The state of the public service

The Commissioner for Children's term must be up.

Invitations for applications have appeared.

The requirements are indicative of how the public service now operates:

We are looking for someone who is an expert in child-related matters. The Children’s Commissioner is a champion for all tamariki and rangatahi in New Zealand.

There will be a specific focus on knowledge of te ao Māori, and Māori thought leadership and strategy.

The second sentence contradicts the first. But it'd be too much to expect logic from a Ministry these days.

Maori 'thought' - or Maori worldview - is paramount across the public sector. The Reserve Bank is now imbued with Maori spirituality; the Police are preoccuppied with ridding themselves of 'unconscious bias' and the Ministry of Education aims to indoctrinate guilt and expunge white privilege from students.

The role of the Children's Commissioner is supposed to be independent - the department is an independent crown entity - but that appears to be changing:

The Government is currently strengthening oversight of the Oranga Tamariki system. As part of this, a decision has been made to transfer the functions associated with the independent monitoring of the Oranga Tamariki system to a departmental agency hosted by the Education Review Office.

It is also proposed that the Children’s Commissioner will cease to be a corporation sole and that governance responsibilities will rest with Commissioner and a board of three to six members.

Read what you will into that.

Gutless National

National MP Paul Goldsmith says that on balance colonisation has been good for Maori. 

But his colleagues and leader equivocate.

Chris Luxon says the opposite. "Colonisation was not good for Māori as we saw with breaches of the Treaty and we saw with Land Wars as well."

But wait.

Goldsmith has found at least one ally in the house in ACT Party leader David Seymour.

"I think there was always going to be an impact when New Zealand reconnected with the world," Seymour said. "That's not saying that it's justified, it's about balancing everything that's happened.

"The question is on balance, has colonisation been a good thing, and the answer is yes, because New Zealand is one of the most successful societies in human history to grow up in today," he said.

When asked how Māori dying seven years younger than non-Māori was good for them, he said it did need to be improved, but framing everything in light of colonisation was not going to solve it.

On that last point  colonisation is apparently an ongoing process. If it is so bad for Maori how come their life expectancy has risen dramatically and faster than non-Maori?

What has come over National?

Put aside the pressure to be woke and falsely empathetic (and craven), the facts are against them.

Yes Maori feature overly among the worst social statistics but that's at the extremes of the population.

On balance, life has improved for Maori in the same way as it has improved for all New Zealanders.

For a National Party MP to be effectively ostracised for saying as much is just un-bloody-believable.

Dyson deserves diddly squat

Ruth Dyson recieves a gong for her services to disabled people.

Good Lord.

The minister who forced the minimum wage on sheltered workshops in 2005.

She was warned about the effect but bullocked on. 

Here's a report from my local paper (when it was still worth reading):

Packworx Limited, a Hutt company that provided paid employment to 23 people with intellectual disabilities, closed its doors on Monday last week.

Packworx has been run as a limited liability company since September 2005, and prior to this was part of the Hutt Valley Disabled Resources Trust, which operated as a sheltered workshop for about 20 years.

The split off into commercial and social support entitIes was forced by the then Labour Government's repeal of the Disabled Persons Employment Promotion Act (1960). It required workshop operations to pay workers the minimum wage and holiday entitlements for reasons of fairness, but also so that they did not undercut other commercial operations pursuing packaging and other small, labour-intensive contracts on price.

Parents and others warned at the time that while the philosophy behind repeal of the Act might be all very fine, the requirement to pay minimum wages to people with intellectual disabilities would place even more of a burden on an operation already on a revenue/cost knife edge.

Packworx chairperson of directors Carolyn Crutch said last week that the downturn in the economy, plus "non-realisation of contracts that were anticipated" meant it was no longer financially prudent for the company to continue to trade.

Fellow director Marlene Wilkinson said it was a step taken with "a great deal of reluctance".

There was "huge emotional attachment" bound up in running of the business and keeping the 23 employees, plus long-time manager Jan Geursen and two other supervisors, in work. But as Packworx was being run as a commercial entity "we have to abide by the Companies Act and its rules". Revenue wasn't going to cover overheads.

MAJOR BLOW

David Vance and Barry Jordan of Deloitte have been appointed liquidators.

Mrs Crutch said it was a "major blow" that this happened now, right at a time when the former staff will be up against many others laid off work in a depressed job market.

The Hutt News reported in 2006, that the then Packworx staff of 60 tackled a variety of packing, mailing and shrink wrapping contracts - everything from cutlery for Air NZ to lining bulk laundry powder cartons. The mainstay of the work was the making of 60,000 bird seed balls a month for Masterpet, as well as packing millet sticks and for the dog food market, pigs' ears. Right up until last week, Packworx still had work from Masterpet. "We needed more contracts like that," Mrs Wilkinson said.

The Hutt Valley Disabled Resources Trust, a separate entity, is not affected. However, it's likely that a good number of the former Packworx employees will be eligible to come onto the trust's arts, sports, gardening, life skills and social programmes. Mrs Wilkinson said "down the track", training opportunities for some of the former workers could be explored.

Trust general manager Susan Gray said WINZ has already met with the Packworx staff to discuss benefit and future training options. The HVDRT will be making available its premises in Woburn Rd so that those staff can continue to meet with WINZ, Housing NZ and representatives of other help agencies.

At the time that Labour announced it was repealing legislation covering sheltered workshops, around 3,000 people around New Zealand were employed in the sector. Mrs Gray said some workshops closed immediately and a good number of others shut up shop when the legislation came into full effect on 1 December last year.

There are some entities that continue to run semi-commercial operations employing people with intellectual disabilities, including in Invercargill and the Waikato. 

However, most are "not entirely commercial" like Packworx, with many of the survivors benefiting from contracts dealing with recycling from local authorities.

The Hutt News could not contact Mr Geursen, whose personal drive is credited with much of the success of the sheltered workshop/Packworx over many years.  We understand he is currently overseas.

 

HUTT NEWS, Simon Edwards.

 

Benefit income versus income from work

 Another graph from Perry's latest report:

This is a depiction of core benefits compared to before tax minimum wage and after tax average wage. Note Accommodation Supplement, Winter Energy Payment and Best Start are not included.

The AS pays a maximum rate of $305 for a sole parent with two children. If one child was receiving Best Start that's another $60 and the Winter Energy Payment is $32.

If someone on the blue line (DPB/SPS +2ch) was receiving these extra payments it would push the line up to almost the 'after tax average wage' line.

I accept that rents are very high and the sole parent is still struggling.

But I come back to the reality that being a sole parent is a viable option if that's the environment in which you were raised. And it's only going to become more viable.

From April 1, 2021 beneficiaries can earn up to $160 before their benefit is reduced. This is a large rise from the previous $90 on Jobseeker and $115 on Sole Parent Support. 

Add that to the blue line and it'll push it above the 'after tax average wage' line.

It is an unavoidable conclusion that dependency on the state is set to grow.

Child hardship: controlling for education almost removes ethnic differences

Bryan Perry writes reports about incomes for MSD and has done so for years. I admire and respect his work.

Child Poverty in New Zealand, released today, contains the following child material-wellbeing graphs. Wellbeing is measured not by household income but by asking parents about what they can or can't afford in respect of lifestyle eg heat house or run a car and specifically for their children eg two pairs of shoes or a waterproof coat.

"The six groupings range from material hardship (red) through to very well off (dark green on the right). 

The next breaks the groupings into households where the highest educational qualification is a tertiary degree:

Perry comments re the second graph:

"There is a greater similarity for the material wellbeing profiles for these children across the ethnic groupings than there is when all children are looked at,though some differences are still evident."

The profile for Maori children almost inverts if the household features a parent or caregiver with a tertiary degree, and looks a lot more like NZ European or Asian.

Stuart Nash on unemployability

The following exchange took place between Mike Hosking and Stuart Nash on NewstalkZB (8:15) this morning:

MH: TV One last night, so you pay people $5,000 to move to a job ... claim is 1/ they quit when they arrive and scarper 2/ you guys at the Ministry no longer follow up. Why?

SN: Yeah, I heard that Mike and I'm not aware of that. I will follow that up because if it is happening it's completely against the spirit of the policy and programme. I'll see if it is happening and if MSD aren't following up or people are abusing the system in that way then that's wrong.

MH: And the Ministry has also given up on social checks. So the social responsibility that was brought in  by National in 2013 - you enrol your kid wuth a doctor, you get your kid into school, and that's part of being on welfare - you've given up chasing that as well because you claim it's too administratively difficult. How is that possible?

SN: I'm not aware of that Mike. But one thing we are doing and one thing we do do is ensure that people are work ready. So if you are on a Jobseeker benefit we work really hard to make sure you can get into a job and we've got one of the lowest unemployment numbers in the OECD...

MH/ Why do we have 115,000 people on unemployment longer than 12 months if there are so many jobs and they are all work ready?

SN/ What economists will tell you - and this is under any government - well, it varies between 3 and 4 percent of the workforce is unemployable. This is where the marginal cost of getting that person into work is just huge. What we do do is work incredibly hard with those people who want to get into work which is to be honest the vast majority of New Zealanders. There's always been, Mike, that rump at the bottom who don't want to work or it's very impossible to get them to work or there is some reason why they can't work.

 This is the first time I have heard a government MP talk about accepting unemployability. 'Shrug - it's just a fact of life.'

Neither am I aware of economists agreeing on some inherent level of unemployability occurrence. Economists do talk about a minimum unemployment rate of around 3-4 percent which will always exist as people move between jobs and are not working.

People couldn't become unemployable if there wasn't an alternative to working for money. The benefit system creates a vicious cycle. Paying indefinite benefits makes some people unemployable therefore requiring more benefits.

Just last week Nash said gangs aren't a problem ("You have nothing to fear")  and now he says unemployability should be tolerated. 

What a no-hoper - literally.

Seymour twice as popular as Prebble

David Farrar has gone back through poll archives to see if any other ACT leader ever surpassed David Seymour's current rating at 6% as preferred Prime Minister. Here's what he found:

* Richard Prebble (96-04): 3%

* Rodney Hide  (04-11): 1%

* Don Brash (11): 0.8%

* John Banks (12-14): 0.2%

You have to hand it to Seymour after so many years as a solitary MP. He never wavered. Exactly the kind of attitude and perserverance NZ needs. 

1930-40s housing problem and political propaganda

 A poster at the BFD put up this comment and 1930s pictorial:

"I wonder if in election 2023 we will see back to the future advertising?"

Come 1943 and National was counteracting with this:

I wonder if in another 70 to 80 years - a lifetime - NZ will still be yo-yoing between the two?

'Cousins' the movie

I went to see the movie version of Patricia Grace's story 'Cousins' today.

Witi Ihimaera's 'Mahana' was a hit with me - 'White Lies' to a lesser degree -  so I thought I'd give this one a go.

Three female cousins of a similar age (born post WW11) form the core of the story.

One is estranged from an early age due to her mixed parentage. She is in the legal guardianship of a nasty, drunken, Pakeha matriarch who doesn't want the child to have anything to do with her Maori side. That plays out through the film.

It moves about chronologically alot. Between childhood; young adulthood and the present.

The child who is 'stolen' (words used in the film) suffers mentally and eventually becomes a homeless lady living on the streets of Wellington.

The cousin who balks against living in the homeland and being one half of an arranged marriage to cement tribal ties but more importantly land ownership, flees to Wellington and becomes a lawyer.

The remaining cousin fills her place in taking on the arranged marriage.

She ends up being the winner.

The lawyer will only come back to the heartland if she can find the stolen cousin.

The lawyer develops terminal cancer and coincidentally finds her long lost cousin who has just stepped out in front of a Wellington bus causing it to screech to a halt.

They return to their turangawaewae together  - one dead.

I was very moved. I shed a few tears. 

But I am not sure if my tears were for the death of the lawyer cousin, the trauma of the dislocated cousin or because I felt like the movie was holding me responsible.

Oranga Tamariki wards don't fare so badly afterall

Children are stolen; children are abused in state care; Oranga Tamariki is a racist institution, and so on.

They aren't my claims but they abound from various sources. You'll be familiar with them.

Yet when children and young people in state care are surveyed about how they are feeling currently their responses are fairly positive. Probably - dare I say it - on a par with most young people their age.

You can enlarge the graph here. P30. Research released today.

The first statement: 'Have people in my life who love me no matter what'

77% say 'Yes definitely' 20%, say 'Yes I think so'.

The lowest agreeable score was, 'Know my ancestry (whakapapa)' where just 25% said 'Yes definitely ' and 28% said 'Yes I think so'.

For me the first aspect of a young person's life is more important. The importance of feeling unconditionally loved is hard to overstate.

Not all young people in the care of the state have participated so that's a shortcoming. 84% participation rate is nevertheless good.

The survey results seem strangely out of sync with the failure of  OT opponents put about.

"You have nothing to fear"

 Here's Stuart Nash, MP for Napier:

Nash acknowledged that Hawke's Bay had a gang problem, but said arresting people was not the solution to the problem.

In terms of public safety, Nash said any form of gang violence “tends to be perpetrated against other gangs”.

“In terms of feeling unsafe, unless you’re a gang member, you have no reason to feel unsafe. The public are not everyday target. I understand gangs can be intimidating, but unless you’re a rival member or tied up in the drug trade, you have nothing to fear.”

Tell that to the toddler shot dead by a gang in Wanganui; tell that to a young nurse who was relieved of $2,000 he'd just withdrawn from an ATM by gang members and offered no assistance by the police; tell that to rape victims who serve as unwitting initiation objects.

What a terrible stance for an MP to take.

Cindy Kiro

Cindy Kiro's appointment to the role of Governor General is political. Judging by comments on Kiwiblog people have forgotten her time as Children's Commissioner. She advocated that every child should be interviewed or assessed before age two and again at ages five, 13, and 17 - a heavy-handed unnecessary state intervention to avoid stigmatising particular groups. 

She helped Sue Bradford push through the anti-smacking legislation saying, "...we know more about parenting and child health and development now than we did in our parents’, grandparents’ and great grandparents’ times."

Warding off an interviewer asking about Maori child abuse she said, "I think people need to get a little careful when they start this business," and propagated false child death statistics in defence. She never owned or corrected them after their inaccuracy was identified. 

She overspent her Ministry's budget and was criticised for spending too much time overseas and staff turnover. 

Kiro is not a smart appointment.

Labour happy for babies to be born onto benefits

When Paula Bennett was Minister for Social Development she wanted to stop people adding children to an existing benefit to avoid work. So the subsequent child rule was created. If a beneficiary adds a child to a benefit, when that child turns one, the parent will still have the same work-obligations based on age of the previous child - part-time between ages 3 and 14; full-time thereafter - hardly onerous.

Now Sepuloni wants the rule removed. This is an extract from support material that accompanies the bill to achieve this:

I take issue with the adjective "small" to describe the number of people who have added a child to a benefit and are currently affected by Bennett's rule. Almost 9,000 in total.

2,533 have added a child to their benefit when the next oldest was 14 or older (which is why they are currently on the Jobseeker benefit).

Let's call it careless procreation at best. It is not good for the babies to be born onto benefits. To say otherwise defies commonsense.

But note that the government analyst who wrote the support material says "lighter" work obligations are beneficial and:

Apparently lighter work obligations will allow mothers to take up education for "long-term careers".

These are females who don't know how to stop having kids when they are already in a bad situation!

A shining example of the naive and foolish ideology of the left.

Another one bites the dust

The only op-ed writer left worth reading at Stuff, Martin van Beynen signed off today:

As an opinion writer, it's easier to identify what you oppose rather than what you support. I don't like being told I'm to blame. I don't like zealots and young know-nothings telling me what to do. I don't like wokeness or virtue signalling or cancelling people for some trivial perceived infringement of current sensibilities. I don't like being told I'm privileged or that I had it too good because of being pale and male. I don't like tailoring my views to suit a new zeitgeist. I don't like the implication that everything done to improve people’s lives prior to the latest orthodoxy has been a disastrous failure and that some new system will bring in a utopia.

So there's another voice looking for a new home.

They are piling up.

Chris Trotter foolishly invokes Micky Savage

I think Chris Trotter was in his cups writing about the Budget yesterday, including this line: "To hear Robertson invoke the memory of Ruth Richardson’s “Mother of All Budgets” ... delivered 30 years ago as the final crushing blow against Mickey Savage’s welfare state..."

Is that a joke? The welfare state Savage designed was stringently policed. There was no benefit for any individual who caused their own incapacity to work. Criminals and drunks had no eligibility. Single women who became mothers had no eligibility. Even deserted married women struggled to access assistance. 

By 1991 Savage's welfare state had metamorphosised into a massive mess with sixteen percent of the working age population on a benefit. Until 1970 there was never more than two percent. Savage would have approved of Richardson's reforms (numerically exaggerated in the re-telling) intended to undo the intergenerational dependence and dysfunction that had developed.

Now the country is running headlong into free-for-all, no-questions-asked reliance on the state. As Trotter points out, Clark and Cullen resisted this. And they were right to do so. They consistently maintained work was the best way out of poverty (which includes child poverty).

The kind of values needed to raise children with their wellbeing absolutely utmost cannot be learned from a government. They cannot be replaced by unearned income.

Savage understood human hardship but he also understood human motivation.

MSD priorities

Recently we learned that MSD was moving its fraud investigators away from beneficiaries and onto businesses.

"...between 40 and 50 MSD staff who usually worked on benefit fraud would be working on subsidy investigations for another 12 to 18 months."

In other words, leave the non-productive alone and go after the productive - those keeping the economy afloat by working and paying taxes.

This seems par for the course now.

I note today in the Budget detail this advice from MSD:

Right now, people getting Jobseeker Support – Health and Disability don’t need to renew their medical certificates. This will continue to be deferred until the new process starts.

This applies to over 78,000 individuals.

The "new process" begins next year and entails a new medical certificate process for Jobseeker clients with a health condition, injury or a disability that affects their ability to work. It’ll be more flexible and based on their health practitioner’s advice.

It's almost certain that for some this will be a fairer process based on their genuine incapacity. But there's an equal argument that these rules need to be stringent to deter malingerers. (Most doctors will welcome the easing. They do not want to play the role of benefit gatekeepers.)

Let's quickly recap on other rules that have been eased since 2017.

Single mothers no longer have to name the father/s of their child/ren. The father pays no child support.

Single mothers who continue to add children to their benefit are no longer subject to a subsequent child policy which kept their original work obligations intact.

Annual jobseeker reapplications and stand-downs are still deferred.

And despite what Mike Hosking said on NewstalkZB this morning about sanctions increasing under Labour, he was only referring to sanctions for having an outstanding arrest warrant. I expect the Covid disruptions to courts has provoked that.

Overall sanctions are decreasing. The following are quarterly:

Timeless evidence the Budget ignores

 "... 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

As I have said repeatedly that  Jacinda Ardern's fixation with reducing child poverty will be realised only at the cost of more children growing up in benefit-dependent families. 

"...findings show that poor children reliant on government transfers, when compared with poor children reliant on market incomes, have lower living standards and a number of compounding shortfalls that can be expected to place them at greater risk of negative outcomes."

Source

No coherence in Labour's thinking or approach

 According to Bryce Edwards on RNZ: 

"...pressure to deliver to those most in need is now just too great for the government to ignore, and rumours are building that a benefit increase will be announced."

A benefit increase would be consistent with Labour's general approach to welfare.

But how does it tie in with the new immigration policy?

"...the country must move away from its reliance on a low-skilled migrant labour force."

The PM stressed on RNZ this morning, " Those on temporary work visas make up 5 percent of the labour force - the highest share in the OECD" with a definite implication that 'highest' was a bad thing.

But if benefits are made more attractive (along with already increasing ease of access) then New Zealanders are not going to fill the roles that migrants willingly do.

Here's an example:

Jade is on sole parent support, but she does not want to be on a benefit.

She wants to study, but she has decided to wait another couple of years, so she can spend more time with her nine-year-old daughter.

I initially received this as audio and thought I must have misheard, and she said 9 month-old daughter.

I was wrong. 

A benefit is not provided so a parent can spend more time with their 9 year-old who is presumeably at school for most of the day. Jade could support herself - or very nearly - doing any number of jobs that low-skilled migrants do.

Sorry but I have a problem with people with this sort of attitude.

And I am very grateful and inspired by people who come to New Zealand and uncomplainingly fill crucial roles. We need more of their work ethic and self-reliance here.

 

Why stats matter

You want to know what the average household income by ethnicity is. Seems straight forward. You take a survey of about 20,000 households, ask about how much income they receive (from various sources), assign an ethnicity and average it out for all households that fall into each ethnicity. Here is the result:

From the raw data:

European   50,562

Māori 40,760

Pacific peoples 38,204

Asian 44,198

MELAA 43,385

Other ethnic group 43,155

Total 47,775

Um. Don't these averages seem a little on the low side given so many households have two (or more) workers?

They are. That's because of the process called 'equivalisation'. The 'gross' incomes are equivalised according to the number of household occupants. The greater the number of people reliant on the income, the lower the equivalised income will be.

What would be more revealing is the unadjusted or 'gross' household incomes. Unfortunately these do not appear in the published tables. But I can tell you that the average total gross income is $107,196 which is a darn sight higher than the average $47,775 after equivalisation.

Remember the poverty stats are derived from equivalised income - not gross.

So a family with four children may be reported as poorer than the family with two children living next door even though their gross income is higher.

You may say, so what? 

Why they matter is because these stats drive taxation/redistribution policies. They influence how much is taken from Paul to give to Peter. Doesn't matter how hard Paul worked, what sacrifices he made, how careful he was not to have more children than he could personally afford to raise. If he is defined as 'rich' and Peter is 'poor' you know the outcome.

It's interesting that StatsNZ motto is now:

About Aotearoa, for Aotearoa

Data that improves lives today and for generations to come

Depends on whose lives really.

Men are lazy, delusional and selfish

 Men are not pulling their weight around the house. Apparently if they did the economy would be $1.5 billion better off.  Deloitte's who are making the claim says “You have to put a number on it to get people’s attention.” Surprisingly frank about how manipulative axe-grinders are.

Ex National MP Marilyn Waring wades in, “Men underestimate how much unpaid work their partners do, which means all the rest of their answers are highly questionable because they are working from a fiction, not facts.” 

Not just lazy then but delusional to boot.

"Men were also fiercely defensive of their leisure time". Selfish too.

That's backed up by men picking the best jobs. "Men also tended to favour work that involved fun things like power tools."

Of course all of this male failing can be corrected if the government steps in and makes some "good policy decisions."

Except... just a minute... along comes a bright young woman who doesn't think men are lazy, delusional and selfish. 

“It’s quite fluid for my generation. There’s no expectation to conform, which I quite like,” she said.

Stick that in your pipe Marilyn.