Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Why Phil Goff should never get near government again

Labour is going to scrap any work-testing of the DPB if it returns to government. Annette King says that there shouldn't be an arbitrary age for requiring a parent to find a job.

They are also refusing to deal with the problem of women adding children to their benefit by limiting how long they can stay on the DPB thereafter. Yesterday, when tackled about this, Phil Goff told Mike Hosking (21:04) that most women on the DPB were there for a short period of time only and came from a marriage break-up.

He doesn't know where most come from actually. The Social Statistics Report used to record whether someone had been divorced, separated, separated from a de facto or single. But they stopped doing that in 2001 and I have a letter from the MSD confirming this.




So he doesn't know what precipitates an application for the DPB.

Next he doesn't define a short period of time. 6 months? 2 years? Three years? That's a subjective quantification.

But DPB statistics can be twisted to distort the picture significantly and nobody explains this better than Michael Tanner in The Poverty of Welfare:



So it is possible to say that most people go on the DPB for a short period of time AND most of the people on it have been there for quite a long time.

MSD research highlights this phenomenon:

On average, sole parents receiving main benefits had more disadvantaged backgrounds than might have been expected:

• just over half had spent at least 80% of the history period observed (the previous 10 years in most cases) supported by main benefits
• a third appeared to have become parents in their teenage years.

This reflects the over-representation of sole parents with long stays on benefit among those in receipt at any point in time, and the longer than average stays on benefit for those who become parents as teenagers.

Had the research considered all people granted benefit as a sole parent, or all people who received benefit as a sole parent over a window of time rather than at a point in time, the overall profile of the group would have appeared less disadvantaged.


But what does Phil Goff do?

Uses the picture that paints less disadvantage because it suits him politically.

Which is exactly why he should get nowhere near government ever again. He has no intention of fixing a huge problem when he refuses to tell the truth, and the whole truth, about it.

4 comments:

FF said...

Excellent post- your writing just gets better.

WorkerB said...

Typically Labour draws their voter support from the stupid , the uneducated and Government dependents so why would their policies NOT be about making more of all these categories

Freddie said...

Voters who would vote for Goff do not care about the veracity of his statements. They hear what they want to hear.
The sad thing is that the left dupe only their followers.

Anonymous said...

And Key is better how?

"we believe in a welfare system which is fair for to those who use it, but is also fair on taxpayers who fund it."

How is it fair to take my tax money and give it to some bludger?

It's not fair. It can never be fair. It's literally taking food out of the mouths of my kids and giving it to some loser who doesn't love their kids enough to get a job, and who has so little self-respect that they go on a benefit and bludge.

There's only one fair welfare reform: stop welfare

From the Dole to the DPB; from ACC to EQC; from schools to hospitals to GPs;

just stop it all