Allan Dick's Blog - July 2009

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For the past 12 hours I have been convinced that I’m reliving my life.  It’s mid-morning on the 21st of July and since the ACT party yesterday released discussion documents outlining what they say is a need to overhaul the welfare system we have been revisiting facts and figures that we should already know by heart.

What ACT is saying is 100% right — except that the thrust of their argument is aimed at the Domestic Purposes Benefit.

We all know that we have crime-ridden ghettos in this country like areas of South Auckland, Flaxmere, Porirua, Bexley, Minginui where the DPB, the dole and sickness benefits are a way of life.

The original reasons for introducing these benefits were done with the best of intentions but they quickly ballooned out of control and now we have fourth and fifth generation New Zealanders who know no other way of life.

I recall being stunned one night on talkback when a girl phoned, complaining about how tough life was. She was seventeen years of age, had two kids, a third on the way and she couldn’t afford the good things of life — like McDonalds.

I asked why she thought that the taxpayer should fund her way of life. She didn’t understand.

“OK,” I said. “Where does the money come from that you get?”

“Ah, the gummermint . . .?”

“And where does the government get the money?”

“I don’t know. The gummermint has the money.”

The answer to just about every social and criminal ill in this country can be laid at the door of the reliance of so many people living totally worthless existences on benefits.

Who to break this growing cycle is something the national touches on periodically, people get angry on both sides and then, when it proves to be too hard, it quietly goes back into the night and we concentrate on other stuff, briefly. Until someone revisits the whole situation again. This time it’s ACT’s baby and to listen to radio commentators you’d think that this is the first time anyone has raised the subject of benefit reliance and abuse. As a nation, we have an attention span about two beers thin.

If you want to see the really, really ugly side of your tax dollar at work in the shape of social welfare benefits, go to some of these ghettos. Go to Kaiangaroa Forest Village and you’ll see Ugly.

Social Welfare has been abused, mismanaged and misdirected.

And the talk about welfare reliance goes hand in glove with another controversial topic broached in the previous five or six days by the Chief Justice who radically, suggested more home detention for criminals, early release and shorter sentences to ease the dangerous, and worsening, situation of overcrowding in jails.

Read one or two of my blogs back to see how I feel about this subject.

Yes we do have a “crime” problem and yes, it is getting worse. Our answer to it is to lock more people up for longer. Despite the fact that on a global scale our crime rate is no better or no worse than other similar countries, we do jail more people for longer than any other similar country — except the USA. That’s a dreadful comparison. All that the USA has got that we don’t is the electric chair or lethal injection.

As a nation we have a very strong ethic of revenge — one of the ugliest of human instincts.

As I’ve said before, if someone commits a crime against me, I want to get even in the biggest way. That doesn’t make it socially correct though.

The Chief Justice is right, despite the blusterings of the Minister of Justice, we have a major problem in New Zealand with our jail population that needs talking about.

Ignoring it will do nothing, except that we’ll have to build more and more jails that we cant afford and these jails will become cauldrons of hate.

We need to make New Zealand a better place. Make it the land of milk and honey and the best place in the world to bring up kids that we fool ourselves it is.

And we can start right back at where it all begins, by not paying the dole to every kid who lives in a house where the father and grandfather are also on the dole, along with all of the other neighbours in the street. We can stop paying the DPB to young girls who are willing to pop out baby after baby knowing that we’ll pay. And we have to stop paying the sickness benefit to every P, heroin, valium or alcohol addict.

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