Glad Tidings, Or Cruel Game?

Un-Persons: National's welfare policies only work politically because there are a huge number of voters who instantly relegate solo mothers and their children to a place outside the circle of respectable citizens. Only when paid employment reclaims them from the ranks of "the undeserving poor" do welfare beneficiaries stand the slightest chance of being accepted as a "decent, hard-working New Zealanders". Such is the cruel reality behind Mr Key's Pollyanna-ish "glad games".

IN ELEANOR PORTER’S classic children’s novel, Pollyanna, the orphaned heroine startles her misanthropic guardians with what she calls “the glad game”. No matter how bleak her prospects, Pollyanna always finds something to be glad about.

Listening to the Prime Minister wax eloquent about his government’s new welfare policy, I couldn’t help thinking of Pollyanna. Forty-six-thousand New Zealanders are to be purged from the welfare rolls over just four years, and Mr Key is glad. Why? Because, according to the Prime Minister, unemployed, sickness, invalid and domestic purposes beneficiaries will have individualised care wrapped around them like a cuddly blanket.

It’s a lovely thought. Thousands of young solo-mums will have their lives sensibly organised by an army of highly-qualified case-workers. Job training will be made available to all, while their kiddies are looked after in top-notch child-care centres. New MSD swipe-cards will keep these eager job-seekers safe from the temptations of booze, tobacco and God knows what else. Their weekly rent will afford them warm and commodious accommodation.

And all of this will be achieved at the very reasonable cost of just 50 million additional dollars, spread over four years. Presumably, this “new money” will be added to the $130 million per annum already spent moving beneficiaries from welfare to work. So, let’s see: $50 million divided by four equals $12.5 million per year to be spent assisting 11,500 beneficiaries (46,000 divided by 4) into the paid workforce. Hmmm? That’s just $1,086.95 per beneficiary.

Can professionally trained case-workers, high-quality child-care, affordable and appropriate housing stock and effective job-training services really be provided for just $1,086.95 of additional resources per person?

And what about the Government’s boast that getting 46,000 beneficiaries back into the workforce over four years will save the taxpayer one billion dollars – that’s $250 million a year. Or is it? Don’t forget, the estimated annual cost of getting 11,500 people off the welfare roll is $130 million + $12.5 million or $142.5 million. Which means that the annual net benefit to the taxpayer isn’t $250 million, but a much more modest $107.5 million. The saving over four years is more likely to be $430 million – not $1 billion.

Not forgetting, of course, that for there to be any net benefit to the taxpayer at all sufficient new jobs will have to be created to: 1) absorb the normal number of school-leavers and graduates entering the workforce; 2) re-employ workers in businesses which have been sold, shut down or failed; and 3) provide jobs for the 11,500 “Jobseekers” the Government intends to purge from its rolls every year for the next four years.

That’s a very big ask – especially for a government recovering from a global economic recession which added 60,000 people to the welfare rolls. The Prime Ministers glad-game notwithstanding, New Zealanders’ employment prospects remain bleak.

Isn’t it more likely that the $1,086.95 per person of “new money” will be expended on the “services” of a vastly expanded army of “assessors”? Medical professionals (many of them, perhaps, retired, or holding overseas qualifications) who will be expected to tell thousands of sick citizens that they have been “re-assessed”, and that, overnight, they have quite miraculously become “job fit” and, therefore, ineligible for Mr Key’s new “Jobseeker Support” payment?

And, isn’t it equally likely that the Ministry of Social Development will hire scores of new, minimally-trained, case-workers to harry and prod, prod and harry solo mums and unemployed workers into taking any kind of work, no matter how intermittent or unsuitable, so that the number of citizens in receipt of state support can be shown to be trending downwards?

Or, perhaps, the MSD won’t hire any new staff at all. Perhaps the responsibility for managing those receiving Jobseeker and Sole Parent Support payments will be contracted out to private enterprise. The more jobseekers and sole parents they purged from the welfare rolls, the higher the profits of these private agencies would climb.

It’s what happens in Australia – and it’s what the Welfare Working Group set up by Mr Key’s government recommended.

Pollyanna transformed a whole town by refusing to be beaten-down by circumstances, and by unlocking in her neighbours an altruism they’d long been encouraged to repress. Is it a similar, altruistic, game Mr Key is playing with New Zealand’s beneficiaries? Or will he just be glad to see them gone?

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times, The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The Timaru Herald and The Greymouth Star on Friday, 4 November 2011.

Reflections on the Christchurch Earthquake: Acts of God and Acts of Man

Does Anyone Know Where The Love Of God Goes?: In the face of the earth's blind indifference to human suffering, it is only our species' instinct to reach out and offer assistance that offers the hope of recovery. When disaster has a human origin, however, our altruistic impulses are often deliberately thwarted. Why is that?

I WONDER if Paula Rebstock will be brave enough to tell the thousands of quake-struck Cantabrians who have just lost their livelihoods to get busy "job-seeking".

She wouldn’t dare.

The heartbreaking events of last Tuesday have disrupted the lives of thousands of Christchurch families. Looking east across the city’s devastated eastern suburbs one is daunted by the massive scale of this disaster.

Most New Zealanders have become uncomfortably familiar with the grim scenes of tragedy in Central Christchurch. But very few Kiwis yet grasp just how many Cantabrians are struggling to survive in ordinary suburban streets much like their own.

In these streets you will not find the wrenching drama of the collapsed CTV and Pyne Gould Group buildings, but do not believe for one moment that the after-effects of Tuesday’s killer quake will be any less crushing.

If someone is trapped in a building, the task is simple: get them out. But what do you do when the tasks looming ahead of you are too numerous and frightening to contemplate?

How do you cope when liquefaction has sunk and twisted the foundations of your home and filled the rooms with raw sewage? How do you keep track of Civil Defence advice when there is no electricity to power your radio – and the bathroom transistor lies in pieces on the floor? How do you keep up your family’s morale when the nearest drinkable water is twenty-minutes walk, and sixty-minutes wait, from your front gate? When the family toilet is a hole in the ground?

How can you plan ahead when your employer’s business lies in ruins on the other side of the police cordon? How is he supposed to even make up last week’s pay? And, if, as you suspect, your job has gone, is the company in any position to offer redundancy? How will you continue to pay the mortgage on a house you can no longer live in, from an income stream that no longer exists?

Multiply these questions a thousand-fold and you begin to get some idea of what lies ahead for the people of Christchurch.

And, naturally, their fellow New Zealanders are responding with generosity. There’s simply no question of WINZ employees grilling quake-afflicted mums and dads about their job-seeking efforts. No one’s going to threaten them with "sanctions" if they can’t produce evidence of positions applied for, and interviews attended. When people’s joblessness, homelessness, acute depression and deteriorating health are attributable to an Act of God, we do not blame them – we do everything within our power to help them.

So why is the Chair of the Welfare Working Group, Paula Rebstock, who wouldn’t dream of denying assistance to the victims of the Christchurch earthquake, so ready to harass and punish the victims of man-made disasters?

When a firm goes belly up. When a Board of Directors decides to shut down their uncompetitive New Zealand factories and relocate the manufacturing side of the business to Thailand. When a public-servant-hating Government throws scores of innocent, hard-working New Zealanders out of their jobs. It’s then that the people on the receiving end, through no fault of their own, are confronted with many of the same questions currently challenging the residents of Christchurch’s eastern suburbs.

They may not have experienced physical liquefaction, but the solid foundations upon which they believed their lives had been built have crumbled and sunk away just the same. The power and the water may still be on in their houses, but how do they keep these utilities flowing with no money coming in? How do they pay the mortgage? And, when in it comes to shame and embarrassment, telling family and friends that you’ve lost your job is right up there with having to squat over a hole in the backyard.

Help will come quickly to the people of the eastern suburbs. It must – or Cantabrian morale will collapse, psychological depression will set in, family violence will soar, and a calamitous natural disaster will be compounded by the effects of a social catastrophe.

Paula Rebstock tells us that the number of New Zealanders on benefits is already a social catastrophe, and her report proposes a series of harsh and uncompromising measures to shrink the welfare rolls. It seems to regard beneficiaries not as the victims of disasters they did not make, but must somehow endure: unemployment; spousal abuse or abandonment; mental illness; physical and/or intellectual disability: but as hopelessly dependent children.

Beneficiaries, according to Ms Rebstock, have become the prisoners of their own, and others’, low expectations – and only paid work can set them free.

I dare her to use that sort of exclusionary and condescending language to describe the struggling families of the eastern suburbs.

What the innocent victims of God’s acts, and Man’s, need most is our help – not our disdain.

This essay was sent for publication in The Press of Tuesday, 1 March 2011.

POSTSCRIPT: The Government’s assistance package, announced on Monday, 28 February, further highlights the curious distinction our political leaders continue to draw between Acts of God and Acts of Man. If you’ve lost your job because of the earthquake you’re immediately entitled to receive $500.00 per week (close to the minimum wage). But, if you’ve lost your job because your employer has just been bought out by a multinational company, you’re entitled (after a stand-down period of 12 weeks) to an unemployment benefit of just $294.00 per week (56 percent of the minimum wage). Nothing could better illustrate the punitive assumptions built into our welfare system.

The Domain Of Pain

Striking a Balance: How much unnecessary suffering must our fellow citizens endure before we can be persuaded to take action on their behalf?

"THE DISTINCTION between necessary and unnecessary suffering defines the limits of political rationality", writes Dr Maurice Glasman, Director of the London Metropolitan University’s Faith & Citizenship Programme. "In delineating a domain of pain which is amenable to concerted amelioration from a sphere of grief that is immutable, it defines the power of society to respond to the miseries of life."

Ah, yes, Dr Glasman, but where does "the domain of pain" end and "the sphere of grief" begin? At what point, exactly, does it become politically irrational to attempt to ameliorate the pain of one’s fellow citizens? How immutable does a person’s situation have to be before we’re willing to consign her to that hopeless "sphere of grief"?

These were the sort of questions I wrestled with for most of last Friday at a public forum jointly organised by the University of Auckland and the Child Poverty Action Group.

"Rethinking Welfare For The 21st Century" attracted some pretty heavy hitters – most notably two, top-flight Australian academics, Professor Paul Smyth and Dr Peter Saunders, who’d crossed the ditch to add their intellectual firepower to the artillery of the CPAG angels in what is becoming an increasingly bitter social policy debate.

In addition to being Professor of Social Policy at the University of Melbourne, Peter Smyth is also the General Manager of the Research & Policy Centre of the Brotherhood of St Laurence (a Christian socialist outfit founded by the radical Anglican priest, Father G.K Tucker, in the 1930s).

The work of Paul Saunders – former Director of the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales – has been focused on the non-monetary indicators of social disadvantage. His research has pushed the concept of "adequacy" to the forefront of contemporary academic discussion about poverty relief.

The visitors’ contributions, like their country of origin, were large and sprawling. Information and statistics were applied impasto to a succession of broad canvasses. Indeed, the aptly named Peter and Paul turned out to be a couple of academic evangelists: "big picture" men, engagingly keen on wrenching the welfare debate from the clutches of the Right and "re-framing" it. They came at their Kiwi audience like Aussie pace-bowlers with a new ball.

It took the presentation of another Australian, Eve Bodsworth, to remind us that in spite of the fact that the "Lucky Country" has so much more wealth to distribute, its success in reducing the quantum of unnecessary suffering is really no greater than our own.

Eve had recorded the experiences of Australian solo mums struggling to navigate their way through the labyrinthine cruelties of state and federal welfare bureaucracies. In the plain speech of these institutionally battered women, the "domain of pain" and the "sphere of grief" were brought vividly and heart-wrenchingly to life.

Their words, and those used later by Kay Brereton of the Wellington People’s Centre, was Reality’s answer to the mumbled neoliberal liturgy of Paula Rebstock with which the forum began.

I suppose it was gutsy of the Chair of the Government’s hand-picked Welfare Working Group to show up at all. Certainly it was valuable to learn exactly how vast is the gulf between the world of the Government’s advisers – and its victims.

Ultimately, of course, the Government’s principal advisers are the people themselves, and it was that singularly inconvenient truth that kept breaking through the presentations of Susan St John, Paul Callister, Keith Rankin, Louise Humpage, Cindy Kiro, Manuka Henare, Mike O’Brien and Sue Bradford.

Seventy years ago, New Zealanders won international acclaim for their "concerted amelioration" of unnecessary suffering. The Welfare State decisively re-defined our society’s capacity to "respond to the miseries of life".

Seventy years after Savage & Fraser, and aided by a quarter-century of neoliberal social-policy, New Zealanders’ "pain threshold" has risen dramatically. And though the good people gathered at last Friday’s forum would be loathe to admit it, the "political rationality" of 21st Century capitalism is much less compromised by social sadism than social justice.

This essay was originally published in The Dominion Post, The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 17 September 2010.

Scrooge's Ghosts

"Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" The heartless cry of Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens A Christmas Carol was intended to expose the moral vacuum at the heart of laissez-faire capitalism. The same "airless quality" is present in the first report of the Welfare Working Group. The Painting is Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward by Luke Fildes, 1874. Food and shelter in the "Casual Ward" of the parish workhouse were made available to all comers - but only for a single night.

GORDON CAMPBELL described the report as having a "peculiarly airless quality". It’s authors, hermetically sealed in their ideological cocoon, could have been writing "at any time over the past four decades".

The veteran journalist is right. The report of the Government’s Welfare Working Group (WWG) makes not the slightest attempt to interrogate the flesh and blood world of contemporary unemployment, sole parenting, chronic illness and invalidism. But, then, why would it – when it already knows all the answers?

In the WWG’s own words:

"We have come to the view that the scale and consequences of long-term benefit receipt are deeply concerning and that the system is not achieving what New Zealanders could reasonably expect. It is not sustainable, it does not provide equal and fair opportunities for those people on different benefit types and it is associated with poor social outcomes."

Let’s unpack that extraordinarily dangerous statement.

To begin with, who are the people identified by the WWG Chair, economist Paula Rebstock, as being in "long-term benefit receipt". Overwhelmingly, they are those on sickness, invalids, and domestic purposes benefits: people who can’t work; people whose physical or mental disability makes ordinary paid work impossible; and people engaged in the raising of babies and small children.

What on earth is so "deeply concerning" about providing long-term support to such people? If you’re suffering from a temporary or chronic affliction; if you lack the resources required to look after a young family; then to whom should you appeal for assistance – if not your fellow citizens?

What would be "deeply concerning" is a society which defined sickness, invalidism and sole parenthood as self-inflicted conditions – sins which can only be expiated through the pain of social humiliation and the self-redeeming qualities of unrelenting toil.

The grim workhouses of Victorian England were erected on the flint-hard foundation of these vicious bourgeois prejudices. Deliberately constructed to terrify the poor into righteousness, they were known colloquially as "Bastilles" – after the grim Parisian fortress. So harsh were the regimes within these institutions that many risked death, rather than enter their prison-like gates.

In his celebrated 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, Dickens parodies the harshness of laissez-faire capitalism in the character of Ebenezer Scrooge. Listen to the exchange which a request for a donation to assist the poor provokes:

‘Are there no prisons?’ asked Scrooge.
‘Plenty of prisons,’ said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
‘And the Union workhouses.’ demanded Scrooge. ‘Are they still in operation?’
‘They are. Still,’ returned the gentleman, ‘I wish I could say they were not.’
‘The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?’ said Scrooge.
‘Both very busy, sir.’
‘Oh. I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,’ said Scrooge. ‘I’m very glad to hear it.’

When pressed, Scrooge’s parsimony turns deadly:

‘I wish to be left alone,’ said Scrooge. ‘Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned – they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there.’
‘Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.’
‘If they would rather die,’ said Scrooge, ‘they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.’

There it is again, that airless quality, which Dickens’s storytelling makes explicit by enveloping Scrooge’s counting house in a dismal and noxious fog.

In the 167 years since A Christmas Carol’s first appearance, the world appears to have turned full circle. By the 1970s the Welfare State, which Mickey Savage described as "applied Christianity," had consigned the workhouse and the treadmill to history’s dustbin. But in the ensuing four decades, as Mr Campbell rightly observes, the noxious fog of laissez-faire capitalism has returned – along with the prejudices of epochs past.

And who will melt the hearts of these modern-day Scrooges?

For all their squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching and covetousness, the Victorians still knew themselves to be sinners, and were thus receptive to Dickens’s marvellous parable of Christian redemption.

In 2010, when only the spirits of Gain and Greed are admitted to Society’s feast, who will risk the WWG’s censure by insisting that we can afford to – and should – "make idle people merry"?

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star of Friday, 13 August 2010.