Worst of all, is the mounting evidence that far from reducing poverty, their solutions of padding up benefits and making access to them easier, are sure-fire guarantees that the number of beneficiaries will grow, and poverty along with them. Surely it is high time for a re-think of society’s approach to handouts and the unintended consequences that inevitably flow from too easy access to taxpayers’ money?
Let’s look at a little history. There is almost no evidence that anyone misappropriated old-age pensions that date back to the last days of the Nineteenth Century. Pensions for disabled miners and blind people followed. Nor did “free” access to maternity services and hospital care from the late 1930s do more than make health care available to everyone in most parts of the country. Initially, unemployment benefits were a temporary hand-up, not a hand-out to people in their time of personal emergency. Universal access to education provided opportunities for all citizens to acquire at least the minimum skills necessary to survive in an increasingly complex world. Always the assumption was that people would utilize these services, and respect them for what they were. Yes, there will always be some who can’t work, like the sick and the disabled, and we all agree that they should get assistance from the state.
Starting with the report of the Royal Commission into Social Policy in 1972, public policy began going wrong. Social change was occurring, and producing some outcomes that had flow-on consequences. The young began co-habiting rather than waiting to live together until marriage. Their progeny which previously had been adopted out, often to childless couples, were increasingly kept by their birth mothers. The Royal Commission advocated the introduction of a Domestic Purposes Benefit, or DPB, to assist these mothers and their children. Backed by both National and Labour, the DPB came into force in 1974.
The unintended consequences of the DPB were enormous. Despite the ready availability of the pill and other forms of birth control, living on a benefit clearly had considerable attraction. From about 6,000 benefits paid initially, the number rose to 86,000 fifteen years later and topped 110,000 by the end of the 1990s. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realise that many young women of child-bearing age opted out of seeking paid work, preferring instead to set up homes for their child, or in many cases children, in homes that the taxpayer usually subsidised in additional ways. Marriage rates declined and relationships of short duration became much more common. The glue that had held New Zealand families together was melting. This wasn’t happening in New Zealand alone, but our statistics were among the worst.
This was only the start of rapid further unintended consequences. Women in houses with no man in residence were soon battened on by unattached males who often weren’t the fathers of their children. Assuming that the man was bringing in an income, for a time the public was encouraged to report on welfare fraud where the taxpayer was topping up a household’s income with a DPB. But the rules slipped, the reportage declined, and more and more beneficiary households contained no one who worked. Women gradually refused to name the fathers of their often multiple children. Fewer and fewer fathers were prepared to take any interest in “her” children. Labour’s Carmel Sepuloni gave much of this the official blessing in 2020. The taxpayer is now expected to step in and pay benefits to sustain the whole collapsing outfit.
The new reality meant there was no guarantee that those children would be educated for life. All-too-often, they grew to physical maturity in homes where the males were fly-by-nighters or didn’t work. Boys too often reached adolescence with no father figure or no one in the home who engaged in paid work. Worse, no one ensured they went to school with a packed lunch that the DPB was meant to pay for, while teachers struggled to contend with the substantial social collapse. We are now in a situation where as many as three generations of kids have never experienced the real family lives that as late as the 1960s underpinned New Zealand society. Too many kids either truant from school, disrupt classes, or drift off into petty crime, or worse. Maori are the biggest ethnicity in this cohort. Eighty per cent of Maori children are born to mothers who aren’t married. The prison statistic where 51% of prisoners are Maori tells its own story. But they aren’t the only ones.
Growing up alongside this festering mess is an expanding industry of social workers, charities, bleeding hearts, and aspiring left-wing journalists and politicians who see advantage for themselves in the continuing social collapse. Today, large numbers of jobs depend on social mayhem and the agonies that ensue from it. This industry prevents politicians, who have been at the heart of misplaced policies since the 1970s, from coming to grips with the real causes of the social mess before our eyes. No party seems prepared to make the continued receipt of the DPB conditional on looking after the child in whose name the benefit is paid, feeding it, and getting it to school. The practice whereby the occasional young offender was brought before the beak and a parent cross-examined about why the child was out at night never seems to occur these days. These days, holding parents to account for the children they are paid by the taxpayer to look after is no-go territory.
The old adage that the poor will always be with us is probably still true. But it need not be on the scale of the current monster. It has grown thanks to our politicians, left and right, journalists, charities, and bleeding hearts. Paying able-bodied people to stay at home and not earn their living is probably the biggest social miscalculation of the last sixty years. Unwinding it won’t be easy. There will be howls of outrage led by those who farm poverty. But unless we collectively realise that there is no such thing as a free lunch in life, we will be sentenced to further substantial social failure, continuing under achievement, and escalating crime.
Let’s look at a little history. There is almost no evidence that anyone misappropriated old-age pensions that date back to the last days of the Nineteenth Century. Pensions for disabled miners and blind people followed. Nor did “free” access to maternity services and hospital care from the late 1930s do more than make health care available to everyone in most parts of the country. Initially, unemployment benefits were a temporary hand-up, not a hand-out to people in their time of personal emergency. Universal access to education provided opportunities for all citizens to acquire at least the minimum skills necessary to survive in an increasingly complex world. Always the assumption was that people would utilize these services, and respect them for what they were. Yes, there will always be some who can’t work, like the sick and the disabled, and we all agree that they should get assistance from the state.
Starting with the report of the Royal Commission into Social Policy in 1972, public policy began going wrong. Social change was occurring, and producing some outcomes that had flow-on consequences. The young began co-habiting rather than waiting to live together until marriage. Their progeny which previously had been adopted out, often to childless couples, were increasingly kept by their birth mothers. The Royal Commission advocated the introduction of a Domestic Purposes Benefit, or DPB, to assist these mothers and their children. Backed by both National and Labour, the DPB came into force in 1974.
The unintended consequences of the DPB were enormous. Despite the ready availability of the pill and other forms of birth control, living on a benefit clearly had considerable attraction. From about 6,000 benefits paid initially, the number rose to 86,000 fifteen years later and topped 110,000 by the end of the 1990s. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to realise that many young women of child-bearing age opted out of seeking paid work, preferring instead to set up homes for their child, or in many cases children, in homes that the taxpayer usually subsidised in additional ways. Marriage rates declined and relationships of short duration became much more common. The glue that had held New Zealand families together was melting. This wasn’t happening in New Zealand alone, but our statistics were among the worst.
This was only the start of rapid further unintended consequences. Women in houses with no man in residence were soon battened on by unattached males who often weren’t the fathers of their children. Assuming that the man was bringing in an income, for a time the public was encouraged to report on welfare fraud where the taxpayer was topping up a household’s income with a DPB. But the rules slipped, the reportage declined, and more and more beneficiary households contained no one who worked. Women gradually refused to name the fathers of their often multiple children. Fewer and fewer fathers were prepared to take any interest in “her” children. Labour’s Carmel Sepuloni gave much of this the official blessing in 2020. The taxpayer is now expected to step in and pay benefits to sustain the whole collapsing outfit.
The new reality meant there was no guarantee that those children would be educated for life. All-too-often, they grew to physical maturity in homes where the males were fly-by-nighters or didn’t work. Boys too often reached adolescence with no father figure or no one in the home who engaged in paid work. Worse, no one ensured they went to school with a packed lunch that the DPB was meant to pay for, while teachers struggled to contend with the substantial social collapse. We are now in a situation where as many as three generations of kids have never experienced the real family lives that as late as the 1960s underpinned New Zealand society. Too many kids either truant from school, disrupt classes, or drift off into petty crime, or worse. Maori are the biggest ethnicity in this cohort. Eighty per cent of Maori children are born to mothers who aren’t married. The prison statistic where 51% of prisoners are Maori tells its own story. But they aren’t the only ones.
Growing up alongside this festering mess is an expanding industry of social workers, charities, bleeding hearts, and aspiring left-wing journalists and politicians who see advantage for themselves in the continuing social collapse. Today, large numbers of jobs depend on social mayhem and the agonies that ensue from it. This industry prevents politicians, who have been at the heart of misplaced policies since the 1970s, from coming to grips with the real causes of the social mess before our eyes. No party seems prepared to make the continued receipt of the DPB conditional on looking after the child in whose name the benefit is paid, feeding it, and getting it to school. The practice whereby the occasional young offender was brought before the beak and a parent cross-examined about why the child was out at night never seems to occur these days. These days, holding parents to account for the children they are paid by the taxpayer to look after is no-go territory.
The old adage that the poor will always be with us is probably still true. But it need not be on the scale of the current monster. It has grown thanks to our politicians, left and right, journalists, charities, and bleeding hearts. Paying able-bodied people to stay at home and not earn their living is probably the biggest social miscalculation of the last sixty years. Unwinding it won’t be easy. There will be howls of outrage led by those who farm poverty. But unless we collectively realise that there is no such thing as a free lunch in life, we will be sentenced to further substantial social failure, continuing under achievement, and escalating crime.
Historian Dr Michael Bassett, a Minister in the Fourth Labour Government. This article was first published HERE
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