Child Poverty and ACT

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tdgeek

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Topic # 240980 5-Oct-2018 07:52

The Govt and Opposition have agreed to support this Bill. Thats good news. JA says National's amendments are not major, SB says they are quite significant. Thats fine, both jockeying as no one wants to agree in politics.

Seymour won't support the Bill as National sold out, and its the same Bill. Who has been sold out is the NZ public, funding his salary. The vote will I assume, be 120-1. If he was smart he will have sought an amendment just so he can be relevant, but he is neither smart nor relevant.

As for the Bill, I hope it will be kept to the fore media wise, so we can see what the numbers are, what the ideas are, and what the implementation is.

The issues are lack of income, and lack of care in some cases due to inability to budget, etc. I expect there will also be those that can but don't care, and prioritise other things above the base child care such as drugs, etc

https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/107612392/national-will-support-child-poverty-bill

Edit: Link

6FIEND

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Reply # 2101957 5-Oct-2018 09:39

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This is a very tough issue.

On one hand, nobody wants to see children suffer - especially through no fault of their own.

On the other hand, the root cause of a great deal of child poverty is people having children that they cannot afford to care for.

Any support that a government introduces to help impoverished young families will also, by its very nature, reinforce a mindset that "the government" will provide for your children if you can't. This can lead to even more people having children that they can't afford to care for. (And perversely in some cases, deliberately having more children to increase their government support)

Striking the balance between "supporting" and "enabling" will be tough for any government - I haven't read the bill yet, but I'll be interested to see the approach that has been adopted.

tdgeek

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Reply # 2102005 5-Oct-2018 09:54

Very much so. There needs to be a distinction between my fault and not my fault, but even then what do you do re the ones who can provide care, but cause poverty in the household?

Tough.

Dingbatt

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Reply # 2102115 5-Oct-2018 13:04

If I'm not mistaken, David Seymour is the electorate MP for Epsom. Is it possible that he is representing the opinions of the majority of his constituents? If it is, then that is democracy in action.

And it probably won't be 120 to 1, because the Greens will probably oppose it as not going far enough.

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Fred99

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Reply # 2102165 5-Oct-2018 13:38

6FIEND:

On the other hand, the root cause of a great deal of child poverty is people having children that they cannot afford to care for.

Given that it's a universal/global issue - and apparently causative correlation between relative or absolute poverty and high birth rates, perhaps it's not the real "root cause" - but a symptom.

I don't think that many people make a conscious decision to have children that they expect they won't be able to care for.

MikeB4

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Reply # 2102190 5-Oct-2018 14:29

Dingbatt: If I'm not mistaken, David Seymour is the electorate MP for Epsom. Is it possible that he is representing the opinions of the majority of his constituents? If it is, then that is democracy in action.

And it probably won't be 120 to 1, because the Greens will probably oppose it as not going far enough.

Probably not the majority of Epsom constituents. In the last election he recieved 16,505 votes with 21,729 total votes against him

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Dingbatt

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Reply # 2102573 6-Oct-2018 17:40

MikeB4:
Dingbatt: If I'm not mistaken, David Seymour is the electorate MP for Epsom. Is it possible that he is representing the opinions of the majority of his constituents? If it is, then that is democracy in action.

And it probably won't be 120 to 1, because the Greens will probably oppose it as not going far enough.

Probably not the majority of Epsom constituents. In the last election he recieved 16,505 votes with 21,729 total votes against him

So the ballot paper only had two options, Seymour or Not-Seymour? Twisted facts otherwise.

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JimmyH

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Reply # 2102605 6-Oct-2018 18:03

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MikeB4:

Probably not the majority of Epsom constituents. In the last election he recieved 16,505 votes with 21,729 total votes against him

At risk of being pedantic, there wasn't a single "vote against him". There were votes for other candidates, but that is a vote the candidate they ticked, not a vote against all of the candidates that each voter didn't tick.

If we applied that silly standard then I don't think NZ would have had a government, either left or right, who got a majority of all voters and had a mandate to govern. Ever. And precious few MPs would have been elected either.

I get that you don't like David Seymour. Personally I don't have a view on him and his position on this issue one way or the other. I don't know enough about the detail of the Bill or the policy issues around it. But he is definitely that legal MP for Epson, and from what I have seen seems to be voting in good faith for what he genuinely believes in on this and other issues. Which is what MPs are supposed to do. Whether or not you agree with his views is a different matter, and doesn't make his vote illegitimate.

MikeAqua

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Reply # 2105598 10-Oct-2018 13:46

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If you follow the outputs of the long term cohort study (70 years) in the UK you will see that: -

- Once kids are born into a poor household, their risk of social, physical and mental problems increases significantly.

- To prevent the impacts of poverty on children, you need to address the deprivations their parent(s) live under before the kids are conceived/born.

Given that many kids born into poverty are unplanned, this suggests you have to reduce general poverty, as pre-emptive measure.

This all comes down to the issue of resources available to govt.

Mike

6FIEND

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Reply # 2106632 12-Oct-2018 09:55

MikeAqua:

Given that many kids born into poverty are unplanned, this suggests you have to reduce general poverty, as pre-emptive measure.

That's certainly one approach, but it's not the only option. (though it is likely the most expensive, and I'm not sure that it's ever been achieved before?)

Education and freely available contraception is an alternative approach.

Hypothetically speaking, if we could "flip things around" so that by default, people were infertile but could freely "opt-in" to fertility at any time, I wonder whether impoverished people would still tend to have larger families?

Rikkitic

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Reply # 2106848 12-Oct-2018 16:26

That is an interesting idea. Impossible to get political support for, but interesting. If people had to actively choose to have children, how many would take the trouble? I guess the real question is how many pregnancies are unplanned? Would it make a difference?

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Fred99

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Reply # 2106869 12-Oct-2018 17:07

I don't know. I pondered on that for a while, then gave up, as it doesn't lead to a solution to anything AFAICT.

I'd be fairly sure that almost everybody knows how to make babies and how to avoid that happening, and contraception isn't expensive (is it free - for CSC holders etc?)

Then religion and cultural expectations come in to it, and a curious apparent paradox between high levels of welfare available to the poorest members in society correlating strongly with low teenage pregnancy rates (ie compare say Holland with the USA). You'd think that if you were dooming yourself (and children) to continued poverty, then you'd be wanting to avoid any planned or unplanned pregnancy. But no - it seems not.

OTOH, instead of looking at our societies as a collection of rational thinkers making conscious choices about it, perhaps biological instinct plays a very big part. React to stress by breeding fast - as a survival instinct. Kind of makes sense in that "post war baby booms" really do happen, the highest birth rates are in the least privileged countries, and dare I say it, it's been argued that death and horror has been reported to have an aphrodisiac effect. Dawkin's "selfish gene" works in mysterious ways.

MikeAqua

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Reply # 2108164 15-Oct-2018 13:24

6FIEND:

Education and freely available contraception is an alternative approach.

We have both those things now.

People who are under 22 or have a CSC can see family planning for free and they will give them a script for 60 condoms, for which the pharmacy will charge $5. That's 8.3 cents each Family planning also do free depo injections.

But as Fred sagely pointed out, people don't behave rationally. I'm not sure there is any particular instinct driving people living in poverty to breed. A lot of risky behaviours are associated with poverty and it may be that an appetite for risk often leads to poverty.

Mike