Hattip: NZ Herald
Ms Wynd said: "the future workforce will be predominantly brown, and we need to take steps to ensure adequate investment in them now."
Ms Wynd seems to miss the point that these statistics are showing that the benefit queue will continue to be predominately brown - unless something drastic is done to reverse that trend. Getting these families into work and removing incentives for creating large dependent families are needed - not increasing the handouts.
Already in this country we have 5th generation dependents - where are these people going to learn a work ethic (even a bad one) when there is no one in their family, and increasingly their extended family in whom to look to?
Enforcing parental responsibility would be a start - 232,000 children in homes without incomes is far too many, regardless of race or religion.
Tags: New Zealand, NZ, politics, welfare
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Maori children miss out on new Government assistance
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7 comments:
'The workforce will be mainly brown' and 'the welfare queue is mainly brown'. I don't know why you think this is a contradiction. Read between the lines remembering this is a Labour Govt. Welfare is work.
I suppose I'd missed the implicit point that the non-working part of the workforce is still the workforce ;-)
I was going for the workforce actually working :-p
Given you clearly have a better knowledge of stats than most, how would you rate the unemployment stats ?
I don't understand how unemployment can be at an all time low (apparently) when welfare spending is at an all time high.
This seems like a good bit of spin to me.
"Social Development Ministry figures supplied to the Child Poverty Action Group show that 93,423 Maori children and 137,857 non-Maori children still had working-aged parents on benefits last December, despite the lowest unemployment rate for more than 20 years."
Oh and thanks for the plug on Rodneys site :-)
No worries ;-) - seemed particularly relevant to the discussion.
Unemployment stats - especially in NZ - are always deceptive.
There is the distortion of the difference between jobless and unemployed (I read somewhere our jobless rate is about 6.3% at the moment) for a start.
Also don't forget the numbers shifted from unemployment to sickness benefits - counted in welfare spending, not counted in unemployed.
(Actually not counted in jobless either...)
One of the biggest giveaways that unemployment stats are problematic is that they will only ever count those people who are looking for work who register with WINZ. Taking an IT profesional as an example - chances are they are not going to qualify for a benefit nor be aided in a job search by WINZ, so why bother registering as unemployed?
Also don't forget that DPB recipients are very unlikely to be looking for work either...
Something I just thought of that I hadn't really before - I'm not sure what the definition of "employed" is in terms of how many hours work etc are needed to qualify?
Would be worth checking if the definitions have changed at any point and/or how the def affects the growing trends of contracting and split shifts etc.
My Dad used to give his PA's (Pharmaceutical Assistants) a 4/3 work week - I wonder if that would still leave them "employed"?
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