Maori face longer on benefits, says study

Marcus Coverdale. Photo / Brett Phibbs

Maori spend 2 times as long as non-Maori on welfare benefits in early adulthood, a study has found.

The study, tracking 1265 people born in Christchurch in 1977, found that Maori spent an average of 21 months on welfare between the ages of 21 and 30 compared with just 8.5 months for non-Maori.

The study said the gap could be explained by Maori having more behavioural problems as teenagers, leaving school without qualifications, abusing alcohol, having babies before age 21, and coming from poorer families with mothers who smoked and drank in pregnancy and parents who punished their children too early or neglected them.

A study author, Professor Joe Boden, said the findings called for "a comprehensive range of policies" to reduce poverty, improve parenting, help with mental health and addictions, boost educational outcomes and discourage having babies too soon.

"There was some argument a few years ago that early parenthood was the one thing causing all these social ills but there is really not much evidence to back that up," he said.

Marcus Coverdale, an unemployed Ngati Porou Aucklander born in 1977, said the Government could help by boosting trade training.

He left school at 16 because his parents split and he needed a job to support his mother and younger brother. He started a spray-painting apprenticeship but left because of the low pay and has been made redundant several times since.

"When you do an apprenticeship it's about $250 a week, it's roughly what I get unemployed but it's leading into employment," he said.

"Now I have friends in their 20s that are actually paying to learn how to weld instead of getting on-the-job training. A lot of them are Maori and Pasifika paying $6000 a year to learn something they could pick up in a job if they were working."

The Christchurch study will be published in Victoria University's Policy Quarterly responding to the recent report of the Welfare Working Group.

The group said it was "intolerable" that 26 per cent of Maori men and 36 per cent of Maori women of working age were on benefits last June, compared with 10 per cent of non-Maori. It called for a partnership with iwi leaders to tackle the crisis.

Maori sole parents account for the biggest difference in welfare dependency, with 22 per cent of Maori but only 7 per cent of non-Maori spending time on the domestic purposes benefit between the ages of 21 and 30.

More than half (54 per cent) of Maori used alcohol hazardously or failed to fulfil obligations because of it as teenagers, compared with 36 per cent of non-Maori. And 31 per cent left school without qualifications compared with 17 per cent of non-Maori.

Forty per cent of Maori, but only 12 per cent of non-Maori, were parents by their 21st birthdays.