Once upon a time this country was regarded as one of the most egalitarian on the planet. Americans talk about the land of opportunity, but New Zealand really was such a place. 'Equity' had a different meaning then. It meant that everyone, regardless of the circumstances of their birth, their ethnicity, their family background, where they were born, had the same opportunities as everyone else. Now, rather than equal opportunity, it means equal outcomes, as then deputy leader of the Labour Party Kelvin Davis told the writer a few years ago. Equal opportunity, he said, meant that a poor man and a wealthy man could go to the same supermarket and have access to the same range of goods. Equal outcomes meant that they would fill their trolleys with the same goods.
If that doesn't frighten you, it should. It suggests that the redistribution of wealth is the only tactic that this government has the wit to see. And we have only just begun.
Why is it that politicians can't see a link between dismal educational achievement and poverty? How do they expect someone who is uneducated, and likely unskilled, to enjoy the same lifestyle as someone who is educated, and making the most of the advantages that provides?
Does the fact that a huge proportion of prison inmates in this country are illiterate suggest anything to them? Do they ever wonder if shameful school truancy rates have anything to do with perpetuating poverty? Apparently not.
Last week it was reported that 80 schools in Auckland's Waitematā East shared the service of one solitary truancy officer. A police truancy overview for the Waitematā District, from July last year, found that just under two-thirds of students - 62 per cent - of 88,000 children regularly attended school. 'Unjustified' absences were 3.9 per cent, and increasing. Where that left the other 34 per cent, almost 30,000, wasn't clear, but they weren't at school on a regular basis.
The report stated that "such absences" tended to make young people more likely to commit crime, and contributed to street gang membership. Who could have imagined that?
Regular attendance, defined as missing fewer than five out of the 49 school days in the second term, dropped nationally from 69.5 per cent in 2015 to a low of 63 per cent in 2017, rising marginally to 63.8 per cent last year, ranging from 73 per cent in the wealthiest 10th of the country to 47 per cent in the poorest 10th. In Kawerau, regular attendance was 38 per cent last year, up from 35 per cent in 2017.
Te Tai Tokerau Principals' Association president Pat Newman doesn't believe that truancy officers are the real answer: "Even if they track kids down, if a parent doesn't send them (to school), what happens? If they turn up they usually cause more hassle. We need to change public perception." The government certainly doesn't see much value in compulsion.
The fine for not sending a child to school used to be $25 a day. It might still be, but in 40-odd years of covering the Kaitaia District Court the writer can remember only one parent being charged. That should tell you all you need to know about how seriously governments take truancy, and how little they understand of the link between truancy and negative outcomes, including poverty, in adult life.
If the government really wants to do something about poverty, it needs to fix the truancy problem. It needs to get the tens of thousands of kids who are missing out on the best, perhaps the only opportunity they will ever have to lay the foundations for their future prosperity, and all the good things that flow from that, in front of a teacher, every day of the school year. It needs to use whatever stick, or carrot, at its disposal to persuade parents that they have a duty to see that their children are educated, and so have a shot at enjoying life to the full.
It needs to accept that redistributing wealth is not an answer to anything, but can only lead to social and financial disaster. It needs to accept that social welfare, as it has evolved in this country, can be toxic. That it does no favours to those who give or those who receive. That there will always be a genuine need for a degree of social welfare, but that our system has morphed into a giant sea anchor that is slowing us as a nation, and will one day leave us dead in the water.
It is outrageous that so many children in this country do not benefit in any way from a compulsory education system that, despite the best efforts of a long line of ministers, a ministry that lives in a parallel universe and teacher unions that fret about the welfare of their members rather than the children those members teach, still does a good job for those who embrace it. It is nothing short of scandalous that in a country where primary and secondary education are free to all, now in many cases with a state-funded lunch thrown in, so many kids end childhood without even the most basic of skills that are needed to function within a modern society.
This government continues to preside over what can quite properly be regarded as child abuse on an industrial scale. The government, and parents, are consigning tens of thousands of young New Zealanders to a life of social welfare dependency, and their more diligent counterparts to a life of working and earning to support a social welfare system that has totally lost its compass.
Perhaps that's the way the government wants it. It certainly doesn't seem to have any ideas about, or interest in, turning off the poverty tap, the same tap that is keeping our prisons full. Or in enabling those who are contributing to the pie to put their taxes into something more positive than a bottomless social welfare pit.
