Tapu Misa: Help is great but who helps the helpers?

Many fine people I know are fond of talking about the need to give people a "hand-up" rather than a "handout", but, frankly, it's always seemed a pointless distinction to me. I've never understood why one should be so despised and the other admired.

Not that I don't appreciate the story that goes with it: Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day; teach him to fish, and he and his family will eat for a lifetime.

Fine, but why not do both and call it "help, as needed"?

What if our man gets sick and can't fish? What if his boat is wrecked? What if, because of my superior boat, I catch more fish than I can use, and he catches none? Wouldn't it be right for me to give him a fish then?

Never mind the individual circumstances, the rhetoric suggests that it's about the recipient. A "handout" is what the unworthy poor get, whereas a "hand-up" is what private companies get, in the form of bailouts and subsidies, to keep them afloat.

Witness the new approach of our newly minted Minister of Foreign Affairs, Murray McCully. His "hand-up" approach to foreign aid means NZAID would no longer focus on projects aimed at reducing poverty. But having grumped that "you could ride around in a helicopter pushing hundred-dollar notes out the door and call that poverty elimination", McCully seems happy to "throw hundred-dollar notes at planes", as one aid group described the subsidising of Air New

Zealand flights around the Pacific.

Just let's not call it a handout or corporate welfare. Let's call it a subsidy, instead, and classify it as "aid", even though like much foreign aid the chief beneficiaries are businesses in the donor country rather than the poor in the recipient nation.

Let's face it: foreign aid, like charity, begins at home.

But it's good to know the Prime Minister has no such hang-ups about handouts. Last week in a speech to Philanthropy NZ, he urged us all to be more giving.

Having presided over a tax-cut package that provided neither economic stimulus nor help for the most vulnerable - and only loose change for the well-paid - John Key wants people to do what his Government wouldn't: give their tax cuts to the needy.

Similarly, Key wants employers to bend over backwards to keep their workers out of the unemployment queues, while his Government enforces policies that ensure hundreds in the public sector will lose their jobs.

Still, it was heartening to see the Prime Minister giving us lessons in charity. It seems we'll need them with his Government so determined to divest its responsibilities to the private and non-profit voluntary sector.

Key's admiration of the Americans' so-called culture of giving downplays the fact that Americans are given generous tax breaks to encourage their generosity.

It also sidesteps the uncomfortable fact that charity is more necessary when the safety net is full of gaping holes because government won't provide the kinds of basic necessities that we take for granted here, like universal healthcare. There's nothing wrong with charity, of course. I've been involved with a few charities over the years. I know they're necessary. But they can't replace the role of government. And in these straitened economic times, with government funding stretched too thinly between too many groups and private sources drying up, charitable organisations are as much in need of charity as the people they help.

Without adequate support, the move to shift more of the social burden on to the non-profit sector seems more like abdication than smart management on the Government's part.

In his best-selling book, Seven Ways To Change The World, the progressive American preacher Jim Wallis argues that the answer to the endless debate about the role of government is neither small government nor big government, but rather effective, smart and good government.

He argues that a healthy society needs all three sectors - private, public and civil society (which includes non-governmental and non-profit organisations) - doing what they do best.

For example, after Hurricane Katrina, religious communities were the first on the scene to give practical help to the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, "and they did so far better and faster than every level of government. The religious communities showed both more compassion and greater effectiveness than many governmental agencies, which were exposed for their incompetence. Many pointed out these facts to bolster their arguments against the role of government generally".

But, he wrote, "while churches can bring relief, they can't build levees".

"Churches cannot provide healthcare for 47 million Americans who don't have it, or ensure enough affordable housing to working families, or provide social security for the elderly or a social safety net for children. Only governments, often working with the civil society, can do that.

"Nor can the churches provide jobs with a living family income for parents with dependent children. Only the private sector and the labour movement can assure adequate and fair employment, with justice in the workplace.

"And contrary to the anti-government rhetoric of the Religious Right, many religious and charitable groups helped prompt the New Deal by calling for government to take a more active role in reducing poverty and ensuring fairness in American society."