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Lindsay Mitchell
Listening to Paul Henry interview Social Development Minister, Anne Tolley about the latest condemnatory report into Child, Youth and Family was very dissatisfying. There was no discussion about getting to the real core of the problem.
Lots of people survive courtesy of a benefit. They do so because they are too sick to work, can't find a job, have children who need feeding with no other source of income, and so on. There are a myriad of reasons why people receive welfare. Most of these people - 300,000 or thereabouts - are not violent. The same can be said of the general population.
This week, even Lyn Provost, the Auditor General who has presumably spent many, many hours putting together a report on Whanau Ora said, "It was not easy to describe what it is or what it has achieved." These outsider inabilities to understand the concept may not matter if insiders did. But there is now evidence that parties directly involved disagree about aims and purposes.
Amnesty International makes pronouncements about every country in the world (in this particular report, 160 countries) but cannot intimately understand the development of child poverty locally. The only purpose this report serves is to provide headline fodder for the political Left.
The trial applied to sole parent support beneficiaries because this is the only benefit that has relationship status a requirement for eligibility. The participants were those who had been on Sole Parent Support benefit for 20 weeks.
In the last six years National has done more to address working-age welfare dependence than Labour did in the prior nine. However their reforms shouldn't be overcooked. Describing them as a "useful start" in his recent autobiography, Don Brash was spot on.
Authored by Jonathon Boston and Simon Chapple, Child Poverty in New Zealand was published on June 18, 2014. Two major reasons for child poverty are presented: Child poverty is a result of inadequate benefits, and Child poverty is the result of unemployment.
Since the National government took office late 2008, welfare reform has formed a large legislative programme much of which has now been completed. It is perhaps too soon to expect benefit numbers to start reducing, complicated by the global financial crisis driving up unemployment in 2009-10.
Something about the way the Left is presenting the ‘child poverty’ problem doesn't stack up. When interviewed, Green co-Leader Metiria Turei repeatedly stresses that 2 in 5 of officially poor children come from working homes. But for Turei and other anti-poverty advocates to continually highlight this group when attempting to influence voters implies there is something less laudable about being benefit-dependent. Not a sentiment normally associated with the Left.
A recent Child Poverty Action Group report about child abuse claimed that, " ...the Ministry of Social Development and its predecessors have been researching and writing about child abuse for almost quarter of a century."
