Poverty Watch 25

13 comments on “Poverty Watch 25 ”

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1. johnm 1

   30 March 2013 at 5:03 pm

   No comments so far because we are a selfish money grubbing out for personal advantage society. Concern for our fellow New Zealander’s has become a quaint weird fossil from a bygone age. The shallow hologram Of John Yankee rules supreme.
   • Daveosaurus 1.1

     30 March 2013 at 6:47 pm

     More likely ‘no comments so far because the site’s been down all day’.
   • lprent 1.2

     31 March 2013 at 1:56 am

     Nope – no comments because there was a database problem today that jammed the system up…
2. Colonial Viper 2

   30 March 2013 at 7:04 pm

   The financialised, consumption promoting, Chicago school economic version of capitalism is the big problem here.

   It chains governments to needing exponential economic growth. It encourages debt driven consumption of things that we do not need. And worst of all it rewards companies and decision makers with bigger profits if they encourage the paying public to burn through non-renewable resources as fast as possible while paying their workers as little as possible. In this model, companies like Apple are of course huge successes. (They did have to pay a little bit more for suicide nets around their subcontractor’s factory buildings because Chinese workers kept leaping out of the windows on an inconvenient basis).

   Convincing top decision makers, political parties, and privileged consumers that the wealthiest need to accept a much smaller cut of the pie so that more can be shared around is going to be a real trick.

   In the past, the neoliberal answer was…we’ll just continue to “grow the pie” so that there is more for everyone. Well, that answer has been a recognised failure since “Limits to Growth”.

   In the short term, yes it’s crucial to spend more money on providing resources and opportunities for young children.

   In the long term, unless we get our political economics sorted out, we’ll still be a country with very well educated, poorly paid, under employed workers wondering why they can’t save up enough for a first home deposit, even though they are working over 50 hours a week. (Ahhh, did I say in the long term? I meant right now).
   • Colonial Viper 2.1

     30 March 2013 at 7:09 pm

     tl:dr – until we have a vastly different political economic discussion in this country, all we’re going to achieve are child poverty band aids which get ripped back off whenever the Tories (or Treasury Labour) are back in charge, until cumulative resource depletion and peak debt stops us from applying even the most basic sticky plasters.
   • Draco T Bastard 2.2

     31 March 2013 at 4:11 pm

     +1

     The economic system that has been forced upon us is the cause of poverty. This government and all the governments going back to the 4th Labour actually want more of it. That means more poverty, more crime and more of our wealth going to the rich few.
3. Olwyn 3

   30 March 2013 at 7:29 pm

   I think I am repeating something Just Saying has said earlier, but I think that the focus should be on poverty per se rather than child poverty. So long as we are living under neo-liberal governments, an emphasis on child poverty is just as likely as not to open up the conceptual space for the privatised orphanage, or the fostering of the children of the poor by the middle class in order to help pay their mortgages. Child poverty is a result of parental poverty, and the two should not be thought of separately. A child should not be put in the position where it blames its parents for conditions that have been inflicted on them.
   • just saying 3.1

     31 March 2013 at 11:24 am

     I think framing poverty as “child poverty” is dangerous. It is a right wing narrative about neglectful and abusive parents vs the innocent and therefore “deserving” poor (“lil chillins”). It under-represents the extent of poverty. When we are only every told of the X number of children living in poverty the actual size of the problem is sanitised, and the lives and the suffering of many are made to vanish like some kind of forgiven debt.

     While it is essential the public is made aware of the consequences of child poverty at every opportunity, constantly doing so without mentioning the reality of poverty for adults suggests that for an adult, a time living in need isn’t such a bad thing (and may even be necessary to get ‘them’ off their lazy arses. ), In reality it is a quicksand that many, maybe most, will never escape, no matter how hard they fight, and a life of unrelenting stress, at times at an intensity that a CEO or a brain surgeon, may never experience in their whole lives.

     Sue Bradford, in her last blog at “The daily blog’ is careful to reframe the narrative from the right:

     I feel sick every time I hear a National Party MP lamenting child poverty. Their welfare policies condemn ever increasing numbers of adults and children to stressful, demeaning penury, with consequences that can last a lifetime

     (bold mine)

     http://thedailyblog.co.nz/2013/03/27/destroying-lives-to-win-votes-nationals-anti-beneficiary-rampage-continues/
4. xtasy 4

   31 March 2013 at 1:49 am

   Re Maori health and unemployment, I must sincerely ask, what are those established corporations doing, that were set up to manage investments and run certain businesses (e.g. in fisheries) for their iwis and whanau?

   It is no easy task, for sure, and colonialism and racism are hurdles and certainly impact on people’s ability to succeed, but then again, perhaps develop with some resources and opportunities that may here and there exist.

   Government must do more also, but this one does not care much. Even Labour led governments did not offer Maori all that much, hence we have Turia and her colleagues in the Maori Party.

   If I was Maori, I would not trust any Pakeha dominated governments for a start, I would try and seek the means and legal rights to establish my own way of running collectives, companies, corporations or whatever, and I would support and involve my own people, educate, train, support and achieve, without the patronising way that too many NZ governments have treated Maori.

   It seem Tuhoe are about to realise some potentials. That will be an interesting space to watch.

   Apart from this, yes, NZ governments will naturally need to continue supporting and resourcing Maori in many ways, given the fact that the past injustices are not going to be resolved by some treaty settlements alone.

   But it is justified, to expect some self reliance, as that is what Maori always wanted. Give them a chance and it could work well in future.
   • marty mars 4.1

     31 March 2013 at 11:02 am

     The entities created to accept putea from the government (because they wouldn’t pay it out any other way) are doing quite a lot but it is the governments job to look after all citizens and too often they want to lay the responsibility on iwi and blame them and reduce their (governmental) responsibilities. This is a continued part of colonisation and victim blaming. And it is different from iwi demanding tino rangatiratanga for their people.
5. karol 5

   31 March 2013 at 8:50 am

   Two related UK articles, showing how the neoliberal crisis is resulting in the screws being tightened more on the less well-off:

   Mark Steel in the Independent, on “The poor spend all the money, isn’t it obvious”. He takes the assumption behind austerity measures, that the poor have been too extravagant and need to be reigned in, to it’s logical conclusion.

   The Scotsman reports on a UK poverty survey:

   AUSTERITY is hitting families hard across Britain and Scotland according to a survey which suggests thousands of people are finding it hard to pay for basics like heating, clothing and food.

   The Poverty and Social Exclusion report, the biggest survey of deprivation across the UK, found that a third of adults now suffer from some form of financial insecurity, with more than a quarter admitting they can neither save £20 a month nor put money away for a pension.

   Just under one in ten households say they are unable to heat the living areas of their homes, up from just 3 per cent in the 1990s. People now say they consider around 33 per cent of Britons to be suffering from a lifestyle of “multiple deprivation”.

   Households are suffering marginally less badly in Scotland compared to the UK as a whole, however.

   More than 14,000 people across the UK, and 2,700 in Scotland, took part in the survey, which was conducted by a number of universities.

Links to post

1. How austerity is destroying Britain... coming soon near you - The Standard: posted on 1 April 2013 at 9:37 am
2. Feed the Kids - Big Breakfast - The Standard: posted on 16 April 2013 at 2:14 pm

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