WELFARE

The Labour Movement was once about the dignity of labour, now too often it’s about the dignity of welfare. The welfare state was designed to remove the ancient fear of sickness, old age and accident. People were to get an adequate income as they recovered, re-trained and moved back into the workforce, or retired after a lifetime of work - welfare was not meant to be a lifestyle choice.

It was socially just and made economic sense. The class system stole from the economy the talents of the many who could not contribute to the maximum of their ability because education was beyond their financial or social reach. Cutting half the people out of the productive economy because they were women or the wrong colour or wrong class was a cruel abomination and economic stupidity. The welfare state was to be a springboard not a way of life. In New Zealand, Labour leader, Peter Fraser, probably New Zealand’s greatest Prime Minister, hated loafers and told the New Zealand Parliament in 1945 that the treatment of loafers should be to put them in a large tank, pouring water into it and giving them a pump to keep the water level down. If they didn’t pump continuously, they would drown. When the conservative party in 1938 attacked what was to be the most advanced welfare state in the world as “applied lunacy”, Labour leader Michael Joseph Savage replied that it was “applied Christianity.” It worked well for half a century.

Now what’s happened? Thirty years ago in New Zealand there were 28 full-time workers for every person on a full-time benefit, now it’s 4 to 1.

Over the past 30 years, beneficiaries have increased tenfold, from 35,000 to more than 350,000. The number of solo parents has exploded from 12,000 to 120,000. In just 20 years, the number on sickness benefit has risen from 8,000 to 43,000, and those on disability benefit from 18,000 to 72,000. One child in three lives in a family supported by benefits, and a quarter of all children live in a solo parent home. Include pensions, and welfare accounts for more than a third of all government spending, dwarfing investment in education and health.

Just in case Aussies think this is a Kiwi problem, 40 years ago in Australia, 3% of the working population was on welfare, now it’s 16%. The proportion of workers to beneficiaries is slightly better than New Zealand, five to one, yet 40 years ago it was 22 to 1. New Zealand historian and former Labour Minister, Dr. Michael Bassett, recently pointed out that “an iron triangle of politicians, bureaucrats and beneficiaries band together to resist change”. Any questioning of the status quo is greeted with cries of heartless, cruel, unchristian by pressure groups who harvest headlines and live good lives running this industry. Bassett suggested that “increased welfare dependency coincided with the declining role of religion in people’s lives. Churchmen and women, having lost their congregations, found a new missionary role in promoting welfare.” They capture the process posing piously as principled, but the process and its ownership become more important than the objective to get beneficiaries back into the mainstream. Chairman Mao also proudly proclaimed “rather socialist weeds than capitalist crops” than being on benefit, you’d have to be a mug to go to work. But, what happens next to people? What happens when there’s two, now close to three, generations of people who have never worked? Is this a socialist solution? Hell, no. The other great change is that some in the new left have moved the goalposts dramatically. Labour has always believed in the equality of opportunity. That’s why there is a Labour Party. However some social scientists, puzzled that in the end people are not the same, now talk of equality of outcomes, not equality of opportunity. That’s a profound change, which takes us down the slippery road to quotas, rigging examination results, social engineering, and the softening of standards. Labour’s policy must be to recreate the social and economic mechanisms to provide greater opportunity and have a welfare state that is a liberator of the people, not a straight- jacket or a prison to trap people into dependency. Just as it took Labour governments in both New Zealand and Australia to open our economies, the benefits of which are now so apparent, it should be Labour’s modern mission to re-design the welfare state. The righteous right complain about the nanny state and proclaim there’s no free lunch. Why is it that it’s only those with nannies who complain about the nanny state and enjoy tax-free lunches at their favourite think tanks?

But if Labour doesn’t answer these questions, others will. Leaving this ground to the conservatives is politically dangerous creating a wedge issue because all this infuriates hard-working low-paid workers, and makes targets of our most vulnerable people.