated composers and musicians who will suffer from royalty loss? Will they be compensated?

Should Jacinda tie the knot?

Interesting conclusion to a thoughtful column about the forthcoming "well-being budget" that essentially argues people should be making their own well-being choices with personalised saving accounts instead of the government deciding what is and isn't worth spending on:

Marriage, for example, has a large positive effect on wellbeing. So should our Prime Minister be cajoled into it? Citizens must be the ultimate decision-maker.

Nice one.

It has been proven repeatedly that marriage is generally good for people. But all we need there is some acknowledgement, not government interference to boost it.

The point made by the writer sees the PM hoisted by her own philosophical petard, nanny-statism.

My well-being is my business. Butt out Jacinda.

"Rape bias" as titled by NZ Herald

My 550 word opinion piece was too long for publication but a 100 word letter would be accommodated, I was told. The usual word limit for letters is 200.

What are they scared of?

What the Welfare Expert Advisory Group will recommend

Due to report back this week, here's a selection of what I believe the Welfare Expert Advisory Group will recommend:

1/ No more compulsion to name the father of a child dependent on a beneficiary. That's what scrapping the current penalty for not naming the father will mean. So expect the estimated cost of this move to be grossly under-estimated.

2/ Passing on child support to the beneficiary instead of keeping it to offset the cost of their benefit.

3/ Linking benefits to CPI and wage inflation (as per Super).

4/ Scrapping the 'additional child' conditions National imposed - ie work-testing the mother who adds a child to an existing benefit when that child turns one. They will justify this by showing the condition hasn't stopped people adding children anyway.

5/ Extending the In Work Tax Credit to other beneficiary parents. Perhaps it'll be named the Not In Work Tax Credit.

Then some possibilities:

5/ Scrapping the sanctions system.

6/ Lifting abatement rates to allow parents in particular to earn more without losing benefit component.

7/ Scrapping stand-downs which were introduced in the early 1990s

8/ Removing tax from benefits.

That last one is interesting. From memory Roger Douglas introduced taxation on benefits to solve a problem connected with people who work some of the year and are on benefit for the remainder. I can find reference to this as " a major package of tax reform that included the grossing up and taxation of welfare benefits" in October 1986.

(As an aside, in searching for information about the introduction of tax on benefits I came across this Tax Review report presented to Michael Cullen, then finance minister, in 2001. Searching capital gains resulted in the following, "We do not consider that New Zealand should adopt a general realisations-based capital gains tax. We do not believe that such a tax would make our tax system fairer and more efficient, nor do we believe that it would lower tax avoidance or raise substantial revenue that could be used to reduce rates. Instead, such a tax would increase the complexity and costs of our system.")

All of the above recommendations will cost a great deal and I wouldn't put it past the group to recommend lifting the super qualifying age as a means to afford more working-age welfare. I believe we should be lifting the age (as are the UK, Australia and the US) but not to pay for more welfare.

Remember that the welfare review is part of the coalition deal extracted by the Greens. The panel members are almost exclusively politically left. The public response, on the back of the controversial tax recommendations, will be most interesting.

On Jordan Peterson's 'rape' comments and the provocation of outrage

Regarding the views of Jordan Peterson, recently interviewed by NZ Herald journalist, Simon Wilson: "He's said several times it's wrong to believe the victim in rape cases.”

Without wishing to put words in Peterson’s mouth I expect he might have conveyed his intention better if the word ‘automatically’ had been inserted before ‘believe’.

And I suspect that Mr Peterson has talked about this issue on the back of feminist fixation with the issue of rape and consent. It is entirely pertinent to this country.

The message steadily gaining traction is, ‘No women laying a rape complaint must be disbelieved’. Prior to the 2014 election Labour wanted to shift the burden of proof of consent to the defendant.

In any event Labour did not win the 2014 election. But again in April 2017 Labour's sexual violence spokesperson, Mrs Poto Williams called for “…radical reform of the sexual justice system which would see rape accusers believed by police as a starting point.”

This would invert the principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty’.

Naturally Peterson would oppose this idea. We all should. The whole point of the justice system is to fathom out the facts and respond accordingly.

To further explain his position he also makes mention of the high number of false rape complaints that occur. There have been numerous examples in New Zealand. Reports from the mid-2000s suggested police put the level of false rape complaints as high as 60-80 percent. The Peter Ellis organization documents many. Not content with second-hand information, I wrote to the New Zealand Police in 2008 asking for statistics relating to false rape allegations. Their response:

“Police record statistics under the offence “False Statement/Declaration Etc”. However, these statistics do not distinguish/identify the nature of the false complaint e.g. ‘Rape’….official statistics for what you have requested do not exist.”

Hit a brick wall there. But in the late 1990s Jan Jordan, Victoria University, wrote a paper Beyond Belief? Police, Rape and Women’s Credibility.

Describing her own interviews with detectives experienced in sexual assault investigations,  Jordan writes estimates of false rape allegations  “…ranged between one detective who said 10 percent and another who estimated that 80 per cent of all rapes reported were false ‘in one way or another’.”

Jan Jordan was given unprecedented access to police files to make her own analysis of rape and sexual violation complaints. Police judgement on 164 cases from Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch were examined. Factors that featured in findings of false complaint included drug or alcohol impairment, a delay in reporting, previous consensual sex with accused, previous rape complaints and intellectual impairment. Jordan observed “…a dominant mind-set of suspicion underlying police responses to reports of sexual assault.”

She also sensibly points out: “The police do, in fact, have to tread a fine line between the victim and the accused as they attempt to preserve the balance of justice and guard against the possibilities of wrongful conviction. However, an over-zealous commitment to the rights of the accused may unwittingly tip the balance the other way.”

The converse is equally true. That is the direction we are heading in, or indeed, a destination we have arrived at - an “over-zealous commitment” to the rights of the accuser.

This, then, provides context for Jordan Peterson’s comments which taken in isolation provoke the outrage the journalist intended.

An 'old white women's' view

My last post was about sole parents and their declining dependence on benefits. It was a public alert countering the messaging from welfare advocates.  My husband asked me, Why doesn't Paula Bennett tackle this stuff, promote her record of welfare reform?

I don't know, I replied.

But today we are privy to what she does spend her time doing My new look and life 12 months after gastric bypass surgery

Of course she is not alone.

Maggie Barry and her bolt hole was a recent DomPost piece Inside Maggie Barry's sea front home

Links for celebrity MPs on the left - especially the PM - can be found but I can't be bothered.

I disapprove of MPs magaziny muppetry. Makes me very old school, I know.

But these individuals are handsomely remunerated by the taxpayer to perform a public service. This fluff stuff is overt vote-buying. It's another form of pork-barreling.

And think about it. It's most commonly female MPs exploiting their gender - and the interest it elicits from their 'sisters' - that pimp themselves in this way.

But they might dismiss me as an 'old white women' clinging to a paradigm of policy over personality. Of service over stardom. Of serious, sustained endeavour over shortcuts.

Welfare advocates start lining up

An article appeared in the DomPost on Thursday, Feb 14.

My response.

If leftists won't believe the Sally Army, then who?

If I had a dollar for every time some individual or organisation claimed inequality was growing, I'd be rich.

But the latest Salvation Army appraisal of the nation (an annual publication) has this to say:

Our prosperity is fairly shared
The past five years have seen increasing prosperity for most New Zealanders and a very modest narrowing of income inequalities. Those living on welfare benefits remain economically excluded, however.

The last statement is  not correct.

The report goes on to acknowledge this by mentioning extra supplementary assistance, the " one-off increase in benefit rates in 2016" and the winter energy payments.

It does not mention increases in the accommodation supplement, changes to benefit abatement rates allowing some beneficiaries to earn more, the significant Best Start payment for newborns and increases to WFF payments to children in beneficiary households.

They draw a depressing conclusion:

... the numbers of working-age adults receiving a benefit remains constant around 285,000, and this is despite the official unemployment rate in September 2018 sinking to a 10-year low of 3.7% of the workforce. The core of those receiving a benefit, around 150,000 adults, do so for health or disability reasons and so are paid the Supported Living payment or the Jobseeker/Health Condition payment. Their needs and this number of people are unlikely to change even in times of low unemployment. This permanence, alongside the economic exclusion suffered by those reliant
on welfare payments, suggest that a radical re-think is required for setting benefit levels. Such a re-think should look at avoiding the need for top-up and supplementary payments, and could consider indexing benefit levels to changes in wages and salaries as we already do for New Zealand Superannuation.

This final recommendation will undoubtedly be a feature of the Welfare Working Group's report due end of this month.

I don't have a problem with such an indexing, which is what we do for Superannuitants. But don't pretend that beneficiaries have been "economically excluded" without it to make the argument.

Flummoxed by latest political poll

I couldn't really give a fig if National tanks. They've been almost as socialist as Labour for a long, long time. They message otherwise then merely manage degrees of intervention and redistribution.

But I am surprised at the latest poll result that has Labour well up and National down. I'm not sensing any warming to Labour or Jacinda. Talkback, letters-to-editors, personal conversations don't find for Labour.

Topical issues have run against Labour. Don't need to spell those out.

Leadership? Personally I lost any interest in Bridges when his 'f...ing useless' descriptive remarks about a fellow MP came to light. Because he had painstakingly painted himself as Mr Nice Guy prior. BUT I am atypical.

Such a sizable swing simply makes no sense to me.

Another racist policy!

The government has announced it will ban smoking in cars that contain children:

Source

Seriously, what about the thousands of children who are affected by drugs and alcohol before they ever get to grace a baby car seat? This move is a superficial scratch on the surface of a much deeper problem.

Govt ignores own research

MSD monitors the effectiveness of its spending on employment assistance. The 2016/17 assessment has just been published.

"$149 million (72%) went on effective or promising employment assistance."

Not all of the spending is effective. Some results are "mixed" and some "negative".

But among the "effective and promising" interventions appears:

"Work obligation focused interventions: interventions that use work obligation requirements to ensure people are actively seeking employment."

In other words, sanctions. A failure to meet an obligation requires a consequence. Otherwise an obligation is meaningless.

In the year to December 2018, this government reduced the use of sanctions by 42.2 percent.

Brief comment on prison population

Based on the most recently available prison statistics the total muster is reducing. The PM says:

"We've seen about 1000 fewer people in our prisons, and so any work that we do on rehabilitation programmes ultimately does benefit Māori."

She must have more up-to-date stats than the public because the September 17 to September 18 reduction was only 418.

Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis says:

"...tribes from Ngāti Whātua right through to Ngāti Kuri are working with the department to reduce the prison population in the north and support people when they emerge from prison."

Yet in September 2018 there were 625 prisoners in Northland Region Corrections facility. A year earlier there were 607.

The government is fixated on the prison population.

But they are ignoring where it begins. Births into unstable, dare I say it, unmarried, dysfunctional family situations. I blogged yesterday about Maori accounting for 93% of the increase in births to the year ending September 2018. Around a 1,000 more were ex-nuptial and 300 fewer nuptial.

Marriages (with proven greater longevity than de facto relationships) might not last, but they at least say something about parental commitment at the time of birth. There is no doubt that these babies have significantly lower risks of eventually becoming prisoners.

Maori births account for 93% of year-on-year increase

Ever-interested in the behavioural response to 'incentives' I was looking at recent birth data. Labour promised and delivered greater financial benefits for newborns and families with dependent children.

It is probably too soon to assess any response to this, especially as the latest data available is to September 2018, not December.

In the year to September 2018 there were 59,331 live births. An increase of 837 on the previous year.

Not particularly significant.

However Maori live births rose to 17,118 from 16,341 - an increase of 777.

So of the total increase 93% were Maori.

17,118 is also the highest number of Maori live births since 2012.

The increase is almost totally accounted for by Maori mothers aged 25-34.

Who should qualify for Super?

(Left-click to enlarge)

Sean Plunket ran a show attacking Super receipt today; those taking it while continuing to work, and any taking it when they don't need it. He personalised his attack using morning host Peter Williams, newly qualified.

He justified his argument through concern about inter-generational inequity. The baby boomers are stealing from the following generations.

I rang to make the point that in the 1990s some were making the same accusations about the generation born in the 1920s through 40s. David Thomson wrote a book called the Selfish Generations to this effect. These inter-generational inequities are probably swings and roundabouts.

Regarding Super, my view is that the qualifying age needs to go up to 67-68 with those physically incapable going on a Supported Living Payment. Anyone who is receiving Super and working is effectively paying for it themselves through their own tax. It's like WFF for the over 65s.

Some means-testing sounds good but it opens a can of worms just not worth opening.

Hawke's Bay headed for a 'labour shortage declaration'

What else would you take from today's release?

This is no more than an advance move to ward off criticism about the number of beneficiaries in the East Coast region where there are currently over 7,600 claiming an Unemployment Benefit (aka Jobseeker Support)

From memory, this is the third region to do so.

Historically Maori and Pakeha men moved around in search of work. At a guess, that work paid reasonably well because employers weren't having to meet the high levels of taxation required to meet social security. Maori may have been paid less because of communal living perceptions - and that was wrong.

But was it a model worse than today's?

Wealth redistributed voluntarily and constructively?

Individuals with a sense of worth, camaraderie and autonomy?

It wasn't perfect.

But is the replacement?

Maori perspective on welfare offices and procedures

PUAO-TE-ATA-TU (day break)
THE REPORT OF THE MINISTERIAL ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON A
MAORI PERSPECTIVE FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL WELFARE 1988

 "People felt the Department’s offices were unwelcoming and impersonal, lacked privacy and adequate soundproofing. Counters were seen as creating barriers between “them” and “us” and children were not catered for in waiting rooms."

"It was suggested that training programmes should be designed to raise the level of awareness of Maori culture and should also incorporate training in personal skills and some knowledge of New Zealand history. A compelling need was for front-line staff to be fully aware of the range of assistance available and to have the authority to make decisions and give authoritative advice."

Yesterday MSD released their latest attempts to consult with Maori about their experiences with WINZ and the responses are strikingly similar:

"You said that our offices needed to be brightened up and have
spaces where you could meet with your case managers privately.
You didn’t like open plan set ups as other people could easily
overhear your business. You want access to toilets and tea and
coffee facilities so that when appointments are running late, you
can freshen up and have a drink. You also wanted play areas and
changing facilities for your children and access to free Wi-Fi at
service centres. You didn’t mind the presence of security guards
and understood why they were there. However you said that
kaumātua or Māori wardens could also fill those roles as they were
less threatening to Māori and would likely diffuse situations before
they even began. With some site closures it has been harder for you
to get to other service centres."

"You said that it was stupid that we don’t tell you about all the different supports that you are entitled to receive when you register with us – instead we wait for you to ask."

"You told us you wanted to hear Māori being spoken/greetings | See Māori imagery around | Choose to have a Māori case worker | Be offered training on Māori things."

I can find no on-line data for benefit ethnicity during the 1980s. Currently Maori account for 36.4 percent of all working age beneficiaries. In 2003 the percentage  was 30.4 and in 1998 25.2 percent.

In 20 years the figure has risen from a quarter to well over a third.

Make what you will of that.

The best of times and the worst of times...

In recent history, the NZ unemployment rate saw the best of times in the latest quarter - December 2018.  It saw the worst of times when the Great Recession of 2008/09 took hold.

(Click on image to enlarge)


From a welfare viewpoint - the % of working-age dependent on a benefit - this is what the two extremes look like:

There is a 2 percentage-point variation between the two polar points.

Is 10 percent of the working age population dependent on a benefit now as good as it gets?

Here is some context for you to digest.

There was a decades-long period post 1938 (when Social Security was created) when the norm was consistently around 2 percent of the working age population dependent on taxpayers.

Now we are expected to celebrate 10 percent.

Sanction reduction extraordinarily inconsistent across country

Nationally, since December 2017, the number of benefit sanctions has reduced by 42 percent. But the reduction is extraordinarily inconsistent across the regions.

For instance, the East Coast region has seen a 70% reduction in sanction application whereas Northland beneficiaries have experienced only a 17% reduction.

These two regions represent the highest and lowest reductions. Yet they are reasonably similar in profile. Which leads to the conclusion that there is a degree of arbitrariness occurring in the decision-making.

There is also speculation that the increased sanctions are leading to an increase in the number of people receiving a Jobseeker benefit.

Is any correlation showing by comparing the regions? No.

Canterbury had the highest growth in Jobseeker numbers but one of the lower reductions in sanctions. Northland and EastCoast have virtually the same increase in JS benefits but the highest and lowest sanction reduction.

This doesn't conclusively disprove that fewer sanctions lead to more Jobseeker dependence simply that other weightier factors are in play.

I come back to the glaring inconsistency between Northland and East Coast. Why has the East Coast taken a much softer line than Northland? 

Whatever your feelings are about welfare, beneficiaries should be entitled to a consistent application of rules.

Unplanned pregnancies

NewstalkZB reports that NZ has a "shocking" rate of unplanned pregnancies, 6th in the OECD apparently. There is almost certainly a link between this and our high rates of child poverty, neglect and abuse.The major reason given for this state of affairs is that long-acting reversible contraceptives are far more effective than other forms of contraception but not financially accessible for many.

Coincidentally yesterday I was studying the dramatically increased rate of hardship assistance granted in the past couple of years which the left say indicates greater need. It may just indicate that under the changed culture at WINZ - far fewer sanctions for instance - that fewer requests for hardship assistance are declined.

But I noted one interesting stat.

Of 344,771 grants in the September 2018 quarter only 41 were for long acting reversible contraceptives. (0 in December but I'm picking that is a delay in reporting.)

If the latter number increased substantially the former should fall.