Let's end child poverty say the Reds

Well so say the Greens, with their enormous "give free money to the parents of poor kids" electoral bribe, to be paid for by a tax hike.

It's classic dyed in the wool socialism and its central premise is that it is somehow caring to take by force from a small proportion of the population to give people money because they have children they can't afford to raise properly.

That's it.

When Russel Norman says:

Proud to pay 7c more income tax on every $1 over $140k so 200,000 kids can have food in their bellies 

It defies description.  What's he doing with the money now if he believes so much that it would be better helping poor kids?  Couldn't he just spend that money now on charities to help them?  Couldn't he convince others to do the same?  What's the mentality that says "if only the government took more of my money I could be helping the poor more"?

The Greens - nationalising children so you can pay for everyone else's

So the Greens are cleverly pulling at the heart strings, with images of children and landscapes. You're meant to vote for them, yep, someone else's kid, because the Greens think we all belong to everyone else.   It's the antithesis of individuals living their lives responsibly and interacting freely with one another, but rather the heavy hand of the #lovenz state taking your money out of "love" to pay for other people who at best don't care about where it came from, and at worst hold you in contempt (you rich c*** you, probably with Pakeha and male privilege that you inherited from your thieving racist/sexist ancestors, go on feel the guilt). 

People who breed and barely raise kids at all, who then go on to repeat the cycle, maybe bullying your kids in the process, or (the Greens hope) become angry political activists who go on to talk to the hilariously named Child Poverty Action Group (so named because it undertakes the minimal possible action to address child poverty by simply demanding the state do something about it with other people's money).  

Worried about child poverty? Well use your own money then

If ever there was a reason to close down the Office of the Children's Commissioner, it should be this report on child poverty (pdf).  It is the classic socialist/statist treatise on taking more money from some people to spend money on others.  Philosophically it takes the view that the people primarily responsible for children are not those who created them or have taken responsibility (typically by default) to care for them, but the state.  It's hardly surprising given that the Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty consists almost entirely of those who embrace a philosophical position of statism.

Let's take some of its key points:

Child Poverty is costly:  The counterfactual that children who are well fed, housed, taught and loved tend to thrive is true, but to claim that you can monetise "costs" that are born by society presumes that they are to be born by everyone.  Yes having children you cannot afford to feed, house or clothe restricts their likely opportunities and ability to thrive, but that isn't the fault of everyone else - it is the fault of the father and mother for breeding without thinking of the consequences.  The report claims that it "should not be tolerated".  Who by?  Is everyone who raises children in adequate conditions or does not raise children have to be obliged to bear the costs of those who do not take reasonable steps to prevent raising a child in poverty?  The claim is that child poverty affects the "nation's long-term prosperity", but all that really means is a presumption that government will tax everyone else's prosperity to pay for those who go on welfare because they have few saleable skills, those who commit crimes because they want the property of others or are angry at others, or who breed without concern for the consequences.  Maintaining that presumption denies the fundamental cultural shift needed to promote responsibility for the consequences of ones own actions.  That isn't promoted by the welfare state or the idea that all children are the responsibility of all adult.  They are not.

Child poverty can be reduced:  Yes, demonstrably, it has been happening for centuries.  It has been achieved through economic growth, and the growing amount of time that parents can dedicate to raising children.  That is not encouraged by a growing state demanding ever more taxes, restricting the supply of land for housing and so increasing the cost of living and the amount of work people must undertake to achieve their desired standard of living.  The main motivator for reducing child poverty has been parents who have strived hard to give their children a life better than their own.  Mine did that, countless others did, and they didn't do it because the state told them to do so, or handed them a cheque.  They did so because they were responsible and human.

Specific recommendations:  The overwhelming thrust of these measures is to treat children as a national asset that needs a national solution.  It wants universal benefits for children up to a certain aid, making all children rich or poor a source of income taken from taxpayers.  It wants taxpayer funded universal healthcare for children up to age 17.  It wants the state to build more houses.  It wants legislation to bind a Minister to targets that are primarily about what families, mothers, fathers and children do on the ground.  It is absurd and ridiculous to use law - an instrument which typically defines rights, mandates actions or prohibits them, to be necessary to hold a politician to what is a politically set policy goal.   It undermines democracy and clogs up the legal system with a law that is not fit for purpose.

It seeks to make every additional child worth the same amount of additional welfare from the state, promoting breeding for cash, a phenomenon that has hardly been a great success.   Why is it good for children for their parents to get more money from the state because they breed more?   It wants welfare benefits to grow according to GDP, in effect meaning welfare always looks like a reasonable option regardless of actual poverty levels.  

It wants the state to lend money at favourable terms to people in poverty seeking to get back into work, presumably because it doesn't think the public would support such a charity.

It wants a massive state intervention in housing to regulate rental housing, build more homes, but also subsidise low income people's mortgages.  The words "sub-prime" should come to mind, but then when middle income people struggle to save for deposits in Auckland and Wellington facing higher taxes to subsidise poor people in Timaru and Kaitaia buying houses, there might be some concern over equity.

Special money for Maori households to buy homes, because they are ethnically predisposed to not earn as much money as everyone else.   Nothing quite so readily breeds resentment as a pair of low income families and one getting special help because of who their ancestors were.  That's the nationalistic race based policy thinking, based on neo-Marxist structuralist theory (which means all Maori are disadvantaged and powerless, so the state must take from non-Maori to benefit Maori and "even the outcomes"), which simply does not reflect reality or responsibility.  

The reason more Maori are in poverty is overwhelmingly because they disproportionately make the wrong decisions in life, devaluing education, valuing whim, devaluing entrepreneurship and individual innovation, valuing "being one of the group" and valuing "not thinking you're better than the rest of us".  Giving them more money wont fix that.  Of course, this is a report that wants you to pay for "the development of Mäori-centric data that acknowledge and capture Mäori concepts of poverty and wealth".  Don't go there.

Having problems because you stupidly borrowed too much money?  Never fear, the state would bail you out if this recommendation was implemented:

We recommend that the government investigate and implement a public-private--partnership micro-financing model with the banking sector and community groups, with the aim of providing modest low-interest and zero-interest loans, as a mechanism to help low-income families access affordable credit and effectively manage debt.

How about promoting saving as a way of getting enough money to buy consumer goods and services, rather than tax everyone so that the least able can borrow more?

It wants a "child nutrition strategy" without saying what that really means, I think Sue Kedgley would love it, but those who want to promote personal responsibility will not.

It wants support for children with parents in prison to be increased, which isn't entirely silly, but doesn't for a moment suggest that the criminal justice system be reviewed to eliminate victimless crimes, such as drug laws, to reduce the rate of incarceration of parents who are relatively low risk offenders, nor does it blame parents when they have committed real crimes.

Conclusion

There are some worthy recommendations in this report, but it should be up to those who embrace it to raise the money themselves, voluntarily, and implement the measures, for only then will they have the incentives to get it right, to avoid people claiming inappropriately and have the moral authority to provide support given by those who want to support those less fortunate, rather than forcing people to do so.

However, the report's number one failing is its blatant disregard for the breakdown of family structures as being one of the key sources of poverty and abuse among children.  That has been sustained by the growth of the welfare state, and a cultural norm of responsibility for children not being primarily with parents but "society".   It is seen in the use of language that nationalises children, that treats all children in the country as being the responsibility of everyone else, but actually means that net taxpayers bear the cost and burden of raising the children of net beneficiaries.  It means that there are taxpayers who are earning money not only to raise their own children, but another parallel family.

The answer to child poverty is twofold.  One is economic growth, with more wealth, employment, opportunities for starting up business, to save money without it being devalued through inflation and to provide the legal and monetary environment to allow people to succeed.  The second is individual.  If you don't want children in poverty, don't have them when you are poor - contraception is cheap, and not difficult to obtain.  If you don't want other people's children to be in poverty, cough up, help out, give some of your own money, spend time with charities, use your imagination with other like minded people.  Do something directly.

One thing that wont help is this report, or the functionally inert Child Poverty Action Group - which has as its sole purpose, actually doing nothing substantive for child poverty, simply producing reports which demand the government take more money from taxpayers to pay the parents of children in poverty, because they are poor.

The philosophy behind this report has failed, it has been tried in one way or another for the last 40 years, to go this far would bankrupt the economy and chase enterpreneurial or aspirational people from New Zealand to elsewhere, further reducing the ability of the economy to catch up with the rest of the developed world.

However, the Greens will love it, because it buys into their "your child is everyone's child" nationalisation of children philosophy, and their admiration for a huge welfare state.  Now go to southern Europe to see what a roaring success that approach is proving to be.

Oh and New Zealand has had this sort of hand wringing, fiscally extravagant approach to social policy presented before.  The Royal Commission on Social Policy reported in 1988 wanting benefits and taxpayers' money for just about any group or individual identified as not having a "fair go".  The Lange Government to its credit ignored Rosslyn Noonan's post-modernist structuralist treatise on recreating a grand social welfare state, and it was called the most expensive door stop in history.

This report is shorter, and cheaper in real terms, but should have the same fate.

Abolish child poverty by not having kids you can't afford

An Institute for Fiscal Studies report in the UK has said that government changes to welfare policy will result in it failing to meet targets to eliminate child poverty by 2020.

There is an absurd “legally binding target” to eliminate child poverty by 2020 in the UK. That in itself is a gross misuse of the law. Laws should not be passed to demand that government ensure certain social outcomes arise (there is a similar stupid law requiring the government to reduce CO2 emissions, who gets penalised if the government fails?).

Child poverty in 2021 is largely preventable now. There is no need for any children under 10 to be raised in poverty by 2021. This is my strategy for eliminating child poverty for the under 10s by 2012.

If you can’t afford to raise children then:

1. Contraception is free (taxpayer funded), use it;

2. If it fails, there is a waiting list of financially secure people ready to adopt;

3. First trimester abortions are available for free on the NHS;

So don’t have children you can’t afford.

Some people have children they can afford but circumstances change. That is not preventable, although if taxation were lower, more could afford to take out insurance to cover such situations.

Child poverty is first and foremost the responsibility of the people who brought the child into the world in the first place. Parents have the responsibility to consider how to bring up their kids, how to pay for them, how to provide them what they need.

Nothing would be more important than for government to make this, seemingly obvious point, clear.

In addition, don’t allow anyone to immigrate with children if they also cannot afford to keep them.

One way to do that would be to painlessly phase out the child benefit. Declare that one year from now, no one will get child benefit for any future children. 

Child poverty is not a disease you catch, it is not the responsibility of everyone who doesn’t have children and those who have them, who can afford them.

It wont be eradicated by governments, political parties and “charities” calling for taxpayers to be fleeced to constantly pay for people to raise children they should not have had in the first place.

Depending on government to fix a social problem is deluded and misguided. The best way government can help is to get out of the way. Make the first £10,000 EVERYONE earns be free of income tax and national insurance as a start, and stop paying people to breed.  Raise the income tax free threshold according to GDP growth every year

Another reason to avoid Cadbury

Not only has it always been a sweet masquerading as chocolate, Opinionated Mummy shares my views on this, but is now pandering the the fatuous Fairtrade fad.

Let's not forget what Fairtrade is, a branded payment of more than the market price of a product to engage in a transfer to those who sell the product.

Yes people can choose Fairtrade, but with fair trade comes one assertion, one assumption and one deception.

The assertion is fair trade is good for people in developing countries. Paying people more than the market price for something is good for them. This of course encourages them to produce more, putting more pressure on the market price. You see, the market price is a signal of demand compared to supply. Interfering with that means overproduction, further distorting what people produce. It's basic economics, but it is hardly surprising the do-gooding left don't understand that.

The assumption is that free trade is bad. Of course free trade is comparatively rare in agricultural commodities. You can blame the EU first, US second, Japan third and others, but whilst attention is taken away from liberalising trade in agriculture with the Fair Trade trend, it means the gross distortions and subsidies seen in global trade in agricultural commodities continues. These are distortions that increased due to Barack Obama and which the EU shows precious little sign of confronting, largely because of the parasitical French.

The grotesque fraud is Fair Trade diverts attention from trade barriers that impoverish farmers in developing countries, but the economic illiteracy of the left continues to support this nonsense.

So what is the deception? That the premium paid for Fair Trade all goes to the poor farmers. Nonsense. Much of the premium is skimmed off, because Fair Trade products attract people who are less price sensitive, so everyone from retailer back can skim a little more off. It's a nice way of ripping you off under the guise of helping the poor.

You want to know more? Read this IEA report, which exposes Fair trade as being an wholly inappropriate way of helping the poor. Notably 50% of the revenue from Fair Trade levies is spent on the Fair Trade corporate brand itself on self promotion.

"50% of this income was spent on so-called educational activities and most of the remainder was spent on certification, licensing and product development. In fact, the educational activities involve campaigning and promoting the Fairtrade brand through Fairtrade fortnight, promoting Fairtrade schools etc. These are all activities that effectively promote Fairtrade’s own brand....It is most unusual for a charitable foundation whose objectives are to help the poor in under-developed countries to use such a large proportion of its revenues on activities simply designed to increase its own size. It would be surprising if Fairtrade customers were aware of this."

The Adam Smith Institute found that 10% of the Fair Trade premium actually got to the producer.

Indeed. If you want to help people in poorer countries you might do two things:
- Support campaigns for free trade, oppose politicians and lobbyists who oppose it; and
- Donate to charities with sound reputations for high quality development projects. Note, none have the initials UN attached to them.

Meanwhile, Cadbury now sells overpriced poor quality chocolate flavoured candy. I will be even less likely to buy it now.

You can assist people by choice

One Idiot Savant doesn’t understand. When referring to huge families on welfare he says:

“those children exist, and their need is real… If we want them to have any chance of a decent life (rather than creating or perpetuating multi-generational poverty), they need to be provided for.”

Why do these children exist? Who is primarily responsible for meeting their needs? Why should people who choose not to have children or to have few children be forced to fund a decent life because some parents ARE feckless? Why should people currently on welfare get more welfare if they breed more? Why is the money forcibly taken from others, a right?

However, his lack of imagination, the fundamental failure of morality shared by virtually all on the left is this statement here:

“What exactly are the right proposing here? Denying assistance to those whose need is greatest? Leaving people to starve?”

Who is leaving who to starve? Who denies assistance? Who is stopping anyone from providing assistance? Is Idiot Savant suggesting that if the beloved state doesn’t pilfer taxes from him, pay bureaucrats in the process then hand it out in welfare, that he wouldn’t help people in need?

Why are taxes, a tax collection bureaucracy and a money handout bureaucracy a sign you care, but charity – something you choose to give, through people who want to help – an anathema?

In other words – why do you need to be forced to care?

Furthermore, why is it ok to bash the people who are forced to pay welfare, but not to demand accountability and appreciation from those who get it?

Don't give to Tearfund

Because it wastes your money hiring an intellectual minnow called Sara Shaw. She works for Tearfund (a Christian poverty relief charity) as "Policy Officer - Climate Change". I am sure that its money could be better spent hiring someone who can actually do some serious work in the developing world, rather than lead statist political causes.

She recently wrote this nonsense criticising the New Zealand Government's policy on climate change:

"Poor people, already being hit hard by climate change, have once again been disappointed by another developed country taking a weak and self-interested approach"

Hit hard by climate change how? No evidence, just part of the zeitgeist promoted by Shaw that climate change is happening, real and the poor are suffering because of it. Secondly, she claims to speak on behalf of poor people. Funny that, not being one herself, or even a member of parliament for any country. Thirdly, she criticises taking a "self interested approach", which of course poor people never do - they are always willing to sacrifice their lives for the greater good.

This follows from her earlier banality and economic illiteracy in promoting the faith based idea that by penalising "non-Green industries" and subsidising "Green ones", everyone wins. Not a shred of evidence or economics, just faith.

She presumably thinks she does great work to "save the world" and "help the poor", when she isn't doing a concrete piece of positive work in developing countries, for education, health or to improve infrastructure.

If she really gave a damn she'd be pushing for the European Union to abolish its Common Agricultural Policy, eliminate agricultural export subsidies, eliminate barriers to importation of agricultural products into the EU, and abolish domestic subsidies. That would make an enormous difference to farmers in developing countries, but no - she worries about climate change - a distraction from doing real good for people who are impoverished. She could campaign loudly and vigorously for good governance, the end to the corrupt kleptocracies that plague Africa and don't protect private property rights or have independent judiciaries.

However no, Shaw would much rather finger point, pontificate and preach, blaming the developed countries, and suffer the poor, ever patronaged, people in the developing world. She is chasing the ever illusion, the idea that destroying wealth creating industries will help the poor, and taking money from those who create wealth and give it to those who don't helps them too. There are undoubtedly charities that help impoverished people without being distracted by Green politics and agendas of economic illiteracy, big government and finger pointing rather than evidence.

Tearfund isn't one of them.

Helen Clark and UNDP sycophancy

If there is one thing that keeps me in the UK and which frustrates and angers me the most about the idea of returning to New Zealand (or even to Australia), it is how journalism almost does not exist in the mainstream media. At least with the Times, the Observer, the Telegraph, FT or even (cough) the Guardian, there are journalists – people not afraid to research a topic and ask hard questions, to be a devil’s advocate for the opposing point of view. Sadly, it appears that metaphorically sticking your tongue up the arse of your subject is de rigueur among New Zealand reporters

The most recent example is the sycophancy dressed as journalism being trotted out by Tracy Watkins in the Dominion Post, who has written two articles profiling how Helen Clark is getting on leading the UN Development Programme. Watkins could just as well have been working for the Labour Party to produce such inane twaddle. The first article would be better seen in the NZ Woman's Weekly or the like. I do love how the talk of scandals was brushed to one side though, "disgruntled staff" you see. Because, presumably, you only listen to disgruntled staff when they work for the private sector, not the altruistic people loving United Nations.

You can of course read the latest instalment here, which goes on about five crisis that have ravaged the world in the past year (food, financial, fuel, swine flu and climate change), though you might ask some hard questions about how many of these are real and how many still exist (food and fuel disappeared as financial came).

Watkins could have asked what have been the achievements of the UNDP, how many countries it has weaned off of aid since it was formed in 1965? The answer of course is none.

Watkins could have talked to critics of aid, especially UN based aid operations. Funnily enough she didn’t.

Watkins could have asked how much of the NZ$5 billion budget of the UNDP goes on administration, how much the average UNDP employee receives in income (tax free) and the UNDP’s travel budget? In other words she could have discussed why UN employees are some of the best paid (and least hard working) “public sector” workers in the world.

So the article is essentially an interview with Clark. Nice for Watkins to get her jaunt to New York of course, but that could have been done over the phone. Watkins could instead have used her trip to meet with different groups who have differing views of the UNDP or the UN, but that might have upset Clark – and you can’t do that can you?

She finishes with a so-called “factbox”, which says precious little.

It talks about New Zealand’s aid, ignoring aid raised through private charities and distributed through such charities, like World Vision (who I do NOT endorse). For example, talk about the aid given by the US ignores that around 80% again is given and distributed privately. In short, aid doesn’t have to involve force.

So what could Watkins have done? Well maybe she could have looked at the long list of scandals involving the UNDP and asked Clark what she’d be doing about it on her NZ$500,000 tax free salary. Scandals? You mean the New Zealand MSM hasn’t been doing its job to find out what the UNDP is about? You betcha! Watch this space.

Pacific aid a waste of money?

The NZ Herald reports that Foreign Minister Murray McCully says that aid to Pacific Island countries is achieving little, despite millions of dollars being poured into the "Pacific Islands Forum" (formerly South Pacific Forum).

Quite right. The Forum has long been a typical intergovernmental organisation, filled with less than busy hardworking bureaucrats, more keen on earning high salaries that achieving much at all. In fact it demonstrates quite clearly what the approach to aid in the Pacific should be.

Firstly, if there is to continue to be aid, it should go to private charities and organisations that are motivated to achieve charitable good in the region.

Secondly, state aid should be phased out. New Zealanders who want to help Pacific Island states should donate their own money themselves (as they should for all states). Government aid creates appalling incentives of dependency, little interest in the recipient weaning itself off aid, and strong incentives to engage in rent seeking along the way. Rent seeking by bureaucrats, by aid distributors, by suppliers to aid agencies and ultimately recipients.

In other words, offering something for nothing will do precious little to generate a sense of independence, or to perform well. Remember. Africa has received increasing aid over 50 years, and much of it remains a basket case. By contrast, the likes of Chile and South Korea have adopted different national policies - of being oriented towards entrepreneurship, investment, governments that allow enforcement of contracts, and respect property rights (as well as having, now, vigorous open liberal democracies and independent judiciaries).

So when Murray McCully wants to "encourage Governments to adopt good fiscal practice, undertake some economic reform to become more globally competitive and encourage trade, and ensure aid is not squandered". He might want to tie aid to such reform, before phasing it out. After all, if you want the Pacific Island states to grow up, it might be about time to show them how and let them be.

The nonsense of relative poverty

Socialists have long argued that measurements of poverty should not be on the basis of actual subsistence - those who do not have the basics for survival of food, shelter, clothing etc. - but on relative wealth compared to rest of the country within which someone lives.

This of course means that the poverty level for those in your average developed modern Western country would be abundant luxury for someone in Bangladesh, Chad or Paraguay. Relative poverty is a combination of socialism and nationalism (why, for example, is the comparison only with people in the same country? Wealth is not distributed by governments, well not good ones).

The BBC has on its website a graphic comparison of what relative poverty means. It comes from a report which states that pensioners in the UK are poorer, relatively speaking, than pensioners in Romania. That seems intuitively nonsensical, but it is what relative poverty does.

Move the interactive graphic on that website to see what happens when you change the median income. If incomes rise rapidly, so does the poverty threshold. The wealthiest country has a poverty threshold that would be above average income in many countries, but if wealth was destroyed systematically (the Khmer Rouge and Zanu-PF being recent examples), the numbers in poverty could arguably decrease- because the poverty measure drops dramatically.

In other words, relative poverty damns successful economies by the implicit demand that "something be done" to ensure everyone gets their incomes uplifted by prosperity, whether they contributed to it or not. It rewards failed economies, because if people are roughly on average destitute, it's "ok" - at least there aren't too many people wealthy compared to those seriously destitute.

Of course this sort of analysis of "relative poverty" fuels the likes of Help the Aged in the UK, and the Child Poverty (in)Action Group in New Zealand, who simply demand more money be thieved from taxpayers in the middle and upper incomes, to give people at the bottom more - regardless of whether they did anything for it. It encourages dependency and wants to reward poverty, regardless of whether poverty actually means not being homeless compared to not being able to afford Sky TV, or fill up the petrol tank.

After all, two of the groups people appear most concerned about for poverty are the elderly and children. The elderly could see poverty relieved if they saved for their retirement and weren't taxed on their retirement savings or income. Old age is rather predictable. The poverty of children is the fault of their parents, who are (or should be) primarily responsible for paying for them. Breeding isn't compulsory, but too many think it is a right that demands others to pay for it. Both could be addressed in part by personal responsibility, with those who are poor through misfortune able to be helped by charities. You don't notice the Child Poverty (in)Action Group ever raising funds to feed some children do you? No - it just lobbies for the state to put its hand in your pocket to pay more welfare.

Poverty will, of course, always exist, if the relative poverty measure is retained. There will always be people who through incompetence or misfortune earn less than 20% of the median income. If you think that is a problem, then instead of expecting the government - such a quick response and competent authority as it is - to do something, why don't you?

That, of course, isn't really the answer anyone on the left likes to promote.

NZPA stuffs up again

Yes, someone once again shows how all too many New Zealand “journalists” are not up to the mark.

You see much of this report is quotes from Helen Clark, but the imbecile who reported it (remember journalism isn’t about quoting verbatim what someone said, but actually interpreting it) starts the article with “Former prime minister Helen Clark has called for world leaders who promised aid to developed nations at the turn of the millennium to deliver on their promises”

Aid to “developed nations”? What, to EU member states, Japan, US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand? Who promised that? The word is developing. What fool wrote developed? What moron can’t proof read to save himself?

Now the material issue here is whether aid is a good thing. I’ve just finished reading the rather dated book “Lords of Poverty” by Graham Hancock, which despite having a centre-left tint to it, comes clearly to the conclusion that aid is harmful and destructive. That despite billions of dollars going to developing countries since the 1950s, it has not made a material difference. State aid primarily goes to wealthy people in poor countries and wealthy people in rich countries (who go there to “help out”), and private aid is an industry in ripping people off.

Aid is a salve for consciences, as the biggest sources of developing country poverty are quietly ignored:
- Corrupt, thieving governments that don’t protect individual rights, property rights or have judicial systems to manage disputes over these (such as contracts). This is generally the rule in Africa;
- European, Asian and US protectionism against developing country goods, particularly primary produce;
- Intellectually and morally bankrupt socialist economic philosophies that damage wealth creation in favour of grandiose “national” plans and ideas.

Helen Clark feeding the patronising dependency attitude that has kept many a politician and bureaucrat well fed (especially the likes of those now working for her) is counterproductive. The adage trade not aid is right

However, you can’t expect New Zealand journalists to engage in any critical investigation or reporting on the UNDP when some don’t know the difference between developed and developing countries!

Helen Clark too hard working for UNDP

Well, I'd abolish the UNDP of course. Like all UN organisations it is a bloated bureaucracy which employs many people for whom hard work is something they'll never be accused of experiencing. I've spent plenty of time dealing with UN organisations, some of the curiosities were the compulsory morning and afternoon tea breaks, half an hour each, and the two hour lunch break, with 5.30pm being the absolute latest working period. 9.30am-5.30pm minus three hours! Criticise Clark for many things, but she was a hard worker - she worked long hours ensuring that her largely mediocre ministers didn't screw up completely.

Tax free pay, accommodation and medical allowances, flying business class everywhere. It is a racket that many on the left are only too happy to suckle from. A racket that treats all countries as being equal, whether it be Sweden or Belarus.

The UNDP has been subject to allegations of financial impropriety in North Korea, a place where Medicins sans Frontieres chose to leave because it couldn't guarantee that its aid would get to the needy instead of the military and the party.

Clark will continue to live off the back of taxpayers, people forced to pay for her. However, she is likely to be heading this rather awful organisation which may get the better of her.

What SHOULD happen is the UNDP should be privatised, and be an agency run and led by people who want to help international development, by voluntary donation of their time and money - not lazy barely employable bureaucrats who are more interested in protecting their vested interests.

Reasons to be on the DPB

So here's a test I'm applying to think about this one - what of the following are a good reason to claim the DPB? I am talking of women here for sake of simplicity.

1. Woman gets pregnant (accident or deliberate is neither here nor there since it is impossible to prove one way or the other), father doesn't want to know. Woman wants to keep the child (I mean as in raise, not adopt) and become a mother. ANSWER: State should pursue father as being legally obliged to provide adequate support to pay for child.

2. Woman gets pregnant, in de facto relationship, relationship ends for whatever reason. ANSWER: State should pursue father as being legally obliged to provide adequate support to pay for child.

3. Woman gets pregnant, whilst married. Couple separate or divorce. ANSWER: State should pursue father as being legally obliged to provide adequate support to pay for child.

4. Women gets pregnant, father of child died. ANSWER: Couple should have made provision for life insurance, other whilst welfare state remains, DPB remains until youngest child of that father, is of school age.

5. Any of the above scenarios, father too poor to pay for child. ANSWER: Father still responsible to pay proportionate child support, mother claims unemployment benefit whilst welfare state exists.

Quite simply, if people choose to breed, which includes taking the risk of breeding, they bear the consequences of it. At the moment the consequences are to be paid and to be not responsible for paying.

If this is moral then I'd like supporters of the DPB to answer why those who raise children by their own financial means shouldn't stop working and just let the state pay - except of course, there wouldn't be any money then to do so!

So what does the left DO about the poor?

National's very modest DPB policy has provoked cries from Helen Clark that it is beneficiary bashing, from the Greens that this is "denying kids having their parents at home" (because taxpayers earn money at home of course), and Idiot Savant saying it's "beating up on the poor".

Do the left really think those on the other side of the spectrum hate the poor, want to do violence to them, want to let them starve and laugh? Are they that detached from reality that they think they have a monopoly on compassion?

Well the truth is that most of them can't claim a monopoly on compassion since they themselves have none. When the Nats introduced some modest tax cuts in the late 1990s, did the left say "we'll donate our extra tax cuts to welfare beneficiaries?". No, they did their usual demand that the "state should care" and demand that everyone be forced to care.

This time it's the same old story. With some distinct exceptions, far too many on the left sit in their Wadestown, Parnell or Mt. Victoria homes, sipping fine wines, chattering amongst themselves about how "awful" those nasty National, ACT people are - how they are racist (Idiot Savant of course thinks racism is when the state ceases to care about race) and how sexist they are, and how they probably want to laugh at poverty.

You see you can take two approaches if you care about people in poverty:
a) Leave it to your taxes and the state to do a fine job of lifting people out of the cycle of poverty, despair and lack of aspiration;
b) Donate to charity, participate in charities, give of your time, money, other property, wisdom to help.

So if you care, what do you do? It's about whether you think a bureaucrat handing out a benefit is more valuable than donating a bunch of books for kids in homes without them, or more valuable than donating time to helplines for kids in need, or more valuable than teaching adult education classes in literacy for next to nothing.

So next time someone on the left says "more money should be spent" on the poor, ask what that person is doing directly for them? Ask them if they have donated every tax cut they ever got to charity. Be astonished if you get answers little more than an uncomfortable, "Umm... well" and maybe an admission to the odd donation.

Then you'll realise that the amount they care for the poor is inversely related to the amount they hate the rich.

Cindy Kiro's got her hand in your wallet

Yes, further proving the uselessness of the Commissioner for Children role, Dr Cindy Kiro having advocated Stasi like monitoring of all of New Zealand's children, because a small number of parents abuse them, she is now showing her true Marxist colours in calling for the state to take more of your money to give to parents who shouldn't be having children in the first place.

The NZ Herald reports her poverty plan and it is stark in its adoption of the tired old solutions of "gimme more money", and nothing imaginative about incentivising better behaviour among delinquent parents. What does she want?

- To make you pay for other people's children to have MORE pre-school and after-school care. Nice, subsidise more breeding. After all, you MIGHT have thought about the cost of that before you had a child?

- She wants solo parents to be able to earn more before losing the benefit, which of itself may not be a bad idea, but then having an income tax free threshold would help this too (but lower taxes don't figure in the big Nanny State world of Cindy Kiro)

- To make you pay for HIGHER benefits, HIGHER accommodation subsidies, because again you're responsible for other people breeding.

- To abolish penalties for not naming childrens' dad/s, because YOU can pay for that deadbeat's kids, don't let the state go to the effort of making him responsible. What were you thinking you lazy, rich, heartless pig?

Cindy Kiro has nationalised all of the children in New Zealand in her mind, so it's only fair to her to make everyone pay for everyone else's children. Never mind thousands of families see a good third or so of their income go in taxes to pay for deadbeats who breed with little concern about where the next dollar is coming from or the condition the kids will grow up in. It's HER responsibility, as the big sister of the nation to embrace these children by leaving them with their irresponsible parents and get more money pilfered from single people and families that look after themselves.

It's socialism and it is the problem, not the solution.

On top of that how utterly despicable is it for her to use the election to push an avowedly political platform, a leftwing platform that you can be sure the Greens will largely embrace, as will the Maori Party, Labour will selectively embrace and endorse but say some is too expensive, and it puts the Nats and ACT on the back foot to argue against a public servant.

If the Nats can't put their foot down and abolish this clearly quasi-political role, then they aren't worth spitting on. However John Key has said nothing about this control freak in the past, so...

The dire social underclass

I forget to read Dr Michael Bassett's incisive columns as often as I should. Around a month ago he wrote about the underclass in New Zealand and what sustains it.

He tells some stark truths that are far too uncomfortable for policy makers:

"The criminals share several things in common. They are almost all from families where there is one parent on welfare, too many kids from several fathers in the household, inadequate supervision, easy prey from relatives or de factos, and access to alcohol and drugs. Far too many are Maori. The kids exist because they carry an entitlement to a benefit stamped on their brows, and the parent doesn’t care about their welfare for which the taxpayers give them money."

and

"Domestic violence rises on the days of the week when there is enough money to purchase drugs and alcohol, while for the rest of the week hard luck stories emerge about people resorting to food parcels and there being no lunches at school. The Child Poverty Action Group gives us a sermon about poverty and argues for more money for the parents, which sensible people have long-since worked out would go on more alcohol and drugs."

Contrast him to Dr Cindy Kiro who DOES play the "give them more of other people's money" card. The whole article is worth a read. He leaves one of his most damning lines for the media:

"Before going home to their trendy pads in Ponsonby and Herne Bay, the media treat this social crisis like soft porn – titillating details of one tragedy after another. There’s no proper analysis of the cause of the problems. No brains engaged."

How can anyone on the left seriously believe that throwing money at the problem is the solution? How can they ignore the absolute poverty of responsibility, role models, attention, love and aspiration endemic in far too many parts of the country? They have nothing to do with money - as much of the world is poor, but has stable family units, responsible and dedicated parents and esteem to grow onwards and upwards - this was seen in the Great Depression.

It is about ethics, culture and philosophy - and the philosophy of "it's everyone else's fault", "capitalism makes everything unfair so I'm angry and torture my kids", "everyone else owes me a fair life", is bankrupt.

It's about time those who peddle this are confronted, exposed and policy change radically - they've had their chance, and it has failed, miserably.

Glasgow East by-election or why socialism has failed

The Glasgow East by-election is occurring because its sitting MP, David Marshall, is standing down for health reasons. It shouldn't surprise, at 67 he is already outliving the average man in his constituency.

In the 2005 election he won with 60.7% of the vote. Yes he is one of those MPs with a strong true majority. The Scottish National Party (SNP) came a distant second with 17%, the Lib Dems third with 11.8% and the Conservative Party fourth with 6.9%. You get the picture, this is heartland Labour territory. Much of the media coverage is about whether Labour might lose, as the SNP is campaigning strong calling for nanny state to help food and fuel prices. Once addicted to nanny state, always addicted, although I hope the Tories might squeeze into third place (which happened, just, in 2001).

What's actually more telling are two sets of statistics. First, those about the constituency itself. This is a part of the UK that is not middle class, it is the absolute pits of despair - funded from the loving caring generous welfare state.

UK polling report describes the seat as follows:

"This seat contains some affluent suburban areas like Mount Vernon and Bailleston, but it is mostly made up of the post-war product of slum clearances, soul(l)ess tenements and terraces thrown up in the 1950s and 1960s into which the population of Glasgow’s substandard housing were decanted. The resulting estates, lacking employment and amen(i)ties were ravaged by unemployment, hard drugs, violence and gang culture." (sic)

It is poor white Scotland, with only 1.1% of the population not European. A quarter of the population under 18 and 20% over 60. Parts of the seat have a life expectancy for men of 62 - one of the lowest in the UK and akin to Bangladesh. Good ol' NHS doing wonders isn't it?

Only 7.6% of the population are graduates and just over 50% of adults have no school qualifications at all. Good ol' state monopoly education working then?

46% live in "social housing", about the same again in owner-occupied homes. 15.6% of homes have either no private bathroom or no central heating - in Glasgow!

Fraser Nelson of the Spectator explains further: "I once had the job of signing up the good people of Glasgow East to the electoral register — at the time, regarded as an invitation to pay poll tax. Gang graffiti scars the walls, police are virtually unseen. This no-go-zone status is new, and cost billions to achieve. Houses there are in good condition, money is being spent. But it has funded a hideous social experiment, showing what happens when the horizontal ties which bind those within communities to one another are replaced with vertical ties, binding individuals to the welfare state."

You see this is the dire world of welfare, drug and despair addicted Scotland "A boy born in Camlachie is expected to live to 64.5 — the same as in Uzbekistan. In Parkhead it is 62, the same as Bangladesh. Just outside its boundaries lies Dalmarnock where the figure is 58 — lower than Sudan, Cambodia or Ghana. The lowest is Carlton, where the figure of 54 is lower than even Gambia’s equivalent"

Nelson continues, pointing out the vile levels of dependency of those there and how irrelevant they are to Labour "It is invisible because the people in this Labour stronghold are of no use to politicians, who only do battle nowadays in marginal seats. When I last visited a pub there, to research an article, I was asked if I was a missionary — church groups are about the only people who bother with such places these days. Its horrors are hidden by statistical manipulation. Official unemployment is just 6.7 per cent. But add in such factors as those claiming incapacity benefit, and it quickly emerges that a scandalous 50 per cent of the working-age population are on out-of-work benefits."

However, you might think as a Labour heartland seat, this should be easy, this sort of seat is apparently what Labour is meant to be about.

Well no.

The people of Glasgow East have been rewarded by their loyalty with Labour by being ignored. Channel 4 reported that the party has as few as three dozen active members in the seat, and that it has never actually campaigned there in recent history on a door to door basis. After all, why would you campaign when those who vote do so as zombies, ticking the same formula as they are told time and time again that only Labour represents the working man, an irony given how the majority don't actually work. The Labour Party doesn't even have a database on the seat's demographics show where it's weakest and strongest. It has taken most of them for granted. With one part of the seat excepted, poor, destitute, welfare ridden, they'll vote Labour - nobody else will bother campaigning in this seriously dire part of Glasgow.

Of course as David Cameron says, the truth is that those in this electorate have, to some extent, given up. Although you do wonder how the inquisitive bright kid in this place fairs, when he risks being beaten up for being "smart", hounded at a school where intelligence makes you a social pariah, where one parent cynically thinks he's getting "too big for his boots", and with temptations towards drugs and other mindless decadence all around. They all vote for the status quo, and get it of course - and get it from a party only too glad that it gets a guaranteed House of Commons vote so it can have power, to look after the floating voter.

You see that's where, hopefully, all that will be proven wrong. This heartland Labour seat speaks volumes about the arrogance of many on the left for those they purport to give a damn about. Labour ignores them, doesn't even have enough local members who LIKE Labour, and the other parties completely ignore them too - until now. What has Labour done for Glasgow East? Kept the benefits flowing, kept the state monopoly schools open, refurbished some housing and left law and order to the gangs.

So the failure of socialist is apparent - starkly apparent. The formula is not more money for state monopolies and welfare. Yet this seat may offer a chance for the taste of change.

I'll leave the end to Fraser Nelson from the Spectator again:

"Labour, forced for the first time to focus attention on one of its ‘safe’ welfare ghettoes, may find it has nothing to say. Is it to promise more of the same? Or blame the wicked Conservatives? It is one thing for Labour to lose the leafy suburbs which Mr Blair won over in 1997. But to be rejected in a supposed heartland like Glasgow East would plunge the party into existential crisis, and rightly so. Because after all those years in power, and all those billions spent, its main legacy has been, quite simply, the most expensive poverty in the world."

CPAG - how chardonnay socialists fight poverty

It should be no surprise that I find the so called "Child Poverty Action Group" disgusting. The one thing it doesn't do is take action against child poverty, it doesn't spend a dollar on helping kids in poor families. No. It lobbies the state to take more money off of others by force.

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You see it doesn't actually want to alleviate child poverty directly. It says "The core objectives of the Child Poverty Action Group are: To promote better policies for children and young people; To promote awareness of the causes and consequences of child poverty"

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This is how it achieves its goals "CPAG publishes reports, makes submissions and conducts small-scale research projects to achieve its goals." Yep, don't look for breakfast kids, don't hope that CPAG might get you a new mattress, CPAG is "publishing a report" instead.

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Pricks. Not getting their clean little academic hands dirty actually helping people, they lobby for socialists answers - high minimum wages, compulsory taxpayer funded health and education and higher welfare benefits. You see they don't really care that people who are poor breeding isn't a good idea, they want you to pay for that. They don't promote birth control, they promote more welfare, other families and those wise enough to not breed paying for those who do. They milk stories of poverty, feeding off it for their agenda and doing absolutely fuck all themselves. Of those listed on the website, most will certainly be earning above average wages.

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According to the NZ Herald the court case they are taking claiming Labour's middle class welfare Working for Families is "discriminatory" because it doesn't spend even more compulsorily taken money to give welfare beneficiaries something for nothing. Think how much the court case is costing CPAG, and the state - think how that could have been spent on poverty, and you'll see how much CPAG really gives a damn. It's mainly costing you according to the NZ Herald:

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"Both sides of the legal argument are being financed by taxpayers - the action group's case through the Office of Human Rights Proceedings and the Government's defence through the Crown Law Office."

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Nice, so you - the taxpayers (oh it's the cost of civilisation) are forced to pay for a pack of socialists lobbying to make you pay more welfare benefits, and you're also forced to pay to defend against it. Too hard for CPAG to pay for advertising to run a charity to actually help the poor of course, they couldn't screw people who actually plan their lives, look after their own kids.

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It is one thing to give a damn about poverty and do something about it actively, like the Salvation Army actually does (regardless of any judgment of its religious agenda), but another to claim you are undertaking "action on poverty" and doing nothing but lobbying to make others pay money to help people through the state.

and that's not even dealing with the issue of welfarism as raised by No Minister. Theodore Dalrymple in his excellent book "Life at the Bottom" describes graphically the world view and culture of the "underclass" that traps so many in poverty, violence and an existence of spiritual depravation. By spirit I don't mean religion, but sense of life - sense of being and esteem. His book makes for sobering reading as someone who HAS been directly on the frontline of poverty. Comparing England's welfare state to Africa "nothing I saw... ever had the same devastating effect on the human personality as the undiscriminating welfare state. I never saw the loss of dignity, the self-centeredness, the spiritual and emotional vacuity, or the sheer ignorance of how to live that I see daily in England".

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CPAG offers nothing to combat that, but to feed it - make it worse, to perpetuate the culture of "not my fault, not my responsibility" and "it's my right" to something by making others pay for it. It is morally bankrupt in deed and philosophy.

Man evicted from house he doesn't own

The Dominion Post reports how a man, who appealed to the District Court (after going to the Tenancy Tribunal) is to be evicted from the four bedroom house YOU own that he occupies. He claimed he should keep living there because it was in his mother's name (she died), and presumably was the family home (yes see how welfarism lifts people out of poverty and dependency?) - but, quite rightly so, the idea that you can inherit a home you don't own is absurd.

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Jason Ellis - if you want to stay forever in a house, buy one. Yes I know it's hard, but imagine how much more you could have earned had you worked on getting a deposit together rather than appealing for taxpayers to keep you living off of them.

Mike Moore on why many poor countries are poor

Yes, former Labour Prime Minister (well for a few weeks anyway) hasn't got it wrong. Unlike the doomsayers on the left, he paints an optimistic picture about poverty in his Dominion Post column:

"In the past 60 years, more wealth has been created than in all of history. The number of people living on less than a dollar a day has dropped from 40 per cent in 1981 to 18 per cent in 2004. During the same period, the numbers living on less than $2 a day have dropped from 67 per cent to 48 per cent."

That hasn't been because of charity. Moore points out that:

"Private ownership works. Open economies always do better, competition and trade drive up better results and drive out corruption, as well as allocate resources more efficiently. A free market without solid, trusted institutions, property rights, independent courts, a professional public service and democracy is not a free market but a black market."

Yes yes, though we may argue about how much of a public service is needed, he's got it! However it is more than just having corrupt free institutions it is about getting the hell out of the way of doing business:
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"in Egypt it can take 500 days, 29 visits and 29 agencies, compliance with 315 laws, and costs 27 times the monthly minimum wage to open a bakery."

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Funny how so many on the left think that somehow the world is impoverishing countries that actually are badly governed and overgoverned in many respects. He concludes that property rights are what is needed, so that the poor can leverage off what they own, have access to courts when their rights are infringed upon and can protect what they produce.
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"We can establish property rights which will encourage people into the formal economy. It's not that radical, it simply suggests that poor people in poor countries should have the rights that rich countries have. Perhaps that's why they are rich."
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Now can someone tell the Labour, Green and National Parties?