Michael Bassett: Jacinda’s Twaddle About Holding Parents to Account

November 25, 2022

Over the last fifty years there has there been a steady movement away from holding parents to account for the children they bring into the world. Why all the hooha when National’s Christopher Luxon recently suggested it was time for parents of perennial young trouble-makers to be held to account? The short answer is that politicians, especially those of a left persuasion, fear voter backlash not just from the parents and the kids once they reach voting age, but from the significant industry that now farms the country’s underclass. Gradually a perception has been allowed to emerge that problems are always someone else’s responsibility to deal with, never the family’s. Yet that is where the heart of the problem lies.

All societies have an underclass. New Zealand’s grew rapidly from the 1960s for a variety of reasons. Following the Second World War, Maori, the bulk of whom lived rurally in marae settings, shifted towards towns and cities where jobs were plentiful. But the marae networks where grandparents, uncles and aunts, who helped supervise children, seldom accompanied the younger families. Urban living was a new experience, and adaptation to its ways took time. Some urban Pakeha were soon mixing with newly-urbanized Maori. The proportion of Maori blood diminished steadily, and the number of unmarried mothers rose during the 1960s and 1970s, encouraged by the introduction in 1974 of the Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) that paid them money, ostensibly to look after their kids.

Urged on by the National Party and brought into force by Labour, the number of DPB recipients shot up from about 5,000 in 1974 to more than 100,000 in the 1990s. Rising numbers of youngsters without two parents wagged school; boys in particular were easily recruited by gangs into both petty crime and the developing drug culture. Requirements that men should support the children they fathered decreased, particularly when birth mothers could refuse to name their children’s fathers. Under all these pressures, the underclass mushroomed. Quite quickly many children had no family link with anyone working for a living. The 100,000 recipients of Job-Seeker Benefits, with no experience, nor intention of working make up the bulk of a self-perpetuating stratum of modern New Zealand society. It costs the taxpayer hugely in benefits, Kainga Ora subsidies, criminal activity, police and prison time. Most of the ram raiding, knife-wielding, gun-toting young offenders come from this modern, politically-created social group.