John Tamihere: Charity creating social underclass

The National Urban Maori Authority, as a collective, has decades of experience in supporting individuals and families who have required state assistance.

What we have witnessed over the past 15 years is an increase in violence and an increase in the intensity of the support services required for a growing underclass.

As usual, Maori are represented disproportionately in this underclass. This is not to say that Pakeha, Pacific Islanders and others do not require assistance or are not also entrapped in this underclass.

Pakeha failure rates are masked solely because of the percentages skewing the pitch. For example, Maori make up 15 per cent of the population but make up more than 50 per cent of the prison population. This figure is worse, given that half the Maori population is too young to come to the attention of the criminal justice system. More than a third (36.7 per cent) of Maori are aged 14 years or less. Only 4 per cent of Maori are over 65.

Pakeha people make up 70 per cent of the population and as a consequence their failure issues are not deemed as dramatic. But they still have a large relative underclass.

What we know is that we are now dealing with at least third-generation beneficiary-driven families. The profile of this third-generation underclass is that they are the product of solo parents (44 per cent of Maori families). They are the product of families that know nothing of a work ethic or, for that matter, acknowledging that their bad conduct adversely affects themselves, their parents, their children and their community. They have no respect for authority or discipline and most of their life is motivated in achieving the next fix that turns them on.

How do we fix this?

The present system draws on a wide range of budgets. In addition to the costs of benefits themselves, there is always support for housing, health, education and justice, all aimed at different aspects of the same family.

Well-paid bureaucratic providers of these services - with no accountability, no transparency and no responsibility that has regard for the end result - continue to be providers of welfare assistance. They will not accept any obligation or responsibility for the outcomes that they are handsomely paid to achieve.

Failure by state agencies to solve the problems of welfare dependencies actually results in the allocation of greater resources to those agencies (nearly $200 million extra to Child Youth & Family and Work & Income over the past six years).

Welfare in New Zealand is now delivered by way of charity. It is ironic given that the welfare state was established to overcome the shortcomings of charity.

Charity hands out enough to get you through to your next handout. Recipients are denied a sense of worth and equality. The inevitable result is dependency.

Who has proposed a solution other than us?

* John Tamihere is head of the Waipareira Trust and a member of the National Urban Maori Authority.