MICHAEL BASSETT: IS IT STATE CARE OR FAMILY FAILURE THAT EXPLAINS OUR UNDERCLASS?

Years ago, when I taught history at Auckland University, we had a rule for student essays. They were to be no longer than 1,000 words. We aimed at concentrating the student’s mind on the question which too many of them thought could more easily be answered by a long, often irrelevant, plethora of words. 

I was thinking of this rule as I dabbled in the thousands of pages of the report of the Royal Commission into State Care. Like too many C-class students, the report rambles, with only occasional bits of analysis of what is under discussion. Of course, state care never has been, isn’t now, and never will be the ideal repository for anyone in need of care. We didn’t need a huge report resulting from a multi-million dollar outlay on a Royal Commission to tell us the obvious. What we do need, but didn’t get, was careful analysis of why so many children and young people in particular found their way into state care in the first place, and some ideas about how that trend might be turned around. Even evidence that the commissioners cross-examined complainants who made serious assertions about “systemically at-fault” care they received would have been welcome. 

Instead, what we got has a Jacinda-luvvie-style load of sentiment wrapped up in an unnecessarily expensive set of books detailing unimaginable horrors in a range of institutions. There are photos; Maori headlines come first; and there’s a Maori index when there won’t be a single reader who can’t understand English. New Zealand is “Aotearoa” throughout. The report is wokeness on stilts. Lots of percentages are bandied about too, but we usually aren’t told what the total number of inhabitants of the care facility under discussion actually is, so the percentages are often meaningless. A careful piece of research the report is not. But the Mainstream Media are lapping it up. Any time they need a victim’s story…. The report is a gift that will keep on giving.

Canterbury sociologist, Jarrod Gilbert, gets to the nub of the problem in a Herald article on 5 August headed “Families biggest risk to Kiwi Kids”. Yes, the stories told in the Royal Commission’s report about those in state care are shocking. But more damage is done to children by failing families than by the state. He’s right. Anyone keeping abreast of the news will know that some truly appalling things are done to children in their own homes. Kids are damaged and killed by parents or by Mum’s new squeeze at a frightening rate. Gilbert tells us that every five weeks a child is killed at home, adding “and when these murders occur, too often there are examples of the family protecting the offender from prosecution, leaving justice for our most vulnerable wanting”. 

I’m not advocating pouring more millions over another inquiry into family harm to children, although with a better set of commissioners it might provide us with very useful information about our expanding underclass. I’d love to see some useful analysis of why Maori in particular are so over-represented in the underclass. And it isn’t colonialism. Many babies are damaged before they are born by domestic violence to pregnant mothers. Alcohol and drugs contribute to fetal-alcohol-syndrome that afflicts many young Maori women in particular who seem, all-too-often, to have engaged in feckless sexual encounters. Their progeny is stricken for life. The absence of a caring family unit, just a damaged mother and an absent father, is a nursery for admission to state care and for gang recruitment. 

Politicians refuse to get their heads around this reality. Too often they seem to take an easy route out of the mess. Claiming that they want to end child poverty, they instead provide incentives to women to produce more children than they can cope with. The new Labour government in Britain is refusing demands to pay monetary benefits for more than two children. Sadly, here in New Zealand, Labour hasn’t been so sensible. Carmel Sepuloni‘s ever-increasing financial incentives and 2021 changes to work obligations for beneficiaries led to a 31% increase (from 170,106 to 222,285) in the number of children in benefit-dependent homes over the last six years, with the inevitable result that our underclass keeps expanding. With the best of intentions, but their brains disengaged, our last Labour government only made matters worse.

This is yet another disastrous development in our society for the Coalition to address urgently.