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4
May 2008
Action
Group, Gangs & Welfare
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Last week the Child Poverty Action Group called for an
increase in welfare payments to beneficiaries with children.
They claimed that increasing benefits would end child
poverty in New Zealand. They want to see New Zealand adopt an
official poverty level of 60 percent of the median household
disposable income after housing costs and then set net
beneficiary incomes to this level (See
Report >>>).
With the latest median household income from Statistics
NZ assessed at $55,976 and the average rent $315 per week,
this would equate to a net (after-tax) income of $26,254.
Viewed as a wage, what the Child Poverty Action Group is
calling for is for beneficiaries to receive the equivalent of
$12.62 an hour in net income. In comparison the minimum wage
of $12 an hour provides a low income worker with an after-tax
income of $20,092 or $9.66 an hour. That means that they want
to see beneficiaries receiving more in welfare benefits than
low income workers earn in wages.
The Child Poverty Action Group also claims that
financial top-ups for working families with children in the
form of tax credits are discriminatory and they have taken a
case to the Human Rights Tribunal. The basis of their claim is
that “the In-Work Tax Credit breaches New Zealand’s human
rights legislation by discriminating against children on the
basis of the employment status of their parents”. In other
words they want a ruling to prevent the government from giving
welfare top-ups to working families that they don’t give to
beneficiary families. The case will be heard in June.
In their report, the Group rejects the fact that work
is the only sustainable way of lifting able-bodied
beneficiaries and their children out of poverty. Instead they
claim that “generous welfare regimes need not result in a
poverty trap and may be the most effective at reducing child
poverty”.
By calling for New Zealand to adopt the generous
poverty level of 60 percent of the median household disposable
income after housing costs, they
would ensure that no matter how prosperous the country
becomes, “poverty” (by their definition) would never be
eliminated.
Thankfully, in this country we don’t have the sort of
gut-wrenching poverty that sees starving children die on a
daily basis. Instead the greatest problem that New Zealand
children face is not poverty but entrenched welfare dependency
caused by too many sole parents being on welfare for too long.
The OECD has identified sole parent welfare dependency
as a prime cause of child poverty, stating that the risk of
children growing up in poverty is three times higher in
jobless single-parent families, than in working families. They
found that the number of sole parents in New Zealand who were
jobless was high by international standards. They attributed
this to the financial incentives for beneficiaries to get a
job being far too weak. This means that New Zealand spends
more than most OECD countries on income support for
sole-parent families.
According to Treasury, “In New Zealand, sole parent
families make up over a quarter of all families with children:
together with the United States this is the highest proportion
of sole parent families in the OECD”.
They blame New Zealand's low employment of sole parents
on “a lack of work requirements, a relatively passive
benefit system, relatively high benefit rates compared to the
average wage, and high effective marginal tax rates”.
(See Treasury “Women’s
participation in the labour force” >>>)
Research from the Ministry of Social Development
confirms the danger to children of entrenched welfare. A
long-term study of 59,000 children found that children living
in benefit-led families were at increased risk of higher
mortality rates, lower cognitive development, and poorer
future employment prospects. The risks were the highest for
children in sole parent families on the Domestic Purposes
benefit. A second study, which looked at the effect on
children of the source of family income, found that children
in poor families reliant on welfare had lower living standards
and were at far greater risk of negative outcomes than those
in families where their parents worked. (To view the papers
click here
>>> and here
>>>)
In other words, for the able-bodied, long-term welfare
acts as a toxin, eroding hope, ambition and personal
responsibility. Those most at risk are fatherless children
being raised in sole parent families where the mother is on
the Domestic Purposes Benefit.
The Rt Hon Sir Michael Hardie Boyes expressed it this
way: “Fatherless families are more likely to give rise to
the risk of being abused; of being emotionally, even
physically scarred; of dropping out of school; of becoming
pregnant; of living on the streets; of being hooked on alcohol
or drugs; of being caught up in gangs, in crime; of being
unemployable; of having no ambition, no vision, no hope; at
risk of handing down hopelessness to the next generation; at
risk of suicide”.
The Chief Youth Court Judge Andrew Beecroft describes
the majority of the serious youth offenders that he deals with
in his court as boys who have had no contact with their
father, 80 percent do not go to school and have chronic drug
and alcohol addictions, most have psychological or psychiatric
issues, 50 percent – up to 90 percent in some courts – are
Maori, and all of them have been seriously abused as a child.
He explains, “14, 15, and 16 year-old boys seek out role
models like ‘heat seeking missiles’. It’s either the
leader of the Mongrel Mob or it’s a sports coach or it’s a
Dad. But an overwhelming majority of the boys who I see in the
Youth Court have lost all contact with their father”.
In a lead story on gangs in New Zealand last year, Time
Magazine described the link between welfare and the growing
problem of youth gangs: “A lot of kids have no direction, no
activities, nothing whatsoever. You've got some who have grown
up without a dad—just a mum—and the only role model
they've got is the older guys in the neighborhood who are gang
connected”. (Tribal
Trouble >>>)
A shocking documentary on gangs in New Zealand, part of
the award-winning British series by Ross Kemp on the world’s
most infamous gangs, interviewed notorious Mongrel Mob members
who blame the violent abuse they received while under the care
of the state as the reason they turned their back on society
and instead turned to gangs. “We
had no fear of the system. We despised the system for the
treatment we got as social welfare kids. The abuse and
treatment you got from people who were supposed to be your
helper. That was
bred into us as 13 year-old kids”, said one gang member
.
Despite TV One screening the documentary series, the
segment on New Zealand’s gangs was not shown here. According
to the Sunday Star Times the gangs only participated in the
filming on the condition that it did not screen here because
they “wanted to protect themselves from bad publicity”.
This revealing expose of our gang problem may be viewed
online. Click
here >>>
Professor David Fergusson of the Christchurch Medical
School, who has been running a longitudinal child development
study for thirty years, has estimated that troubled children
growing up in chaotic single parent families on welfare will
have a risk of disturbance that is 100 times greater than
those who have uneventful childhoods. He estimates that while
severely dysfunctional families constitute no more than five
to 10 percent of the population, they will be responsible for
70-80 percent of serious criminal offending.
This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator is Dr Karen
Hartshorn, is a Director of another New Zealand longitudinal
study which has been run out of Otago University since the
seventies. In her article “Investing in Children” Dr
Hartshorn explains, “For approximately 10 percent of males,
the pathway to antisocial behaviour begins very early in life
and continues right through to adulthood. These are the kids
who bullied in the sandpit and drove primary teachers to
distraction, then as they grew up graduated to stealing and
violence. They are more likely to experience single parenting,
a young mother, or a mother who had poor mental health.
They may have experienced harsh discipline as kids,
moved frequently between caregivers, or been exposed to family
conflict”.
Dr Hartshorn describes that there are cost-effective
ways of turning negative outcomes into positive ones: “This
means early intervention, and even before that, prevention.
Preventing children from starting down the negative
pathways means better outcomes in adulthood, and that in turn
means less demand on health, justice and social services.
What we’re really talking about is the fence-at-the-top-of-the-cliff rather than the ambulance-at-the-bottom
approach”. To read the article click
here >>>
New Zealand has in place a social welfare system that is
failing the very children it was designed to protect by
breeding a resentment that underlies the antisocial and
criminal behaviour that preys upon the innocent and the young.
More money is not the answer to giving these children a better
life. The answer lies in making people independent of the
state not entrenching them in dependency as proposed by the
Child Poverty Action Group.
The
poll this week asks whether you believe that increasing welfare
benefits will reduce child poverty in New Zealand. Go
to Poll >>>
If you
would like to comment on this issue please click
>>>
Readers
interested in this issue may like to read other NZCPR articles
about Crime and Justice – click
here >>>
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