Child Poverty: The Manifestation Of Parental Sin?

Simple Message - Contradictory Response: In the minds of many conservative New Zealanders a battle rages between their instinctive urge to protect and defend our species’ most vulnerable members, and an equally powerful conviction that their children, as extensions of themselves, constitute a form of personal property – over whom the community and/or the state should exercise only a strictly limited authority.

 

WHEN IT COMES to children, the attitudes of New Zealanders are contradictory and hard to fathom. On the one hand, we respond with genuine anguish to media accounts of infants fallen victim to adult violence. On the other, we sign monster petitions demanding the right to administer corporal punishment to our own children. If asked, we will agree emphatically that “the needs of the child must always come first”. But, when welfare agencies and anti-poverty campaigners attempt to do just that, we attack them for undermining parental responsibility.

 

It’s as if, in the mind of every Kiwi, a battle rages between the instinctive urge to protect and defend our species’ most vulnerable members; and an equally powerful conviction that our children, as extensions of ourselves, constitute a form of personal property – over whom the community and/or the state should exercise only a strictly limited authority.

 

Nowhere are these contradictory impulses more clearly on display than in the current debate over whether or not our schools should provide their pupils with meals. Wrapped around this narrowly-focused proposal to “Feed the Kids” is a much wider debate about whether or not a substantial minority of New Zealand children (estimated at 270,000) are living in poverty.

 

Conservative New Zealanders take umbrage at the very suggestion that such a large number of their fellow citizens could be living in such conditions. They simply deny that child poverty exists. What they believe New Zealand is witnessing, in the children who arrive at school every morning hungry, unshod and ill-clothed, is evidence not of inadequate resources, but of poor parenting.

 

According to these conservative New Zealanders, thousands of Kiwi parents are making poor choices about their priorities. What’s more, the institutions of the welfare state, by failing to impose a more appropriate set of priorities and enforce more sensible parental choices, have ensured that the perfectly adequate resources allocated to welfare beneficiaries are both misapplied and misspent.

 

Underpinning this conservative view is what can only be described as an alarmingly eugenicist set of assumptions.

 

So many poor parental choices, the conservatives argue, is proof that a certain (and seemingly quite large) percentage of the population are simply not up to the role of parenting. The straightforward, and brutal, solution? Do not allow such people to breed – or, if they do, take away their children and place them with couples whose parental choices pass muster.

 

It was this sort of thinking that, in Australia, led to the “Stolen Generation”. Thousands of Aboriginal children were forcibly taken from their parents and placed with God-fearing, upstanding, middle-class White Australians. The parental choices of the latter, it was assumed, would be far superior to those of Aboriginal Australians. The cycle of poverty and abuse which plagued indigenous communities could thus be broken, and in just a few generations the Aboriginal “problem” would disappear.

 

The colossal failure of imagination which the “Stolen Generation” policy represented; the singular lack of empathy which made its implementation such a shameful chapter in Australian history; similarly disfigures the analysis of New Zealand’s conservatives.

 

It is common to hear talkback callers and conservative commentators declare that no matter how hard family life has become and no matter how tough their financial circumstances, no parent should ever be excused for allowing their child to go to school hungry.

 

The mental, physical and moral disintegration afflicting individuals subjected to prolonged periods of social isolation and material deprivation is well-attested in the academic literature. The collapse of self-esteem; the recourse to alcohol and drugs as a means of deadening intense emotional distress; the increased propensity to explosive episodes of violence and self-harm: all of these symptoms – the entirely predictable consequences of poverty – are encountered by WINZ staff, police officers, social-workers, GPs, practice nurses and teachers every day of the week. They are not, however, encountered with any frequency by those who claim there is no excuse for sending a child to school hungry.

 

The conservatives have become intellectually immune to even the logical inconsistencies of their hard-line attitudes. They refuse to differentiate the weak and broken-spirited adults of their analysis from the innocent and suffering children. As mere extensions of the pathetic human-beings they were foolish enough to choose as their mothers and fathers, the children of poverty are clearly expected to go down with the parental ship.

 

The polarisation of New Zealand society into “comfortable” and “struggling” has been accompanied by a not unrelated polarisation of political convictions. Among the comfortably-off we are witnessing a wholesale rejection of the paternalism which characterised the politics of earlier conservative leaders like Gordon Coates and Keith Holyoake. In its place we find a new enthusiasm for the politics of exclusion, punishment and shame.

 

As if our children’s only role is to embody for posterity their parents’ blameless success or guilty failure.

 

This essay was originally published by The Press of Tuesday, 21 May 2013.

John Key's "New Men" Could Learn A Lot From National's "Wise Heads"

Risen Without Trace: John Key and Steven Joyce are the true heirs of Muldoonism which overturned the "natural" social hierachy of Old Values, Old Families and Old Money. If Jack is as good as his masters, then, eventually, his masters will end up being no worse, and no better, than Jack.

THERE WAS A TIME when even the National Party had some class. It might have given us Sid Holland and Rob Muldoon, but it also gave us Ralph Hanan, Tom Shand, Brian Talboys, Alan Highet, Les Gandar and Simon Power. Following every election, former provincial chairmen of Federated Farmers and sharp-eyed small town accountants would be met at the doors of Parliament by a sleek collection of urbane professionals. These men knew how to smooth the rough edges off their doltish country cousins and how to keep them at a safe distance from all those responsibilities of government requiring just a little more in the way of intellectual refinement than the average backbencher could muster.

It was, of course, an era when most conservatives (and even some on the Left) still respected the “natural social hierarchies”. Old money wisely invested, an excellent education at expensive private schools, a decent law degree leading to a partnership in a well-established practice – these were the things that gave a man the “right to rule”.

Privately, such men would acknowledge that their side had rather seriously “dropped the ball” in the 1920s and 30s. They knew how large a debt they owed to men like Savage, Fraser and Nash who had pulled local capitalism’s irons out of the fire of the Great Depression. The value of Labour’s stabilisation policies – especially in the countryside – were quietly acknowledged and National was in no hurry to get rid of them. The unions needed a firm hand, of course, which is why they elevated a man like Sid Holland every now and again to put a bit of stick about. But, after the thrashing, it was to “Kiwi Keith” Holyoake that the “wise heads” of National turned. Someone who could keep the peace.

Though people were slow to register the fact, it was Rob Muldoon who undermined the “natural hierarchies” of New Zealand politics and opened the gates of New Zealand conservatism to the barbarians.

Some historians have described Muldoon as “the best leader Labour never had” and that, of course, was the explanation for his political success. As Labour, in its own way, began paying homage to the “natural social hierarchies” by selecting young urban professionals like Dr Michael Bassett and Richard Prebble to represent its solid working-class constituencies, Labour’s supporters began edging away. Muldoon’s pugnacious populism gave them somewhere to go.

Political Superstar: Rob Muldoon kept Labour out, and let Neoliberalism in.

“Rob’s Mob”, both within the National Party and the wider electorate, represented the revolt of the “average Kiwi” and the “ordinary bloke” against the “natural social hierarchies” of education, intellectual and cultural accomplishment and inherited wealth. Muldoon’s appointment of Merv Wellington as Minister of Education and Bert Walker as Minister of Social Welfare was all the proof sophisticated New Zealanders required that the Visigoths had entered Rome.

That Muldoon turned out to be the staunchest defender of the “stabilised” New Zealand society which emerged from the Second World War is ironic. Well before most New Zealanders, he understood how deadly a threat the “free market” ideology posed to the unlikely alliance which, since the early 1950s, had united the fortunes of New Zealand’s conservative working-class with its paternalistic, state-subsidised, ruling-class. Neoliberalism was a radical economic and social doctrine destined to sweep away not only the organised labour movement, but also the social power of both intellectual accomplishment and “old money”. Muldoon’s populism undermined the “wise heads” by proclaiming the “Mob” their equals, but in doing so he opened the door to a radical right-wing movement that would undermine the “Mob’s” security forever. Henceforth, the only hierarchy that mattered would be the hierarchy of money.

And so, in 2012, the National Party is led by a man with a personal fortune of $55 million. Not old money, either, but as new as computerised currency trading. His right-hand man, Steven Joyce, is another of these “new” men, these National politicians who’ve “risen without trace”. Entrepreneurial in politics as well as business, their values are those of self-made people everywhere. Only results count. Intelligence must pay its way. The world does not reward you for what you know, only for what you do. The successful man backs his judgement by any and all available means. Truth counts for a great deal less than utility.

Overwhelmingly, they are men and women who dwell in the present. Because nothing is more subversive of their self-perception than the past. History reminds them that, ultimately, more men fail than succeed, and that nothing has more utility than the truth. History reveals that the only deeds which endure are those that enrich the human condition and extend the range and depth of human knowledge: that giving counts for more than taking.

History tells them that the quality which gave the governments of National’s “wise heads” both their class, and their longevity, was humility.

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 10 July 2012.