Category: Social Issues
Ideas shape nations. Many big ideas are borne out of a country’s history and tradition. New Zealand’s pioneering heritage gave us our number 8 fencing wire “we can do it” approach to life that defines our Kiwi attitude.
When history is said to repeat itself, it is never for good reasons. George Bernard Shaw captured this when he said: “If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.”
The rate of child abuse in New Zealand is a national disgrace. According to the Department of Child, Youth and Family, in the year to June 2012, there were 152,800 recorded notifications of potential abuse against children. However, after removing duplicate notifications for the same children and Police family violence referrals, which require no further action, there were 95,532.
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."
The sudden resignation of Labour Leader David Shearer last Thursday has thrown the spotlight onto Labour Party politics. After just 20 months in the job, he decided to call it quits explaining that he no longer enjoyed the full confidence of his caucus colleagues. Some clearly believed he was not capable of leading the Party to victory in 2014.
Those with any interest in policy issues that matter to New Zealand’s economic future know that we have an ageing population; that there will soon be twice the number of pensioners as now, with bigger increases in the number of ‘old old’ with concomitant increases in health costs.
The welfare reforms that came into force this month have been described as the biggest changes to the benefit system since the original Social Security Act was passed into law in 1938. The underlying generosity of that scheme - which created a wide range of assistance measures including the Sickness, Invalids’, Unemployment, Emergency and Widows’ Benefits - is attributed as helping to keep Labour in power until 1949.
In the early 1990s the National government introduced welfare reforms that were met with enormous resistance and provoked a good deal of public sympathy for the plight of beneficiaries. The reforms featured benefit cuts which reduced most incomes by around 10 percent, with some losing as much as 25 percent.
In May this year, the Retirement Policy and Research Centre (RPPC) published a PensionBriefing: Census 2013 - shortcomings in questions about housing. It suggests that trends in home-ownership rates are less clear than many claim and may even have been relatively unchanged in the 30 years 1976-2006.
In her final speech in the House of Commons on 22 November 1990, the former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher engaged in one of her more memorable exchanges with the Member from Southwark and Bermondsey, to explain that policies aimed at reducing the gap between rich and poor will result in everyone becoming poorer.
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