i’ve done/doing it twice…..the first time it was rare for a male to be doing this role/job….but not now….

resistantsoy is also on the money re sth ak…..

phil(whoar.co.nz)

I’m just guessing that you have no idea how funding to support families with no/low income works at the moment; Working for Families is being rolled out over 24-36 months, beginning April 2004, with more changes coming in Oct 2005 and April 2006 still to kick in.

The amounts of targetted funding to improve the lives of children in poverty are not huge, say compared with the national superannuation payout annually, but they are significant for those concerned, and have been roundly condemned by most National spokespeople, including one of the pre-election “gone by lunchtime” statements.

However, they don’t even come near equalising outcomes for children of low-income families, to the outcomes expected by middle-income or rich families.

If you’re going to be a divorcee living on a benefit, as a career option, marry someone rich first; for the 95% of the population whose solo-parenthood doesn’t come into those paramaeters, learning to budget strictly, living without credit cards, new shoes, haircuts and little extras like holidays or birthday presents for your children can seem harsh at first, but you’re supposed to get resigned to it, or else miraculously the employment market will solve the problem by liberalising enough for a solo parent reliant on childcare to be able to find a job that doesn’t require working evenings/weekends/random rosters at times when the childcare centre is closed.

It’s a tough enough life for kids in poverty without someone telling them that their life could be different if their unemployed mother (often the only person in the family motivated to offer the child a roof over her/his head) was a bit more motivated and had a better work attitude. Nobody questions the choice of middle-class women to be stay-at-home mums, or calls then unmotivated when they put the early years of their children as a priority for their time; we often see mothers of handicapped children hailed as saints or angels, for giving up their choice to work full or part-time, in order to facilitate their child’s education.

The richness of home & community in places like Waitangirua or Wainuiomata is of an order that is unquantified by the “how much do you earn” school of parenting evaluation; the fact that some areas have ethnic gang problems might just trace back to 70’s immigration & employment policies which saw Pacific Islanders from areas which had historically been rivals for ocean resources in their native islands, resettled into State housing blocks with no regard for creating harmonious communities; along comes hip-hop music & movies to portray another culture’s response to ethnic marginalisatioon & conflict, and South Auckland erupts into a wave of inter-ethnic gang warfare; after the amount of “laissez-faire leave’em to stew in the wilderness” policy of the 80’s & 90’s, the question is not why is this happening, but why did it take so long?

After all, “West Side Story” was written about New York in the 1950’s. None of this behaviour is new to the world, we’ve just held it off for 45 years, give or take.

Solving the problem is not about saying that all of South Auckland should be ring-fenced to keep them in, or putting up more jails & prisons to incarcerate another generation.

Feeding,clothing & housing poor children adequately is an area that needs work; that is a decade by decade committment, to prevent the 5-yr-olds going to school for 10 years without lunch from turning into the gang-patched teenagers in the sunday papers.

None of these comments so far even touch on radical feminist positions for solving child poverty, and I’m not going to go there today. (but I might, soon…)

katie

Anyone who reckons that the problem isn’t linked to poverty is kidding themselves. The children that become in these gangs are usually from overcrowded or large households with little or no personal space - in essence the streets become their living room. Bored youth will always cause trouble, some real, some imagined, and cities are pretty un-youth centric places, as any teenager you ask will tell you. The problem gets worse when you have no money, because you’ve got nothing to buy, and nowhere to go. Stagecoach’s ridiculous price rises are a classic example of this.

Respect is a key factor in the whole equation, but when your parents have lost their own self respect because they can’t find a job that isn’t absolute shit, or are working such a job, then it’s pretty hard to find your own. There are people who claim to aspire to a life on a benefit (I know a couple) but most of them would actually rather be working, if there was a job for them with decent conditions and wages and an employer that actually treated them as human beings, not instruments of economic output.

i am just sick of the blame culture. the right is not at falt, nor are the left. they are both doing what they believe is the correct thing to do for the country. everyone has a responsibility to fix this issue.

the youth gang issue is deeper than unemployment, dicipline, politics, drugs. consider movies that glorify gang culture, can they not take some of the bame as well?

i dont know the answers, i wish i did. but as a country we need to sort it out together. opologies if i have offended anyone, was not my intention.

Thank you Tom, that expresses my sentiments just about right. (though I’ll add that those 2nd and 3rd year economics papers tell you how simplistic and idealised those theoretical 1st year concepts are.)

Andy, just wanted to highlight one of your comments:

“Everyone has access to a good education in this country. use it! i dropped out of school at 15 with not[sic] qualifications”

I think right there you’ve made a strong point against your later arguments. Young people are not always equiped to make the best decisions for themselves. The idea here is that we stop people falling to the level where they can’t pick themselves back up. You call it a ‘nappy wearing socialist state’ - I’d call it not crapping on people when they’re down.

Anyway, real answers can’t be put forward or discussed in such simple terms, but I’m surprised you are dismissing progressive measures out-of-hand, given your background.

take a chill pill mate

I’m not sure if you’re purposefully trying to dress up like the stereotypical angry redneck with all the answers, or if you actually fit the bill. Either way, you’re adding nothing at all to the conversation by ranting the same old lines over and over again.

You can be sure that everyone reading this blog has heard these lines before:
“welfare state is the cause of blah de blah”
“the only thing raising the min wage will do is reduce number of jobs and make blah de blah worse”
“welfare recipients and their kids need to get off their bums and change their attitude and they will be fine”

If you repeat the mantra over and over again it doesn’t get any more true, mate! If those lines didn’t convince us before they’re unlikely to do so now…so have you got anything to add that your average crusty bugger in a Canterbury pub couldn’t already have told me?

How about digging a little deeper - what does raising the minimum wage ACTUALLY do? I’m sure clever people have studied that, right? Have you read any of their evidence? Or are your natural talents for diagnosing a problem so fantastic that you don’t need to?

What about how all welfare recipients need to do is change their attitudes - is it that easy? Do you think if you yell at them enough they will magically figure how right you are? Or are there some deeper, psychological, social, whatever, reasons why they can’t break out of poverty and welfare dependency? And when was the last time YOU got abused, scapegoated, and told what to do by some stranger, and you cheerfully took their advice?

And how about this - “to have a 4% unemployment rate, wich equates to virtually full employment if you sit through any 1st year economics paper at uni, and still have masses of young people in gangs running amuck points to something more that just unemployment”

What’s full employment? Isn’t that where everyone who wants a job has one, discounting the ones between jobs or searching, etc? Does South Auckland really fit that bill? And really, what do you think national statistics tell you about the causes of individual problems and crime? Does it necessarily follow that an improved statistical number relates to a better situation ‘on the ground’? (its great how 1st year economics holds the key to all knowledge too. I presume you don’t learn anything more complicated in 2nd and 3rd year)

By the way, you’d be interested to hear that the news that, actually, there is plenty enough food in the world to feed each of its residents. Ergo, there are no starving Africans. (Probably if they’re hungry they just need to adopt a more positive attitude, anyway). So lets all nip off for a round of golf with a clear conscience, yay.

I don’t know the answers - I hope I’ve begun to convince you that you don’t know them either. Probably the best thing we can all do is to acknowledge that, then try and work out solutions from the evidence and knowledge we have. Next time the blood boils up from your neck to your ears, try and divert it to your brain, matey.