A bold $150 million plan to keep all New Zealand under 18 year-olds in school, or in training … the idea sounds oddly familiar. Ah yes. Helen Clark announced it as Labour Party policy 18 months ago. To be fair, elements of the youth employment package announced by John Key yesterday were also announced by John Key 18 months ago.
Some items on the checklist are re-toolings of existing schemes -- Community Max, for example, is simply the venerable Community Taskforce and Taskforce Green wage subsidy targeted at teenagers. By the same token, Job Opps is Job Plus for the kids.
(Which is not to say they are bad things -- I have always been grateful for the minimal assistance (and considerable freedom) afforded by the old job schemes when I arrived back in the country with a young family in 1991. They set me on the road, and the assistance has long been repaid in my taxes.)
But when Key told Morning Report that he only wanted to see benefits available to 16 to 18 year-olds in "exceptional circumstances" -- to an extent that seemed to amount to the scrapping of the benefit --- it was hard not to think that that he doesn't really understand the circumstances in which young people get the Independent Youth Benefit now: they're there because they cannot live with their parents (generally for very good reasons) and have no other means of financial support. Most young people in that group are already ineligible for the unemployment benefit (the only exception being parents in a relationship).
It is evident that the explosion in youth unemployment numbers had to be addressed, and the package timely and welcome. But the announcement does raise the question as to why all but $30 million of the plan is coming out of the government's precious contingency funding. Why wasn't it in the Budget two months ago?
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Bill English isn't wrong when he says he is, in his way, saving the taxpayer by accepting nearly $1000 a week towards the cost of living in his own Wellington house. If he had taken up the free Wellington accommodation to which Cabinet ministers are entitled, the bill, taking in various additional costs, could have been a bit higher.
As Audrey Young notes, English could have saved a great deal more by not taking the allowance in the first place. But that wouldn't be fair either: he has to maintain a residence in his far-off electorate. But why shouldn't his electorate house be considered his secondary residence? I'm sure it's cheaper to keep than his house in Wellington, where his whole family lives, works and attends school.
Comparisons with the British Parliamentary expenses scandal have been quite liberally tossed around lately. I'm wary of manufactured outrage about this -- a representative democracy does cost money to run. But, with its reliance on a counter-intuitive definition of a primary residence, this seems to be only local case that really answers to what was revealed over there.
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I was inclined not to dwell on the less rational elements of Paul Holmes' recent methamphetamine documentary -- I can only imagine being in his position with one of my own children -- but I feel no compunction in describing his column yesterday singing the praises of Paula Bennett as complete twaddle. You might have thought Bennett spent last week fumbling around and making contradictory utterances. That she really didn't know what she was talking about when she declared the women protesting the withdrawal of the TIA could just get a student loan.
But Holmes says you're wrong. He likes Bennet because she is a "star", albeit with " a little of the darkness that stars have, too". Her verbal slips only make her stronger in the eyes of decent people, he says.
But Jennifer Johnston, one of the women who had her details released after protesting the TIA cut, was also a fine sort (although perhaps, Holmes speculates baselessly, she had a difficult childhood) who genuinely wanted to earn her own way. So presumably, in joining the talkback "throng for Paula Bennett", Holmes did not mean those members of the throng who called her a parasite or a bitch.
And then:
Having said all of that, Paula Bennett has made a graphic point. In releasing those simple numbers she painted a vivid picture of the cost of welfare to this country.
We marvelled in horror at how those numbers could multiply, what a mountain they could build. New Zealand faces a massive welfare payout every week of every year. And welfare, once you let it out like a trouser belt round a fattening stomach, is terribly hard to pull in again.
Yes Paul. That would be why the uptake of the unemployment benefit had fallen by 75% until the recession, and why DPB numbers trended down while the population increased, to the point where there were fewer DPB recipients in 2006 than there had been since 1994. But those are mere high-falutin' facts.
As Tapu Misa points out, the government had ample official warning that "with the economy softening, there is a risk that sole parents will fall back on to benefits … If there are no jobs, a period of education and retraining will need to be the short-term focus." Which certainly does raise the question of why the decision to scrap the Training Incentive Allowance was made in the first place. But I suppose such questions are not fit for stars.