An opinion piece by Dr Muriel Newman MP , June 2001

A recent Listener editorial about the killing of baby Hinewaoriki Karaitiana-Matiaha - Lillybing - raised concerns about “a degraded, debased, and chaotic New Zealand , the very opposite of a great place to bring up kids”. The Listener visited the perpetrators and their family, and came away asking “when and why did New Zealand allow an underclass to become entrenched and, more importantly, what are we going to do about it?”

Until now, there has been a widespread reluctance to recognise the existence of an underclass. Yet children like Lillybing and James Whakaruru, growing up in such families, are at grave risk. The consequences for society as a whole are extremely serious, not only in terms of the lost potential of these children and their families, but through the harm they will inflict not only on themselves, but on others through crime, violence and other destructive behaviours.

The trouble is that tackling the underlying causes of serious social dysfunction is neither easy nor politically correct. As a result, advocates and politicians alike call for more money to treat the symptoms: more child abuse teams, more truancy officers, more social workers in schools, more youth justice facilities. Meanwhile the complex causes at the heart of the problem stay in the too-hard basket.

I would like to contribute to this debate, in the hope that we can raise public awareness of a critical social problem that is damaging children on a daily basis. If we are to prevent more innocent children like Lillybing being the victim of terrible, violent tragedies, it is imperative that a widespread momentum for change develops.

The underclass had its beginnings in legislative changes made to New Zealand ’s social security system in the seventies. Prior to that time, our welfare system had remained largely unchanged since its introduction by Rt Hon Michael Joseph Savage in 1938. Designed to be a hand-up to work, state welfare supplemented community-based charitable efforts to assist those in need. The system served us well, right up until the late sixties. In fact, for thirty years there were less than 15,000 people receiving state welfare, with fewer than a thousand unemployed.

During the sixties, however, there were growing concerns that the benefit system had lost relativity with the booming economy. In 1969 the Holyoake Government established a Royal Commission under the chairmanship of Sir Thaddeus McCarthy to review the social security system. That move significantly changed the future of New Zealand .

The Commission published its report, Social Security in New Zealand, in March 1972, with many of the recommendations being adopted by the 1973 Kirk Labour Government. Three recommendations in particular laid the foundation for the eventual emergence of an underclass.

The first of those recommendations changed benefit eligibility from being needs-based for those ‘of good moral character and sober habits’, to a universal entitlement. That destroyed a well-established social contract that ensured only those who were good citizens and met community standards were eligible for a state benefit. For the first time ever, the welfare system began to reward destructive behaviours such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and idleness.

Secondly, the Commission recommended that the level of benefits be raised, to be similar to a working wage. They wanted to ensure that someone on a benefit could “enjoy a standard of living close enough to the general community standard for him to feel a sense of participating in the community and belonging to it”. With the closing of the income gap between welfare and work, the urgent incentive for a beneficiary to take a job to make themselves and their family appreciably better off all but disappeared. This set the scene for the establishment of long-term, intergenerational benefit dependency.

Thirdly, the Domestic Purposes Benefit - a statutory benefit for sole mothers with dependent children - was established to enable an estimated 20,000 women trapped in violent relationships to escape with their children. The creation of the DPB was a landmark change to the benefit system. It was the first benefit to be made available for reasons of personal choice, such as no longer wanting to remain married, rather than for reasons outside of a person’s control such as the death of a spouse, the loss of a job, injury or accident.

Almost thirty years on, as a result of those three major changes, it is now estimated that one in four New Zealand children live in a ‘benefit led’ household. There are over two hundred and thirty thousand working aged New Zealanders receiving benefit assistance, and over one hundred and ten thousand families getting the DPB.

It is in a large part, from the growing numbers of welfare families and communities entrenched in second and third generation benefit dependency, that the ‘underclass’ has sprung. Some of these fragmented families, on welfare since the Seventies, have been conditioned to expect the government to provide for them no matter what sort of hedonistic and destructive behaviours they exhibit. They no longer hold traditional values of work, study and self-improvement, nor do they ask what they can do to help themselves and their families, asking only what the government can do for them.

Worse, lacking the inner resources to leave the welfare system behind, these parents all-too-often pass to their children a defeating set of values and attitudes. Inflicted with impoverished intellectual and emotional development, their children are imprisoned in failure as well. As a result, the systemic social problems of child abuse, alcohol and drug addictions, teenage pregnancy, youth suicide, educational failure, violence and crime, envelop the children, damaging them on a daily basis.

The Listener asks why the underclass was ‘allowed’ to develop? I believe a subsidiary question that should be answered is why successive governments have allowed benefit numbers to grow in what appears to be an uncontrolled way, without due regard for the consequences.

In particular, it is difficult to understand why it has been acceptable to give welfare unconditionally, to fit and able young men and women, or to those who move to areas where there are no jobs. This is especially relevant when we recognise that children growing up in families where no-one works for a living are significantly disadvantaged.

Further, major concerns about the DPB spring to mind: why, when DPB numbers escalated past the expected 20,000 to 40,000, 60,000 and more, was eligibility not reviewed? Why, when it was recognised that most teenagers who went on the DPB stayed there, weren’t the long-term implications for those young women and their children examined? When policy makers realised that New Zealand was becoming a world leader in sole-parent families and fatherlessness, why wasn’t it publicly recognised that the incentives underlying the DPB were encouraging family breakdown and the alienation of fathers?

Even if those questions were asked, it is not difficult to understand why changes were not made. Politically, it is not easy to reduce or remove a benefit entitlement once it has been given, particularly if women and children largely use that entitlement. Unless there is a widely-held view that a benefit is causing damage, any government that imposes benefit restrictions exposes itself to public criticism. In other words, it is a lack of political courage that has allowed the benefit system to escalate out of control, enabling a flourishing underclass to develop.

Those countries which have invested in high quality social policy research to quantify evidence of failure have found it easier to address the endemic problems caused by their welfare system. Some have looked to time-limits for welfare to prevent intergenerational dependency. Others, recognising that DPB-type benefits perpetuate the underclass, have taken away a sole parent’s right to ongoing financial support, by requiring them to move into the workforce, with teenage mothers who want to keep their babies obliged to live in hostels where education and parenting programmes are mandatory.

Welfare has been described as the social policy equivalent of hard drugs, shielding recipients from the demands and obligations of the ordinary world: available, ease-inducing, will-dissolving, insinuatingly easy to get hooked on, capable of taking over one’s entire life and blighting it. Welfare gone wrong is the most destructive social force. Yet welfare done in a sensible fashion can empower, support and liberate, as the first thirty years of New Zealand ’s welfare state showed.

When we read of the tragic life and death of children like Lillybing, the dreadful reality of an expanding underclass can appear to be overwhelming. It is important, however, to remind ourselves that just as legislative change put in place foundations that enabled the development of an underclass, so too, legislative change can prevent it being perpetuated.

We need to return welfare to its rightful role of providing on-going support to those who are genuinely unable to help themselves, while requiring those who are able-bodied but need temporary taxpayer help to take responsibility for getting a job and becoming independent of the state. Further, Government needs to take a leadership role and send a strong message that work is valued, contribution is vital, and that the responsibility for our future rests with each and every one of us.

ENDS

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