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1 April 06
Rich
Country - Poor Families
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In
a sense, New Zealand
is one of the richest countries on earth. We have a great
climate, beautiful countryside, and a more leisurely pace of
life. Our people are friendly, hard working and caring. We are
close to each other in a way that comes from being a small
country remote from the rest of the world.
On
top of that, we have a wealth of natural resources, we are
great innovators and entrepreneurs, and we have established
international recognition for our creativity and achievement
in a multitude of fields of endeavour.
So
why is it that so many New Zealanders have a deep-seated sense
of foreboding about the future? Sure, it could be the negative
growth (no economic growth recorded in the second half of last
year) or the rapidly falling dollar (the Minister of Finance
sent officials to Japan last year to talk the dollar down).
Maybe it’s the burgeoning balance of payments deficit
(foreign debt grows as the dollar falls), or the rising price
of petrol (adding in today’s 1c petrol tax increase, 91
octane is expected to rise to $1.62 a litre). But I suspect
that the issues that are driving that sense of gloom are much
more personal.
At
the heart of the problem appears to be a growing sense of
despair about the state of the New Zealand family. As a
country with a strong tradition of two-parent married
families, many New Zealanders feel that Labour’s
interference in family matters has been detrimental. In
particular, law changes introduced as part of their social
engineering agenda are manifesting themselves in negative
ways.
There
is a new reticence for young people to commit themselves to
marriage - why bother, when de-facto relationships have the
same legal privilege as marriage? Yet common sense tells us
that marriage signals a commitment for life, giving young
women, in particular, the promise of stability and security
they need in order to begin thinking about starting a family.
There
is also a new tendency for relationships to break up just
before the three-year joint property claim thresh-hold is
reached. Couples who are not quite sure whether things will
work out between them, are not prepared to take the risk of
staying together if it means signing over half of their
assets.
With
the Domestic Purposes Benefit already incentivising the
massive breakdown of the family, these more recent changes are
making the situation worse by giving rise to more unstable,
transient relationships. It is therefore little wonder we are
seeing an escalation in child abuse and domestic violence as
well as the fall-out from the breakdown of stable families -
marginalized fathers, alienated children, and excluded
grandparents.
Just
this week, New Zealand's top Family Court judge said that
violence in the home is blighting the country's image as a
good place to raise children.
Yet I do not hear the Judge – or any of the other
professionals who work in this field - calling for a change to
the policies that are driving this social collapse.
And,
with Labour’s new family welfare package coming into effect
today, resulting in 350,000 families receiving income support,
we urgently need to review the wisdom of massive government
interference in the family, before more lives are damaged or
lost.
A
new publication released by the British think tank Civitas
this week, examines the wisdom of state interference in the
family from an international perspective. In her book Family
Policy, Family Changes, Patricia Morgan compares the state
of the family
in Sweden, Italy and Britain, and concludes that families
thrive in countries where there is less government
interference.
In
Britain, where an anti-marriage agenda is being strongly
promoted by the public service, universities and government
funded social agencies, family problems are rife, with Britain
topping the league tables in several of the most worrying
indicators of breakdown, including divorce and teenage
pregnancy. In Sweden, where a comprehensive social engineering
programme has transferred many family responsibilities to the
state - to a degree unseen outside of the Soviet bloc - thereare even higher rates of out-of-wedlock births and
cohabitation than Britain.
Italy,
however, has effectively had no government intervention into
the family, and is still the home of the traditional family
unit. Divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births, including
teenage pregnancies, are extremely low. Cohabitation is so
rare as to be difficult to measure. Young people live with
their parents until they get married, and, for most women,
marriage will represent their first living-together
relationship.
While
government interference in the family is a cause of major
concern, there are many other matters that are driving that
feeling of despondency felt by many New Zealanders. In
particular, there is an overbearing sense that things could be
so much better, especially in those important areas that the
government is responsible for.
With
12,000 hospital beds and 12,000 hospital managers and
administrators is the growth in New Zealand’s hospital waiting lists
being caused by too much bureaucracy? Are we confident that
our welfare system is working properly when we all know fit
and healthy young men and women who are languishing on
benefits? Would primary and secondary school education improve if
vouchers were introduced in order to give parents the same
choice that they currently have at pre-school and tertiary
level?
And
why don’t we take a common sense approach to the small
business sector – the engine room of our economy – by
freeing them up from the mountains of unnecessary cost and red
tape that inhibits their growth and productivity? Why not
lower taxes across the board not only to boost the economy and
create a competitive advantage for Kiwi businesses, but also
to establish New Zealand as an attractive destination for
international business?
There
is so much that can be done to solve those problems that are
holding us back - as a nation that responds
quickly to positive incentives, with good leadership and
sensible ideas, we could really fly!
The
NZCPD guest comment this week comes from Sir Roger Douglas who
outlined to the ACT Party conference last week, the importance
of creating a vision for a better
New Zealand
(View >>>).
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This
weeks poll.
The poll this week asks
do
you
think that the family related policies that Labour has
introduced are good for the country? To take part in our online poll
>>>
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