"I'm From The Minister's Office - And I'm Here To Help." Paula Rebstock provided the former Welfare Minister, Paula Bennett, with a far-Right rationale for purging the welfare rolls. The present Minister, Anne Tolley, is now steering her, like a neoliberal battleship, in the direction of Child, Youth and Family.
I MUST CONFESS to being unimpressed by Paula Rebstock. The
only time I have ever encountered her in the flesh was at a seminar organised
by the Child Poverty Action Group’s Susan St John. Ms Rebstock mumbled through
a page or two of deadly-dull bureaucratese, failed to answer a couple of
questions, and left.
This lacklustre performance confirmed my view of Ms Rebstock
as, ideologically-speaking, a safe pair of hands. Her review of New Zealand’s
welfare system is as bloodless a piece of neoliberal “analysis” as any
right-wing government could hope for – and its ramifications are still reverberating through
beneficiary households across New Zealand.
Not that Ms Rebstock will ever witness the effects of her
recommendations. Not for her the moral anguish of Work & Income
case-workers forced (on pain of becoming beneficiaries themselves) to purge as
many of their “clients” from the benefit rolls as possible. She’s never there
to hear the sobs of a woman already down on her luck, when the fine-grinding
machinery of the MSD delivers an even bigger sack of shame and misery to her
door. It will not be Ms Rebstock who ends up staring into the twin muzzles of a
double-barrelled shotgun wielded by a crazed beneficiary with nowhere left to
go and absolutely nothing to lose.
The Rebstocks of this world are spared the close-up
consequences of their recommendations. They are experts at reading between the
lines of their terms of reference to discover exactly what it is that their
commissioning ministers are expecting from them – and delivering it. So it was
with Paula Bennett’s welfare review, and so it will be with Anne Tolley’s
review of Child Youth and Family (CYF).
Once again in the lead role, Ms Rebstock will not have to
work too hard to decode the meaning of Ms Tolley’s comment that: “CYF has
drafted its own internal modernisation strategy and while it is a good starting
point, it doesn't go far enough.”
It is an axiom of the neoliberal credo that civil servants
are the last people one should consult to discover what is wrong with the civil
service. Where others might see a group of dedicated professionals struggling
to do their jobs with insufficient staff and dwindling resources, the
neoliberal sees only a clutch of self-aggrandizing empire-builders, hell-bent
on squandering as much of the taxpayers hard-earned cash as they can hood-wink
their ministers into giving them.
For the neoliberal “reviewer”, any “modernisation strategy”
prepared by CYF’s own staff could only be a thinly-disguised plea for more
staff and more resources. Even worse, it would, almost certainly, be based on
the professional judgement of its miracle-working “back room” managers, and informed
by the “front-line” experiences of its exhausted social workers. Obviously, such
people lack all objectivity – not to mention the “extensive governance experience”
of Ms Rebstock. When it comes to developing a “modernisation strategy”, or
constructing an “improvement framework”, she will know, to the millimetre,
exactly how far is “far enough”.
It’s possible, of course, that Ms Rebstock has grown tired
of churning out reviews which blithely recommend the application of market
instruments, metrics and incentives to the State’s dysfunctional delivery of
social services. Perhaps, determined that this commission will be her last, she
won’t present a report telling the minister what she wants to hear, but what
she needs to know.
That would entail a comprehensive critique of New Zealand’s
post-colonial economic and social system, and the fate of the colonised peoples
it has swallowed. It would expose the profound lack of realism in CYF’s official mission by
acknowledging the futility of attempting to repair the damage inflicted upon
children and young persons by broken families, when the forces responsible for
breaking those families in the first instance form no part of its remit.
Such a review would point out the impossibility of
accomplishing genuine healing in circumstances where the only people in a
position to assist the victims of abuse and neglect are people who were
themselves the victims of abuse and neglect – not only by their own families,
but by the State.
If Ms Rebstock really wanted to be rid of the burden of
delivering reports which offer no better solutions than crude cost-cutting, outsourcing a growing number of CYF's functions to the private sector, and imposing ever more draconian
sanctions upon the delinquent behaviour of an underclass entirely lacking the wherewithal
to be anything other than a social disaster, then she would tender very different advice to Ms Tolley. She would write a report that
demanded for children, young persons and their families the dignity of work;
the security of a well-appointed and affordable dwelling; a comprehensive
mental health service for those whose minds are damaged; and a CYF agency in
full possession of the staff and the resources needed to fulfil its legal and
moral obligations to this nation’s most vulnerable citizens.
In other words, Ms Rebstock and her fellow review panellists
( Police Commissioner, Mike Bush; Charity Director, Duncan Dunlop; Maori
Advisor, Helen Leahy; and Psychology Professor Ritchie Poulton) would
present a report recommending the dismantling of the entire neoliberal regime.
You’ll forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.
This essay was post on
The Daily Blog and Bowalley Road of Thursday, 2 April 2015.
