No food stamps for old people?

Bernard Hickey has picked up yesterday's post and run with it in an unexpected direction. It seems he's a fan of food stamps, a program that is working so well in America, one in 8 people are now using them. Whatever the hazards of the system, it works well as a poverty indicator.

In fact, the scheme should be introduced to pensioners too, to protect the Old Ones from the TAB, pokies and the RSA, sez Bernard.

True, my Old Mum does like a flutter on the races, and her favourite free to air channel on the old tube is Trackside. But it gives her solitude something to look forward to, because frankly there's not much else in the day. Similarly, I have no problem with Old Ones getting pissed in the middle of the day. I just wish they wouldn't drive as well. Personally, I'm an after 6pm drinker myself, but each to their own.

I'm closer to Bernard's mindset on the pokies thing, though. Horses and booze are as harmless as phone-up psychics and homeopathic anti-wrinkle creams to the Shopping Network Oldsters, but pokies is different. These things are designed to rob people blind. In spite of the facade of charity grants, pokies are run by a hive of scum and villainy preying on the desperately vulnerable.

Big Ups to Bernard Hickey for pulling the relevant stats on benefit numbers:

Pensioners are New Zealand's biggest beneficiaries. There are over 580,000 people aged over 65 who received over NZ$8.8 billion worth benefits in the financial year just completed. See more here at Jonathan Barron's detailing of the Social Welfare budget here.

 Needless to say, John Key was lying by a large quantum yesterday when he said:

"Currently, 328,000 people are receiving a benefit – more than 10 per cent of the entire working age population."

 If he wasn't lying, Key's speech would have read:

"Currently, 908,000 people are receiving a benefit – more than 20 per cent of the entire population."

If John Key was as honest as he was smiley, he would have gone on to say:

"The 580,000 beneficiaries, who cannot be named and will not be harmed, enjoy more Health dollars per capita and more free public transport per capita than any other sector of society. My National government has backed your vested interests by changing the rules and allowing the 580,000 beneficiaries to travel or even live overseas without losing a cent of entitlement."

  There's one hell of a fiscal creep.

Anarchy in the UK

It's not often that I agree with police of any stripe, but the Auton from Eton's idea of appointing a New York crime consultant in the aftermath of the British riots is a bloody stupid idea. What does a Yank know about the situation? Does Cameron really consider New York and British problems equivalent? He's thicker than he looks, and he's asking for trouble.

No Country for Young Men

After having a read of John Key's welfare speech to the converted, I consider riots in NZ more likely than yesterday. These Nat plans can only ratchet up public tensions further.

I'll get to the competent adult / young person support provider thing, as well as the food stamps, shortly. But first, I want to discuss John Key's dictionary definitions.

John Key certainly has a strange definition of government benefits. "Currently, 328,000 people are receiving a benefit – more than 10 per cent of the entire working age population," sez Key. The Super Gorilla in the room, National Superannuation, is not considered a benefit, even if it is a government transfer just like the DPB or Special Youth Benefit, which John Key is bashing here.

Either I'm thick or don't know the right question to Google or whatever, but I cannot find a direct answer to how many people are currently receiving NZ Superannuation. Not even a ballpark figure. The latest New Zealand Income Survey (June 2010) gives an indication of not only the size of the geriatric iceberg, but how skewed Key's selective benny bash truly is:

Of the 48,100 more people claiming a benefit in the year to June 2010, 36 percent of the new intake was over 65 years old. The 2009 Income Survey showed 41 percent of the increase in government transfer recipients was from an extra 13,900 over-65s. From 2009 to 2010 alone, that's a 25 percent increase in new Superannuation payees. It's going to get a whole lot worse as those Boomers retire.

To drive the point home further, there's always Dim Post's old Chart o' the Day from a while ago to remind you what Key's ignoring:

Now, Dagg bless Phil Goff's cranky old dad and all, still loudly ticking at 90. But unless Bruce Goff is an idiot, he would have been on National Super for the last 25 years. I don't wish him ill, it's just one example of how wilfully ignorant John Key is on the demographic nightmare NZ is putting off because Mr Smile and Wave is too chicken.

It's no wonder that John Key is cherry-picking from the Welfare Working Group's report, myopic as it was from ignoring those precious old person votes which John Key has promised not to antagonise.

But what lousy cherries he has picked. Targetting the 16 and 17 year old's Special Benefit is a case in point. Yeah, they're vulnerable and need support more than most. After all, if they can't live at their parents' homes for whatever reason, there's a certain natural level of distrust to authority figures to take into account.

The cure according to Key is to take the benefit off them and hand their basic budgeting to others. The Young Ones must be patronised:

They need a competent adult to help them manage their money. They need a competent adult to help them meet the obligations and responsibilities that come with receiving financial assistance from the State.

And they need a competent adult to help raise their aspirations above the here-and-now. That is why we are going to fund these support providers to be the competent adults in these young people’s lives – to provide intensive case-management and mentoring support.

These "support providers" haven't been quite worked through yet. It might be the local Catholic priest or an overworked WINZ case manager or a private sector corporate welfare scheme based on the Wisconsin model. Whatever. I reckon they'll be about as successful as John Key's boot camp experiment Fail.

It's not just the Young Ones who should be worried. The level of state intrusion in benficiaries' lives is set to worsen:

Instead, we will have a much more managed system of payments, with the young person’s support provider, or MSD in some cases, paying bills on their behalf and helping them manage within their budget.

While there is still a lot of detail for officials and ministers to work through, we envisage that:

• some essential costs, like rent and power, will be paid directly on the young person’s behalf
• money for basic living costs like food and groceries will be loaded onto a payment card that can only be used to buy certain types of goods and cannot be used to buy things like alcohol or cigarettes
• and that a certain, limited amount will be available for the young person to spend at their own discretion.

You do not unleash infrastructure of such complexity unless you intend to test it before widening it to others.The Young Ones are guinea pigs for a new regime of Food Stamps for all beneficiaries (excluding the Super voters, no doubt). Alcohol and tobacco for poor people bad! Pies and ice cream good!

National's paternalism is more likely to fuel a backlash than inspire fomenting youth to comply with their minders. Because, no matter how much Key tries to hide it, the jobs just aren't there.

The Young Ones are easy fodder for the blue rinse brigands, in much the same way as farmers are Labour's current scapegoats. Farmers are predictable protesters though, always with a strong "Let the Tractor do the Talking" motif. The Young Ones aren't quite as constricted in their tactics, as the last week in London has shown.

Epilogue:

Who is making hay under John Key? According to that Income Survey, it's not the average income earner:

Median weekly income from all sources fell slightly, down 1.7 percent to $529 (non-significant).

It's not the average wage slave:

Between the June 2009 and June 2010 quarter, there was a slight decrease in the proportion of people earning wage and salary income down 0.6 percentage points to 53.5 percent.

It's those bloody Baby Boomers:

Significant increases in median weekly wage and salary income since the June 2009 quarter were recorded for only two age groups:

• 50–54-years (up $61 to $880)
• 65 years and over (up $66 to $535).

Uh huh. As at June 2010, the median weekly wage and salary income is below that of the median Superannuitant. Needs based welfare indeed.

Messy

This just in from the Met Service. Good luck people, and let's hope those SOE power companies don't throttle you with monopoly rents like they did earlier.

There is no exception to America

PJ O'Rourke once described the Philippines' history of colonial rule by Spain then the US as three hundred years in a convent, fifty years in a brothel. What he failed to mention was what happened during the change from one to the other:

American forces were soon engaged in atrocities that resulted in the deaths of tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians as well as the burning of villages and the widespread use of torture to extract information. Brigadier General Robert Hughes defended the actions before Senate investigators in 1902 on grounds that would be familiar to the ancients: "These people," he said, "are not civilized."

HT Arts & Letters Daily.

OK, they got the idea from the previous occupiers, and WWII led to atrocities that would dwarf the Filippino massacres. But consider how the Guantanamo Bay occupants were and are excluded from the Geneva Conventions because a legal argument was used that rendered them non-combatants, completely unlike the civilised American soldiers.

From a very early age, I have known of the evil that men can do. OK, evil's the wrong word. Call it man's inhumanity to man and everything else. The USA is no exception to this, no matter how much it clutches its exceptionalism as an alibi for atrocities.

In WWII there was a Japanese POW camp in New Zealand based at Featherston. How's our SAS going in Afghanistan these days? Still handing non-combatants over to the US, or is it a Take No Prisoners policy now?

Randall can handle the jandal

The always excellent xkcd has some good general advice today:

It's called Statistically Improbable Phrases in the parlance of our times.

Can you dumb that down for us, Lord Winston?

Lord Winston rips Kate Chapman a fresh one after she goes under-prepared and ill-informed into an interview. An excerpt:

By now 40 minutes into what was once a news interview, Lord Winston was in his stride and disagreed with the suggestion that the internet was the most important scientific discovery of the last 50 years. 

Looks like he ripped into the Walrus' demographic on Close Up as well:

"The fact is that you still rate things like the America's Cup, the All Blacks and the cricket (as) being far too important when actually they don't fundamentally improve human wellbeing." 

Right on the cue, the MSM continue their Dumb and Dumber NZ Cultural Cringe Fest with the latest brouhaha over effing rugby jerseys. This country remains with its feet in Foreskin's Cement.

Court rejects DNA rape

While the National government haggles with the Maori and Act parties over the half-good half-awful Criminal Procedure (Reform and Modernisation) Bill, it is worth revisiting an earlier Nat law making it a crime for arrestees not to produce a DNA sample. That's because the California Appeals Court has ruled the collection of DNA samples from arrestees as unconstitutional:

“What the DNA Act authorizes is the warrantless and suspicionless search of individuals, before a judicial determination of probable cause to believe they have committed a crime, for evidence of crime unrelated to that for which they have been arrested,” (.pdf) the court wrote. “The United States Supreme Court has never permitted suspicionless searches aimed at uncovering evidence of crime outside the context of convicted offenders.”

The law breaches the US Constitution's Fourth Amendment on unreasonable search and seizure. The New Zealand Bill of Rights 1990 echoes this protection in Section 21. Unlike the US Constitution, the NZ Bill of Rights is more of a carpet than a fence, so although against the spirit of freedom from state menaces, John Key and company can walk all over our sovereignty at their leisure.

A lot like some of the consequences of this Criminal Procedures Bill facing the minor support parties, where the accused loses the right to silence, and the Crown no longer has to prove their case based on their evidence by introducing agreed facts and other contrivances to diminish a fair trial.

The right to jury trials for imprisonable offences will shoot up from 3 months to 3 years. The Law Commission suggested this in their Delivering Justice for All paper from a while ago, but it was one of a sweeping range of reforms which the Nats have otherwise studiously ignored. Where's the decriminalisation of cannabis that they implicitly suggested? Where's the quid pro quo? Where's the balance?

Until the NZ Supreme Court can have a proper whack at all these repugnant Nat laws (Stripping the vote from all prisoners, DNA testing arrestees), it is up to the Maori and Act parties to hold back the whole damn sausage factory legal system, whereby the ones who hire a flash lawyer win and the rest don't have a chance.

Violently shopping

The style of the British riots brings to mind a recent Foreign Policy story highlighted by Arts & Letters Daily under the byline “Television is more important than food!” If you can't be bothered clicking through, it's about poverty and bordeom. Orwell gets a mention.

At least no-one's died yet, which is more than you can say about the Yank's Black Fridays:

Troll Farm Hoedown

In two days' time, P2P software will be illegal in New Zealand. Dub Dot Dash has a good summary of why everyone should uninstall all P2P software before August 11. Troll farmers aren't going to discriminate on who they milk, and the government doesn't give a monkey's about innocent until proven guilty.

Foreskin's Cement

1981 was the first time I became aware I was a political animal. Aside from reading Orwell's Animal Farm for the first time, it was the year of the Springbok Tour. It would be years before I was forced to read Foreskin's Lament in Seventh Form, by which time the plot proved irrelevant to me. I already loathed rugby.

My growing antipathy towards rugby hit something concrete in Form One; the alienation of human rights in South Africa. That, and the final test in Auckland that looked like a live re-enactment of the Crunchie Bar ad. Although I was too young to make it to the Palmerston North Springbok game, I won my first argument with Dad over the topic, a rare event in itself.

So it is fascinating to read Redmer Yska's Listener article on the police side of the Tour equation. Yska has written the only authoritative history of cannabis in New Zealand, and the police's reaction to non-conformity is put under similar scrutiny here.

It makes one wonder just what preparations the authorities have taken heading into the Heineken Mastercard Rugby World Cup. There's nowhere near the same level of public anger, and no stronger reason to protest then the usual non-violent means warrants. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that when the police force is stretched to its limit, airport security staff get temporary deputy badges. Strange Customs Indeed.

Putting aside the politics, there's a twinge of strategic pride in reading about the Palmy game, seeing as I knew the guy who supplied the rubbish bin barricade, and I might know the guy who supplied the cops with the idea.

At moments like these you need Chinese

If the US dollar does turn to custard, NZ is somewhat sheltered if the markets freeze up like they did before last election during the GFC. That may be thanks to the $NZ 5 billion swap fund set up between the NZ Reserve Bank and the People’s Bank of China earlier this year. That's a $5 billion cushion if we really need to (at least temporarily) decouple from the greenback.

Touche on the douches

KAL's cartoon at The Economist most accurately describes my feelings as Saturday afternoon rolls over and there's still no sign of a compromise from that teabagging creche of idiots.

And sons turn their fathers in

After helping gatecrash Back Benches with a bus last night and hearing Madame UNICEF speak, as well as a spread in Bryce Edwards' Daily Political Digest today, I understand child poverty is back in the headlines. Talk of mandatory warning schemes and so forth. Might I add a cautionary warning.

Beware of witch hunts. Remember Peter Ellis and the Christchurch Creche thing. Remember borstals, when the state tried to parent better than the irresponsible parents and bred "the gangs" by accident. Be wary of helicopter parents and Soccer Mums, lest we screw the kids up with Thomas the Fascist Tank Engine philosophies and instil some kind of quadruple reverse psychological bluff on them which ends up throwing them into a new realm of life skills deficit.

Preparing to go to jail so that you don't have to

This just in from 3News. Roaring Lion medical cannabis campaigner Billy McKee is prepared to go to jail for his medicine. Sister Mary Aubert must be spinning in her grave.

UPDATE: I've just been reviewing the holiday pictures and found this beauty:

Levin cops, eh. Not half bad when they're not persecuting harmless invalids.