Bryan Bruce | 27 Oct 2014
On John Key’s website you will find the following quote:”We know children growing up in a home where at least one parent is working are better off. That’s why we have such a strong focus on reforming the welfare system, to support more parents to find work and move off welfare. We want parents to help themselves rise out of poverty. The way to do this is through paid work. Our reforms invest in the potential of New Zealanders to work, better their situation and set a good example for their kids.” ( source http://www.johnkey.co.nz/archives/1667-Keynotes-Tackling-poverty.html )
It’s a clear statement of his ideology so let’s examine it.
“We know children growing up in a home where at least one parent is working are better off.”
No we don’t.
What we know, from one of the Ministry Of Social Development’s own reports , is that 2 out of every 5 children in poverty live in families with at least one adult in full-time work. ( Source: B Perry Household Incomes In New Zealand : Trends In Indicators of Inequality And Hardship 2011)
Clearly work on it’s own is not a solution to poverty because we have Working Poor – people who work all week and cannot meet the cost of the rent, food, electricity, transport and all the rest of life’s essentials. So to “help parents help themselves rise out of poverty ” as John Key puts it , you not only have to create jobs you have to pay realistic wages. Low wages simply keep the Poor – poor.
Just how unrealistic and unfair wages are in New Zealand can be seen in the above graph.
It was supplied to me by Bill Rosenberg who is the Economist and Policy Director for The New Zealand Council Of Trade Unions. Bill is one of the experts I consulted when making MIND THE GAP . He was patient with me as I struggled to understand some aspects of our economic system and very generous with his knowledge. ( He has a B.Com in Economics, a BSc in Mathematics and a PhD ) . The graph actually comes from a text book on the NZ Economy and tracks the real average hourly rate ( the yellow line) against how much each of us is contributing the nations wealth – expressed as GDP percapita (the red line)
If you follow the two lines you will see that before 1984 (when we switched to Neo-liberal economics) workers received a far greater share of the nation’s wealth than today.
Using a second graph Bill explained to me that from 1990 to 2010 productivity rose 48% but the average wage rose only 18%.
So what neo-liberal economics has created (and what Treasury and John Key’s government perpetuates) is a system that increases profits for management , shareholders and business owners and lowered the wages of the workers ( whose labours helped create that profit) to the point where many bread winners cannot earn enough to meet their family’s living costs.
As for the last sentence in the John Key quote above :
“Our reforms invest in the potential of New Zealanders to work, better their situation and set a good example for their kids.”
The insinuation is that parents on welfare are there simply because they are lazy. This is certainly not true of the many parents I have met who are struggling to get by. They want to work and most do, but there is a lack of jobs and those jobs that do exist pay minimum wage ( which as comedian Chris Rock recently put it ” Minimum wage means – I’d like to pay you less but it’s against the law.”)
The other flaw in this ideology is that inference that the only valuable work is paid work.
Again not true.
A lot of the most important work done in our society involves no exchange of money. Parenting and bringing up the next generation is a case in point.
To insist that a Mum stacks shelves in a supermarket to make a few dollars while someone else looks after her baby makes absolutely no sense to me. We cannot build a “better future “for our country by short changing our children on the time, love and attention of their Mums and Dads in the pre-school years.
In short, you cannot measure all human worth in dollars and cents – and we certainly cannot solve the problem of child poverty by continuing with the poverty of mind and spirit that created it.
