Kiwiblog

I get TED talks on my podcast to listen to while exercising. Found this one interesting enough to share, and embedded below.

Some facts he cited:

• Since 2000 there are eight million more AIDs patients getting antiretroviral drugs.
• Eight countries in Africa have cut their malaria rate by 75%
• The same countries have 2.65 million fewer child deaths a year or 7,256 a day.
• The number of people living in extreme poverty has reduced from 43% in 1990 to 21% in 2010.
• At the current rate of decline, the number of people in extreme poverty would be close to zero by 2030

Two items of interest. First the NZ Herald reports:

Adolescents living in the most deprived areas in New Zealand drink almost twice as much alcohol than their peers living at the other end of the scale, a joint study has found.

Researchers from the University of Southern Denmark and Massey University surveyed 1144 adolescents aged between 12 and 19 living in New Zealand across 10 area deprivation levels, 1 being the least deprived.

Their paper published in Health & Place found that at the poorer end of the scale, teenagers drank an average of 96.2ml of pure alcohol or 6.4 serves on each drinking occasion, while t the least deprived adolescents drank 50.6ml or 3.4 serves.

The left response to poverty is a belief that it is simply an issue of money. They say those not in work must be given more money, as they do not have enough money to afford even the basics such as food for breakfasts.

We see this in a Twitter exchange:

dH

Hat Tip: Whale

On this rare issue I am with MP Lole-Taylor. The concept of personal responsibility and choice seems to be alien to some people. If a poor person makes awful decisions, it is not their fault. It is our fault because of poverty. Never mind that if the parents did not buy so much alcohol, and gamble so much, they might not actually be in poverty.

It turns out that the five Labour MPs living on $2.25 a day are not making You Tube videos for WINZ offices on better budgeting but are in fact trying to raise money for charities like Oxfam that try to alleviate poverty in countries where significant numbers do live on under $2.25 a day.

Overall fewer people each year are living in poverty, due to the economic growth of China and India as they have opened up their economies. There are lessons there for other countries.

But I certainly support assistance to those less fortunate, and support a number of charities and also micro-financing organisations such as Kiva, which I’ve made a couple of dozen loans through.

Now you would think five of the most senior Labour MPs would raise a lot of money for people in poverty. So let’s look at their efforts.

The Deputy Leader, Finance Spokesperson, Welfare Spokesperson, Aid Spokesperson and Housing Spokesperson had raised around $1,400 between them, with some as low as just $90. They obviously have not hit their colleagues up enough!

This is less than the just over $1,500 raised by a Dunedin based Young Nat, Varsha Singh.

The challenge finishes at the end of today. Who will have raised more money – half the Labour frontbench, or the Young Nat?

I think it is superb that a group of Labour MPs are living on $2.25 of food a day, for a week, to demonstrate how you can eat cheaply.

Their potato and spinach curry recipe should be displayed in all WINZ offices.

I am a bit confused that they are so eager to demonstrate you can feed yourself on just under $16 a week, that they demand increased welfare payments for beneficiary parents. Currently a low income parent gets $88 a week welfare for their first child, and $61 a week for additional children (on top of core benefit, accom supplement etc). Of course you have non food expenses also, but thanks to Grant, Jacinda, Phil, Annette and David they are showing you can have $72 to $45 a week for those other expenses.

I look forward to their other recipes on how to cook for $2.25 a day. Maybe they could publish a book with Muriel Newman on it?

The Press reports:

Children raised in poor families will earn less and achieve at a lower academic standard but will not have higher crime levels, a Christchurch study has found.

The Christchurch Health and Development Study (CHDS), run by Otago University, has been following the lives of more than 1000 people since 1977.

The latest study, published in Social Science and Medicine, has looked at the impact of family poverty on children up to the age of 10 and how this is reflected in adulthood.

“Being brought up in an affluent family is advantageous to your education and career,” he said.

This is not a huge surprise.

Fergusson said the cohort was split into 20 per cent groups, with the bottom group earning an average of $43,000 a year and the top group earning $55,000.

“It’s not a huge difference but it’s definitely there, and we have seen that it definitely makes a difference.”

I am surprised it is not greater. This is saying the bottom quintile earn 80% of the top quintile. Sure that is a gap, but not as large as many would have predicted.

One of the reasons why the gap is less than other studies of income distribution, is these are people all the same age. Age is a large factor in income. That is why I have little time for the notion that an 18 year old with no experience should earn at least 60% of the income of someone with 25 years experience.

“Contrary to popular belief, being brought up in a poor family does not mean increased rates of crime or mental health problems in adulthood,” he said.

So let us stop blaming crime on poverty. There may be a correlation but that is not causative.

Michael Field at Stuff reports:

Samoans who claim they are poor are lazy, Samoan Prime Minister Tuilaepa Sailele says.

In a comment on the government website Savali, Tuilaepa says having no food, water, clothes, a home or access to medical treatment was poverty.

There was no poverty in Samoa. 

“Every Samoan has claim to land. There are plenty of mangoes, pawpaws, bananas and breadfruit falling off and rotting on the ground, plenty of fish in the sea,” he said.

“The problem is too many people are coming into town and loathing around. They are lazy and do not want to go back to their village to work the land. They should stay in their village where their lands are and develop it.”

Tuilaepa says that some Samoans think that not having car, a TV or a European house is poverty.

“Those are luxuries. Having none of those is certainly not poverty.”

Maybe the PM of Samoa should have been appointed to the Welfare Working Group!

Judy Callingham blogs:

Today  the Herald published a story lamenting the extra cost of local, free-range and organic foods, the very foods we’re being encouraged to buy and eat.  They estimate that the clean, green Kiwi options cost us on average 25% more. For people on a limited budget, that isn’t an option at all.

Indeed. So worth remembering that when people call for certain types of food (battery hen eggs, intensive pig farming) to be banned, the result hits the poorest in society the most.

The Taranaki Daily News got closer to the heart of the problem with a story headlined ‘Free food draws poor kids to class’.  It quotes principals from Taranaki schools who say that some of their students rely on their school to provide breakfast and even lunch, just to survive.

Poverty in New Zealand is a problem we often conveniently ignore, preferring to see our country as a land of milk and honey.  Unfortunately, milk and honey are off the menu for hundreds of thousands of Kiwis. More than 200,000 of our kids are living below the poverty line; over 48,000 of them go to school without breakfast. 

The poverty line is of course the relative poverty line. As the median income increases, the poverty line increases. A family may have their income increase more than the cost of living increase, but still fall below the poverty line because other people’s income has increased even further.

A relative poverty line is normally 50% or 60% of the median wage. I tend to think this is not that useful a measure of poverty – it is more a measure of income inequality – and they are not the same thing.

I find the most useful measure is the four-yearly Living Standards Survey by MSD. It actually asks a representative sample of 5,000 households questions such as whether they have stuff such as phones, cars, contents insurance, enough space, a computer, warm clothes, proper meals etc and whether they would like to have them if they could afford them. This measures actual deprivation over 42 criteria. They also ask if people do various things to save money such not filling prescriptions to save money, buying second hand clothing etc. It is (in my opinion) a far more sophisticated measure of families suffering deprivation due to low income, than merely comparing household income to the median household income.

This is a disgrace. No child in this country should go hungry. No New Zealand child should be cold or ill-clothed or living in an unhealthy or overcrowded house.  No child should be denied an education just because learning is too hard when you arrive at school cold, wet and hungry – if you get there at all.

I agree no child should go to school hungry. However the reasons why more children are going to school hungry is more complex than just assuming it is because they can’t afford it. Even using Judy’s figures, 3/4 of those with incomes below the poverty line do send their kids to school fed. So how do they manage to do so, yet not other families?

Over the last 20 years, the welfare state has given more money to those on welfare who have children. I don’t have exact data (yet), but the level of support has increased beyond inflation.

The government has prioritised a number of policies to stimulate the economy in an effort to get us out of the current recession. None of these policies, to my mind, tackles head-on the most urgent task of all – eliminating ‘child poverty’.

This should be the number one priority. Nothing is more important. Nothing is going to stimulate the economy better in the long run than having our kids grow up healthy and well educated.  It’s a damn sight more important than ultra-fast broadband and super-highways.

Without an growing economy, then we do not generate sufficient tax revenue to help lower income families.

So long as child poverty is based on the flawed relative to the median income measure, we will never “eliminate it” unless we wish to have an economy such as those of the old eastern bloc where doctors could only be paid so much more than parking wardens.

What we can do is use the more sophisticated measures of deprivation, such as the living standards survey and set out to reduce certain indicators within it (such as the proportion of families who say they miss certain meals because they can’t afford it).

‘Child poverty’  is a misleading term. It implies that the only people affected are the children.  But every child living in poverty is part of a household that is also living in poverty.  Whether that’s the result of generations of welfare dependency or a lack of jobs is not the issue.  The issue is how to break the cycle and get these kids into a situation where we can be confident they have a better future – by giving them a better present.

Breaking the cycle is the key. The problem is that it is a problem often that takes a generation or more to fix, as income is merely part of the problem. Education, child abuse, parenting skills are all part of a very challenging mix.

I like this photo (from Stuff) of the Ministers being sworn in. I like the fact that a third of the front bench are woman (and two are Maori women) and indisputably all there on merit – not on the basis of quota or factional appeasement.

I also likes this response from John Key to David Shearer’s call to be on the Ministerial committee on poverty:

Mr Key wished new Labour leader David Shearer all the best in what was a “thankless” job as leader of the Opposition.

Mr Shearer had been “quite quiet” as an MP so it was difficult to tell how he might perform.

However, he rejected Mr Shearer’s call to widen a ministerial group on poverty to all MPs.

“I’m more than happy for David Shearer to be a part of the ministerial committee if he’s happy to give the Government confidence and supply.”

Heh.

On the serious substantive issue, both John Key and David Shearer would sincerely like to see less poverty in New Zealand. They agree on the aim, but the reality is National and Labour disagree strongly on the solutions. This is not always a bad thing – it means NZers get to choose whose policies etc they prefer.

For example National believes a key way to reduce poverty is to reduce the numbers on welfare. Labour however believes that you reduce poverty by paying those on welfare more.

One could argue shouldn’t we do both. Well, yes you can but the policies are not that compatible. The more you pay people on welfare, the harder it generally is to reduce the numbers on welfare.

Ultimately it is of course a bit of a balancing act. Few advocate abolishing the welfare state and having a Singapore system where families must support those not in work, rather than the state. And likewise few support having a welfare state where work is voluntary and you can just go on a benefit whenever you feel like it.

The Herald reports:

The share of the population of developing regions whose people live in extreme poverty is expected to fall to 15 percent by 2015, down from 46 percent in 1990, according to the United Nations. The gains stem largely from robust economic growth in countries such as China and India, the world’s two most populous countries.

That is a huge drop for one generation.

As leaders will hear next week at a Un summit in New York, the overall success in cutting extreme poverty is patchy from region to region. According to the World Bank, much of Asia already has met or is on its way to meeting the goal, and Latin America is on track to more than halve its rate from 11 percent in 1990 to 5 percent in 2015; sub-Saharan Africa is likely to fall short at a projected 38 percent.

The problems in Africa often relate to poor governance.

Change came as it did to many villages in China – through an idea and a road. A local official thought the area’s forested mountains and waterfalls could draw tourists, so he drummed up funding to pave the dirt track that was the sole path in and out of Chongdugou. Today almost all the village’s 350-plus families are involved in tourism.

In the 1990s, “people could only feed themselves, and some even starved. Children could not afford to go to school, and many could not even finish primary school,” said Liu Jiandang, a 41-year-old former farmer. “Now, we’ve got paved roads, new houses, phones and vehicles. I run a hotel that can host 20 to 30 tourists and some rooms have TV sets, air conditioners, hot water and bathrooms.”

How selfish of the village. Do they have any idea what their carbon emissions should be. They should go back to starving in poverty.

Dave Burgess at the Dom Post went begging:

Powerful yet unexpected emotions struck me just minutes into my stint as a beggar. I was feeling like a low-life who would surely be ignored, abused or humiliated by passing pedestrians.

It didn’t help that the people walking past towered above as I sat forlornly on the ground. They were largely reduced to a mass of knees and feet but held the moral and physical high ground.

While depressing messages were crashing around in my head, the reality presenting itself was surprisingly uplifting.

People really cared and showed a huge amount of compassion and generosity to someone who had apparently hit rock bottom.

By caring people, I mainly mean women, of all ages and races. Over the combined four hours’ begging I received $126.20 from 32 people – but only five donations came from men.

The IRD said my begged money is considered a gift and does not attract tax. That is unlike street buskers, who are supposed to declare their earnings.

$126.20 over four hours is a very nice $31.55 an hour. And that is tax free. But with the donated food it comes to $164.70 or $41.18 an hour.

But if you compare it to pre-tax income, to see how much one would have to earn to receive the same amount in the hand, it equates to $60.01 an hour or an equivalent annual salary of $125,000 a year.

So maybe next time you see a beggar, you should ask him or her for a donation!

Work and Income deputy chief executive Patricia Reade says Wellington case managers have visited beggars on the street about 20 times over the past six months to find out if they need help.

“The majority of beggars have refused to speak to us and in fact only one person accepted an invitation to discuss their benefit entitlements.”

I’m impressed WINZ are proactive and regularly seek out beggars to see if they need help. The fact that almost none ever take up the offer of assistance confirms that their presence on the streets is not a matter of poverty or necessity – but normally a reflection of mental health issues and/or addiction problems.

Michael has avoided the “h” issue in his SST column and insteads talks welfare:

LAST week 70 NGOs – mostly voluntary and welfare agencies – met in Auckland to declare war on child poverty. But not in the Cameroon nor Colombia, Niue nor Nicaragua.

In good old New Zealand.

According to their later communique, chaired by Barnardo’s chief executive Murray Edridge, more than 220,000 Kiwi kids live in direct poverty as a result of their parents being dependent upon a welfare benefit. And because the value of a benefit “is way below the poverty level”, the NGO summit demanded an immediate increase, plus tertiary training incentives, and the provision of breakfast in all decile 1 and 2 schools.

The best thing is for a parent to move off the welfare benefit and into the workforce. New Zealand has a huge fiscal deficit and the notion that we can afford to pay people more money to not work is madness. We need more people in work.

“We want our kids to be barristers, not baristas!” declared chairwoman Ani Pitman. They didn’t want them doing “menial jobs”.

All that is wrong with New Zealand, the welfare system and NGOs was probably summarised in that last point. Better to be on the dole than in a menial job. Better being a criminal defender than a skilled worker. And if none of these options are immediately at hand then just give us more money.

Almost any job will make you better off than being on welfare. And not just about the money. I’ve worked as a cleaner to earn $1.99 an hour.

This calculated and continuing attack on the taxpaying workers of this country demands reply, not simply to respond to the silly sophistry of this latest gimme summit, but because it refuses to address the real cause of all child deprivation in this country: their parents.

There is not one child in this country who should be going to school without breakfast. If there is, then that is a mandatory call to CYF. Clearly, the parent or parents are unworthy of the name.

Similarly, if the welfare benefit is not enough to house, feed and clothe your kiddies then there are two possibilities. First, the parents in the equation are smoking, drinking, gambling or huffing the taxpayer money intended for their children. Or, second, that their boyfriends are. Either way, it is testimony of child abuse and neglect, not child poverty.

Laws over-generalises here, but his point is basically sound. There are times when a family does get hit with an exceptionally large one expense such as a medical or dental bill. However there are grants and loans from WINZ to cover such situations. The welfare system does not give a life of luxury, but it is certainly enough for the vast majority of families on it to give their kids breakfast. Breakfast does not cost a lot. it is about priorities.

Except for those permanently incapacitated by injury or mental illness, the welfare benefit is a bridge. From independence to independence, not from sob story to lifestyle. That the summit NGOs don’t get this is the reason why NGOs exist: to create a need and then to amplify it.

And for those permanently incapacitated, I don’t think we do enough.

Yes, it’s true that New Zealand has more unskilled labour than we have jobs. But even those unskilled and I use my council’s litter and graffiti teams as an example perform valuable community service. They are probably of greater value to my city than the entire legal fraternity. But, according to the summit, these are unworthy and menial occupations.

Heh. Poor lawyers. Always picked on.

This country’s welfare system does not deliver poverty. Rather it rescues people from it. It is generous on any international scale and probably to a fault. And it is neither the cause nor the solution of our country’s underprivileged, undernourished and underloved children.

That exclusive responsibility rests with the people who brought them into the world, and the people responsible for their ongoing “care”. This country has too many crap parents. End of story. Until we start facing that reality, we will continue to blight the lives of those we most profess to care for.

Hard to disagree with that conclusion, even though I am sure many will try.

The EPMU has said Air NZ strike attendants are striking over their poverty wages.

Air NZ has said the cabin crew could earn between $40,000 and $60,000 per annum for just 30 hours of week a work.

If Air NZ is correct, then the EPMU is saying a wage of up to $38.35 per hour is a “poverty” wage.

The 4.5% pay increase offered has been rejected as it does not meet the EPMU’s demands of a 26% increase in salaries and 70% in allowances. So they are striking over Easter – the time designed to cause maximum hassles for passengers.

Despite advice from the Electoral Commission that they should register as third parties, six churches are funding a $100,000 campaign on “social justice” and refusing to register, and presumably refusing to put authorisation statements on the campaign advertisements.

They are lucky to only be spending $100,000 as if they spent more than $120,000 and they were deemed to be election advertisements, it would be an automatic corrupt practice [s66(1)].

The Herald reports:

The churches’ leaflet urges local churches to act directly by “supporting activities at a lower decile school in your area, volunteering your time to help with some form of family support or youth work, or being a good friend to families who may be isolated or in poverty”.

It also encourages them to ask politicians two questions: “Do they have explicit policies about lifting children out of poverty? Do they have clear policies about provision of social services to help children in need?”

Now the second part could be seen as advocating against parties and candidates that do not policies to lift children out of poverty.  And considering the churches use a definition of poverty which makes it basically impossible to have some families not in poverty (this is known as the poverty industry), it is a very loaded question that is promoting extreme income redistribution.

Now let us look at s5(1)(a)(ii) of the Electoral Finance Act:

In this Act, election advertisement … means any form of words or graphics, or both, that can reasonably be regarded as doing 1 or more of the following: …

encouraging or persuading voters to vote, or not to vote, for a type of party or for a type of candidate that is described or indicated by reference to views, positions, or policies that are or are not held, taken, or pursued (whether or not the name of a party or the name of a candidate is stated);

Does the pamphlet encourage people not to vote for a party which doesn’t have explicit policies to lift children out of poverty? I wouldn’t want to say without seeing the full pamphlet, but it is certainly arguable.  What is the point of encouraging people to ask politicians the question unless it is to then take that into account when voting? If anyone has a copy of the pamphlet, could they send one to me?

The Electoral Commission has said:

Electoral Commission chief executive Helena Catt said she gave the churches the same advice that she gave to any group planning election-related advertising – that the definition of an election advertisement was still “a large grey area” and it would be “safer to list [as a third party] than not”.

But Annette King said it was a law of common sense, so how can it be a “large grey area”?

As I said above, a copy of the pamphlet would be most useful.

The Herald on Sunday editorial labels Horomia’s assertion some kids are going without breakfast to stay trim, as symptomatic of smugness in the ranks:

Responding to such a serious and heartbreaking issue as child poverty with glibness is something Prime Minister Helen Clark should have stamped out well before election year. The sight of our most amply proportioned cabinet minister suggesting hungry children are simply dieting was reminiscent of a certain French consort’s exhortation to “let them eat cake”.

I think the TV footage would make an excellent political advertisement!

As subsequent reports revealed, recent surveys show half of Maori households are sometimes, or often, running out of food. One in five Maori families is sometimes or often using food banks. Forty per cent of Pacific children go to school without breakfast – and not for slimming purposes. Those figures will only increase in the current climate of rising food, mortgage and petrol prices.

Derek Fox will be happy Parekura is so out of touch.

The Minister’s gaffe, though, is symptomatic of Labour’s wider issues. The party of the left sounds increasingly smug or out of touch with its core constituents. During its three terms in power, a number of its MPs have forgotten who put them there.

No different to a year ago when they denied there was an underclass.