The Bright Sunlit Uplands Of Radicalism: Metiria Turei And The Greens Set The 2017 Election On Fire.

Do You Hear The People Sing? Metiria Turei’s pledge that: “We will not be a government that uses poverty as a weapon against its own people”, is nothing less than a call to arms. Requiring the MSD to stop treating its “clients” as second-class citizens: making a bonfire of work tests, drug tests, bedmate tests, and all the other oppressive means of “sanctioning” beneficiaries, will have the same electrifying effect as the cry which swept through Paris on 14 July 1789 – “To the Bastille!”

 

METIRIA TUREI has rescued the 2017 General Election from the timidity and moral squalor into which it was fast descending. In a speech that brought tears to her listeners’ eyes and cheers to their throats, the Greens’ co-leader carried her party out of the shadows of moderation and into the bright sunlit uplands of radicalism that have always been its natural habitat. The Green Party’s AGM of 15-16 July 2017 will go down in history as the moment when it repudiated the “Insider’s” devilish bargains – and reclaimed its soul.

 

Turei’s revolutionary plans for New Zealand’s social welfare system will be examined below, but first a word or two about her prescience in regard to Winston Peters and NZ First.

 

Clearly, there is now no disputing her warnings about the racist implications of NZ First policy. What looked like gratuitous and counter-productive name-calling a week ago has been vindicated emphatically by Winston Peters’ utterances of the weekend just past.

 

It’s one thing to allow race and immigration to become confused (NZ First is by no means unique in this regard!) but it is quite another to call for a binding referendum on the retention of the Maori Seats. The last senior politician to draw a bead on the Maori Seats was Don Brash – and New Zealand only dodged that bullet by the skin of its teeth!

 

So, let’s be clear: there is nothing democratic about demanding a binding referendum on this issue. On the contrary, it is a shameless appeal to the very worst majoritarian instincts of the New Zealand electorate. Allowing 85 percent of the population to determine the fate of a representative institution dedicated to protecting the rights of the country’s indigenous 15 percent is not only reactionary, it is a direct threat to the “public welfare, peace and tranquillity of New Zealand”.  In such circumstances, no progressive New Zealander could possibly consider voting for NZ First.

 

By the same token, The Greens’ revolutionary welfare policies make it difficult for any progressive New Zealander to vote for anybody else.

 

As anyone who has read the heartfelt postings of people living at the razor’s edge of our welfare system (the latest one is here) knows, the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) presides over an empire of cruelty with few precedents in New Zealand history. The National Government boasts about the numbers who have been removed from the welfare rolls since they assumed office. That this is due to the sheer awfulness of being caught up in the Work and Income mincing machine is an “achievement” they are much less keen to acknowledge.

 

Though most Kiwis remain oblivious to what is happening behind the security-guarded doors of their welfare system, there are tens-of-thousands of families with direct personal experience of what it’s like to be a beneficiary – or the loved one/s of a beneficiary. To these folk, Metiria’s pledge that: “We will not be a government that uses poverty as a weapon against its own people”, is nothing less than a call to arms. Requiring the MSD to stop treating its “clients” as second-class citizens: making a bonfire of work tests, drug tests, bedmate tests, and all the other oppressive means of “sanctioning” beneficiaries; will have the same electrifying effect as the cry which swept through Paris on 14 July 1789 – “To the Bastille!”

 

The question is: do the Greens possess the electoral infrastructure to spread the good news to the tens-of-thousands of disillusioned voters who stand to gain from their policies. These marginalised citizens (minimum wage workers as well as beneficiaries) now have a very good reason to enrol and vote. The Greens boast that, this election, they have more campaigning resources than ever before. Here is their chance to prove it.

 

One reason to be hopeful that beneficiaries will hear about the Greens’ revolutionary welfare policies is Metiria’s extraordinarily courageous decision to admit that when, as a solo mum, she was faced with the choice of lying to the welfare authorities, or letting her child go hungry, she lied. Except that the story does not end there. Like Jean Valjean, the hero of Victor Hugo’s novel, Les Miserables, Metiria made sure that the many opportunities which flowed from her transgression were turned towards making her society a better place.

 

Hugo wrote of his sprawling literary masterpiece that:

 

“So long as there shall exist, by reason of law and custom, a social condemnation, which, in the face of civilization, artificially creates hells on earth, and complicates a destiny that is divine with human fatality; so long as the three problems of the age—the degradation of man by poverty, the ruin of women by starvation, and the dwarfing of childhood by physical and spiritual night—are not solved; so long as, in certain regions, social asphyxia shall be possible; in other words, and from a yet more extended point of view, so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this cannot be useless.”

 

Any more than Metiria’s confession, or, the Greens transformative welfare policies, can be useless. They are the stuff out of which social justice is made. Meaning that, if Labour wishes to catch up with the only progressive coalition partner now available to them, then they had better start running hard – now.

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Monday, 17 July 2017.

The Coefficients Of Despair: MSD's Plan To Rescue The Poor From Themselves.

Pre-Crime-Fighting: The Ministry for Social Development's interest in Preventive Risk Modelling, as a technique for identifying and rescuing vulnerable children before they grow up to become a burden on society, is strikingly reminiscent of the plot of the science-fiction movie Minority Report. Accusations of racial profiling are inevitable.

 

HOW LONG WILL IT BE, I wonder, before the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) is accused of racial profiling? Given the statistical techniques currently being developed by the Ministry to identify “vulnerable” clients, such an accusation is practically inevitable.

 

In collaboration with the University of Auckland, the MSD is perfecting a technique for filtering out all but the worst offenders when it comes to deficient education, poor health, inadequate housing, a history of family violence and/or criminal offending. A filtering process relying upon such variables, however, cannot fail to generate a strong racial bias. In terms of the raw numbers, Pakeha will probably still predominate, but Maori and Pasifika will, almost certainly, find themselves significantly over-represented.

 

The MSD’s problem is that they cannot avoid using such controversial techniques for identifying vulnerable clients. Downside political risks notwithstanding, they are fundamental to the National Government’s new approach to managing New Zealand’s welfare system. Expressed in its simplest terms, this new approach is about identifying the individuals and families most likely to become a long-term drain of the state’s resources – and making sure that they don’t.

 

Serious criminal offending, for example, imposes colossal costs upon the state. A person convicted of murder, manslaughter, rape, child abuse, aggravated robbery and/or serious assault can expect to serve anything from 5 to 20 years in prison – at a minimum cost to the taxpayer of $100,000 per year. And that figure does not include the cost of repairing and rehabilitating the victims of criminal offending. The enormous expense of hospitalisation. The loss of productivity associated with the victims’ pain and suffering. All these social costs could be dramatically reduced if the people most likely to impose them could be rescued, early, from themselves.

 

One of the solutions, according to the MSD, may be found in the statistical technique known as “predictive risk modelling”. According to the Ministry’s own website, a ground-breaking piece of research undertaken by a project team, led by Professor Rhema Vaithianathan of the University of Auckland, has “developed a predictive risk model for children in a cohort who had contact with the benefit system before age two. These children accounted for 83% of all children for whom findings of substantiated maltreatment were recorded by age 5.”

 

The Ministry further reported that “predictive risk modelling had a fair, approaching good, power in predicting which of the young children having contact with the benefit system would be the subject of substantiated maltreatment by age five. This is similar to the predictive strength of mammograms for detecting breast cancer in the general population.”

 

Given the well-attested link between childhood abuse and serious criminal offending in later life, the possibilities arising out of Professor Vaithianathan’s and her team’s research are obvious. If predictive risk modelling (PRM) could identify with relative precision which children, in which families, were most likely to suffer abuse, appropriate “wrap-around” intervention by the MSD, the Police, Child Youth and Family, the Department of Corrections and the Department of Courts could ensure that the predicted abuse (and everything likely to flow from it in the future) never happened.

 

The popular culture reference you’re looking for here is the film Minority Report. Based on the novella by science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick, the movie is set in a futuristic Washington DC, where a special “precrime” squad of police officers use “psychic technology” to arrest and convict murderers before they commit their crime.

 

Now, it would be quite unfair to suggest that PRM is in any way analogous to “psychic technology”, but it’s undeniable that the former’s widespread use in our social welfare system would give rise to just as many ethical questions as Philip K. Dick’s pre-crime-fighters.

 

In the section of the University of Auckland study relating to PRMs ethical ramifications, the Project Team drew the MSD’s attention to the dangers of the data arising from its application being misinterpreted:

 

“It must be acknowledged that some of the data and predictor variables used by the proposed model are highly likely to be misinterpreted by at least some audiences. The decision not to report coefficients in this report, for instance, was based in part upon the belief that the insignificant contribution those factors make to the power of the tool was outweighed by the likelihood of crude and misleading interpretations of that information given existing social prejudices and stereotypes.”

 

Which brings us back to our original question concerning racial profiling. It would be most surprising if the unwillingness of the Auckland academics to identify all the coefficients used in their predictive algorithms was not, at least in part, related to race as a predictive factor in the maltreatment of children. It would, however, be equally surprising if the prospect of Maori and Pasifika families being targeted for special “precrime” intervention on behalf of their infant offspring was not met with loud, sustained, and entirely justifiable protest.

 

There is something profoundly disturbing in the very notion that science possesses the power to predict who will – and who will not – inflict harm upon their fellow human-beings. That, somehow, a computer programme can winnow out from tens-of-thousands, the one family in which violence will be done to a child.

 

Because, even if we could be sure that the child identified through PRM was bound, in every case, to suffer abuse if some form of welfare intervention did not take place, there is another, deeper, question that must be confronted. If individual cases of abuse could be predicted and prevented, what incentive would there be to address the systemic causes of human tragedy?

 

If Maori and Pasifika appear more often than they should among the perpetrators of child abuse it is only because they appear more often than they should among all the other “coefficients” of dysfunction: illiteracy; the diseases of poverty and overcrowding; the psychological deterioration caused by long periods of unemployment; the mental disintegration associated with drug addiction. These pathologies are the symptoms of class as well as racial oppression. Capitalism and colonialism are “coefficients” too.

 

Let us leave the final word to another artefact of pop-culture. Perhaps the most surprising of all Elvis Presley’s hits is his extraordinary rendition of Scott Davis’s song, In The Ghetto. To those seeking to transform our social welfare system into something resembling science-fiction, I would strongly recommend Elvis’s poignant retelling of the story of a boy whose fate was sealed at birth: not by the choices he or his mamma made, but by the system that left them with so few:

 

And as her young man dies

On a cold and grey Chicago morning,

Another little baby child is born

In the Ghetto.

 

 

Video courtesy of YouTube

 

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 3 June 2015.