Back to Columns

16 July 2006

A column published in the "Sunday Star-Times"

THE NEW FASCISTS

One of the great gloats of this Labour administration is that unemployment is at record lows.

That those who are left on the dole are not so much unemployed as unemployable. A sub-class of forty thousand souls that no self-respecting employer could ever consider letting loose on anything remotely malleable or mechanical.

Indeed the economy of New Zealand prefers to ignore such people. Despite seasonal labour shortages in the various Bays – Plenty, Nelson and Hawke’s –employers consider it preferable to tap backpackers and overstayers than trouble the local register.

Apart from the economy, there is another reason for jobless numbers being so low. Many have been transferred onto sickness and invalids benefits. Indeed the numbers on these disability benefits are simply staggering.

As of March 2006, 280,000 adults aged 18-64 years were on some kind of income tested benefit. This included 103,000 DPBs, 74,000 on the invalids benefit, 46,000 on the sickness benefit and 44,000 on the dole. Incredibly, more adults are incapacitated than jobless.

Yeah, but probe those stats a bit deeper. Despite the downward trend of the past five years, the proportion of Maori beneficiaries has actually risen. They make up 40% of DPBs, 21% of invalids, 25% of sickness and 36% of unemployment numbers.

That is perhaps, not unexpected. But it does buttress both the recent child homicide and domestic abuse statistics. No matter that Pacific Islanders earn less money and have a lower socio-economic status, they still make up a lesser proportion of the total anti-social stats than Maori. There is a problem.

On the other hand, a disproportionate number of paedophiles appear to be Pakeha. Each ethnicity, it seems, has an underclass with a rogue perversion.

And yet the most curious feature of the Ministry’s figures is how many mentally ill we have in this country. 27% of invalids and 35% of sickness beneficiaries have a psychological or psychiatric problem.

By my calculation, around 36,000 people aged 18-64 years in New Zealand are so mentally ill that they cannot work and must rely upon State support. So the next time you think the world is going mad, you’d be right. And those figures exclude the mentally handicapped.

Handicapped? Sorry, I meant to write ‘disabled’. No, even that illustrates my lack of political correctness. ‘Challenged’ is the word. We must be sensitive about such things. To label is to demean – probably one of the more ridiculous PC propositions of our time.

Although not the most ridiculous. Schools banning particular foodstuffs because a tiny proportion of their students are allergic, still takes the insanity biscuit.

Or so I surmised last week. And received a torrent of abusive e-mails from mostly mums who saw absolutely no reason why the world should not turn around that child. And if that means 99% of other children have their freedoms impinged … tough.

Which has also been the problem with the policy of ‘mainstreaming’ in our schools. There are those parents who insist that no matter how disabled or dangerous their kid, the local school must provide. Even when it can’t.

On the one hand such advocacy is laudable. On the other, it is what it is. Petty fascism: the foisting of minority demands upon the majority. The contravention of liberty, so that the few might feel satisfied and safe. Fortunately they cannot impose the same bubble upon extracurricular activities although I suspect that will be the next crusade.

And that’s the thing about New Zealand these days. We cater to minority demands because someone might – I emphasise that word – might get hurt. Despite any empirical evidence that a problem exists. When did the last child at a New Zealand school actually die from an allergy to a peanut? Never.

Indeed this society is completely mad at its extremes. Because we are also obliged to suffer dissolute parents. Their kids are completely stuffed the moment that they are conceived. Their genetic stock virtually guarantees failure and, despite that first miracle, they are destined to shuffle from one misery to the next.

Sadly, that misery is also inflicted upon the rest of us. Born to no-hoper mums in often dysfunctional whanau, the kids’ lives possess an abject inevitability. They’re behavioural problems long before any school entertains them. They’re also dumb. And nothing can properly insulate an individual against a lack of intelligence.

Indeed Treasury has been costing – in a roundabout way – the effects of such dereliction. It suggests that the effects of crime – largely undertaken by the products of the above – cost over $9 billion a year. The cost to our pocket of our underclass’ failure.

And Treasury’s answer? Typically gormless – indeed classic proof that an IQ does not equate to an insight. Their answer is to reduce prison sentences or suspend them. That way, crime will cost us less because we won’t have to pay as much to house as many prisoners. The next step in their logic is not to apprehend anyone at all. Think of all the Police, justice officials, corrections staff and probation officers you could then make redundant.

Meanwhile the great oppression continues. The oppression of the normal Kiwi.

ENDS