Spinoff: Government risks own goal in cutting funding for Growing up in New Zealand

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The government risks sabotaging its own targets – on school attendance, for instance – if it cuts funding for one of the jewels in the country’s research crown, the Growing Up in New Zealand study. It also risks wasting money already spent preparing to collect the study’s data.

That’s the message from people who know the study well and have spoken to The Spinoff while ministers debate whether or not to renew its funding.

Since 2009, Growing Up in New Zealand has tracked the life course of 6,000 kids, starting with pre-birth interviews with their expectant parents. The study collects data from the families across a host of issues – from housing quality to health problems, from poverty levels to immunisation rates, from school results to reports of depression and anxiety. It holds a treasure trove of information about the problems affecting young New Zealanders – and the potential solutions.

“The better our data are, the better we can make decisions,” says Kate Prickett, a Victoria University academic and one of the lead researchers for the study. Without this kind of research, she adds, the country has “less confidence that government resources are getting to those who need them, or whether the money we’re spending is making a difference”.

Growing Up in New Zealand is, crucially, a longitudinal study: it follows the same group of people, rather than interviewing a new cohort each year as standard surveys do. This allows it to say far more about cause and effect: researchers can look at changes in families’ lives and see whether they are linked to a particular policy. In this sense, Growing Up in New Zealand is like the famed Dunedin study, but focused on a younger, more diverse cohort.

Waikato University’s Polly Atatoa Carr, another lead researcher on the study, says it has already changed policy. Its findings on the number of rentals lacking smoke alarms, for instance, directly influenced a 2016 decision to mandate alarm installation. Its research into families’ experience of paid parental leave similarly inspired extensions to that programme.

Yet the axe hovers over Growing Up in New Zealand. It received $30m over four years in the 2023 budget, but in February the contract to carry out the work was not renewed by the Ministry for Social Development. 

It is not clear why: the move may reflect scepticism about the study or just a general desire to run the rule over all pre-existing spending. Social development minister Louise Upston told RNZ that her government “values the work that the … study has produced over time, and we would like to see it continue. We are considering options for ongoing funding of the study and will be making decisions on this in due course.”

Something for Upston and colleagues to consider is whether they can even achieve their goals without surveys like Growing Up in New Zealand. Take the much-heralded drive to reduce truancy. “Context drives outcomes,” Atatoa Carr says. Families may be dealing with multiple life shocks, or having to help others in their community, or experiencing poverty that forces their children into work. “If we are interested in government targets on school attendance, you actually aren’t going to understand the drivers of attendance, or non-attendance, without really rich data from those families and the children themselves.”

Some of the study’s findings have been startling. Last year, for instance, it revealed that between the ages of 8 and 12, half of all children move house, one-fifth doing so multiple times. Often these are involuntary moves, caused by events like rentals being sold, tenancies terminated and rents increased. Families’ links to local health services – GPs, immunisation appointments and the like – can be disrupted, sometimes permanently, while school and other community connections can also be lost.

“The changing situation of families is extraordinary,” Atatoa Carr says. “We never expected to find the level of moving house that we found.” And the longer the survey continues, the more valuable it is. The positive impacts of early childhood education, for instance, may not fully show up until adolescence. “We’re only just starting to get those outcomes now.”

Both the study and its participants are at a sensitive stage. The children are now 14 or 15, and this year’s planned interviews – now on hold – are the last before they turn 16 and will have to consent to data collection in their own right.

If, in other words, this year’s interviews don’t take place, researchers will have no chance to explain to the young people why they should take part in the next round, set down for two years’ time. The risk then is that, approached in 2026, they feel they’re being cold-called after a four-year gap – and refuse consent and drop out, weakening the study’s coverage.

Significant sums were also spent this summer training and equipping dozens of workers to carry out this year’s interviews. If they don’t go ahead, that money – an as-yet-undisclosed amount – will be wasted.

Protecting the study’s budget would make sense on many fronts, Atatoa Carr says, not least because the biggest expenses by far – designing the study and recruiting participants – were committed long ago. Money spent to maintain the future interview rounds – expected to last until the participants are 21 – would be “a marginal cost for maximal benefit”. She, and others, hope the government heeds that message.

The Post: Country’s populist shift manifests itself most clearly in Mr Jones

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Half of New Zealanders think that to fix the country, we need “a strong leader willing to break the rules”. Bracing stuff, isn’t it? The finding comes from this week’s Ipsos survey, in which 55-65% of the country apparently agreed that the economy is “rigged to advantage the rich and powerful”, and that experts and political parties neither care about nor understand them.

There’s clearly something in this populist shift. I’m on a Statistics New Zealand advisory board, and our briefings show anti-government beliefs are causing more people to refuse to fill out surveys. Then there’s the general sense of alienation and Covid-related anger, seen most obviously in the 2022 Parliament grounds occupation.

The 2023 OECD Trust Survey, meanwhile, found just 44% of us are confident that government institutions “listen to people”. Only 37% believed that if they took part in a public consultation, “the government would adopt the opinions expressed”. And that belief is even weaker among poor New Zealanders.

The country has long had a pronounced anti-establishment streak. I’ve met older Kiwi blokes whose conversations with strangers consist largely of anecdotes about how they “got one over” the authorities and the so-called experts. “That woman from the council came out to have a look at our project and, well, she didn’t know a thing! We soon showed her what’s what.” And so on.

This doesn’t mean, though, that we should unquestioningly accept the Ipsos survey. If half the country really hates the establishment that much, the fringe parties in last year’s election would surely have recorded something larger than a vote share you’d need a microscope to locate. Even Winston only got 6%.

Bear in mind, too, that in the Ipsos survey, 60% said we shouldn’t raise taxes to increase general public spending – but 70-80% argued for increased funds for specific areas like education and health! People can be incoherent; how one asks the question matters enormously.

So too with populism: if one polled people on specific scenarios where politicians could “break the rules” – appointing their son to a public-sector board, for instance – I suspect most would respond unfavourably.

Recall, too, that although the number of “hard” refusals to fill out the Census has doubled, it still stands at just 10,000 people. The vast majority of us completed the forms last year. The country doesn’t feel like it’s about to fall apart at the seams.

But nor can we ignore entirely the Ipsos results. Even if people are just venting, their answers suggest a broad frustration with elite decision-making, failing public services, and social and economic inequalities.

There is, of course, a significant difference between perceived left-wing elites (academics, some media, and progressive politicians) and right-wing ones (big business and conservative politicians). Probably the anger is aimed at both: people don’t seem to like our supermarket duopoly very much, but nor do they particularly like university professors.

The man most obviously channelling the latter sentiment, and currently dominating the news, is New Zealand First’s Shane Jones. He is overt in his dislike of people who want to protect endangered native species – clearly a middle-class indulgence, in his view – and is attacking the integrity of parts of the judiciary, notably the Waitangi Tribunal.

The Fast-track Approvals Bill, which would give him and two colleagues unprecedented power to unilaterally approve what may be environmentally damaging projects, is the clearest expression of his credo. Careful processes and judicial oversight are for weak-minded pen-pushers; the strongman gets things done.

Such an approach invites criticism – but then a large problem looms. Jones is a little like one of those cartoon villains who feed off their opponents’ energy: each time they are punched, they somehow grow stronger. Criticism from the likes of myself can just boost his standing among his supporters.

The solution? Take great care with the material and tone of any critique. Less wailing about Trumpian tendencies and the violation of abstract principles; more concrete, grounded examples of harm.

If Jones, as he has previously done, attempts to influence judicial processes involving a relative, we should say to voters: what if you don’t have these connections? Should your success – in, say, winning contracts or influencing government decisions – be influenced by having friends in high places?

We should also be better at showing exactly what happens to ecosystems – and thus our lives – when endangered species die out. And we need, finally, to recognise that although some of the current distrust of government is exaggerated, much is well-founded.

Our politicians have created or enabled a situation in which just 1% of the country holds one-quarter of the wealth, most New Zealanders don’t have enough savings to deal with major life shocks, and many of our schools and health services are inadequate, especially for poorer families. It is not – or not just that – the people are wrong; the system must also change.

The Spinoff: A flagpole, a failed space, and a confused history of white fragility

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I pass it almost every day, yet never see it used. The flagpole, placed on a grassy hill above Wellington’s CBD, surrounded by trees and houses, and accessible only by a labyrinth of pedestrian walkways, seems not to serve any function. But it does have a strange and knotty past, as well as an inadequate present.

Its location, Flagstaff Hill, is a sloping parcel of land above the St George Hotel on Boulcott Street, bounded on its other three sides by the Terrace, the Dixon Street state-housing complex, and a sheer drop to the Willis Street Village complex. Largely unknown, it is little more than a patch of lumpy grass, perhaps 40m on each side, dotted with shrubs and rubbish, and containing, most obviously, the flagpole.

Having passed it so often, on my regular walks into town, I began to wonder: what purpose did it serve? Researching its history, I was intrigued – and disturbed – to read news stories implying it had been part of a bizarre defence system for the first European colonists. In 1843, in an incident given the rather vague title of the Wairau Affray, 22 settlers were shot dead by Ngāti Toa fighters several miles north of Blenheim. In response, alarmed Pākehā decided they needed an early warning system. “After the Wairau Affray,” the Dominion Post noted in a 2017 story about Flagstaff Hill, “settlers established a series of flagstaffs in Wellington to warn of impending Māori attack. The first recorded flag was raised on the site in 1857.” A Wellington City Council press release of the same year claimed cannons had even been mounted onsite.

These stories had a disturbing undertone because, contrary to Pākehā belief at the time, it was the settlers themselves who were largely responsible for the “Affray”. Attempting to evict Ngāti Toa leaders from land the latter had steadfastly refused to sell, the armed posse of settlers appear to have sparked the carnage by shooting dead the wife of one of the rangatira. The phrase “white fragility” can be overused, but the Wellington response to the “Affray” – a mass panic by the very people responsible for the problem at hand – was surely a prime instance.

Something, though, troubled me about these newspaper accounts of Flagstaff Hill: they didn’t cite any primary sources. Just to be on the safe side, I started searching Papers Past, the online newspaper archive, and consulting books at the Wellington City Library. These sources hinted at a high degree of confusion as to where “Flagstaff Hill” actually was.

A trip to the council archives then cleared everything up: it’s the wrong hill.

A detailed report by heritage consultant Michael Kelly, prepared for the council in 1997 and based on archival records, noted that in colonial Wellington, multiple flagpoles were erected; accordingly, multiple spots were known as “Flagstaff Hill”. The one that appears to have been used to warn of “impending” Māori attacks, and where settlers mounted two 18-pounder guns they had taken from Matiu/Somes Island, was a hill known then as Clay Point, which sits above the junction of Willis Street and Lambton Quay, a spot now referred to as Stewart Dawson’s corner. It is only a few hundred metres north of modern-day Flagstaff Hill – but it is a completely different place.

How had this geographical error occurred? Kelly’s report argued that, in the 1920s, the location was still being correctly identified, but by the 1948 publication of Fanny Irvine-Smith’s The Streets of My City, the “myth” about modern-day Flagstaff Hill “had become entrenched”. The council’s recent records show just how quickly confusion can regain the upper hand. A late-2000s memoranda from council staff, attempting to summarise Kelly’s report, bizarrely repeats the myth that the hill was used as a gun emplacement. The message, long familiar to historians, is simple: always check the primary sources. And read things carefully.

The pole that gave Flagstaff Hill its name was not, in the end, a very interesting erection. It appears to have been raised by the Houghton family, early settlers who lent their name to one of the southern bays. Deeply involved in maritime activities, they lived on Flagstaff Hill, and may have run flags up the pole to inform the nascent port’s inhabitants about ship arrivals. The flagpole’s erection, Kelly wrote, was “likely … linked to the commercial activities of the Houghton family”.

As the city evolved, so too did Flagstaff Hill. In the 1920s, responding to complaints about the steepness of the path up the slope, the council acquired part of the hill in order to build a cable car from what is now the Willis Street Village to the top of the current cable car, passing under the Terrace “at a depth of 90 feet”. The plan was dropped only when it turned out that “newly improved” buses could manage the climb.

The hill then passed through various hands, including those of New Zealand Breweries and Massey University. The site of the original flagstaff became a car park in the 1970s, and is now covered in townhouses. Ironically, the current flagpole, erected in 1973 to commemorate the restoration of “historic Flag Staff Hill”, according to its bronze plaque, is some 50m away from the original spot.

From the early 1970s onwards, the council leased the current grassy area, maintaining it as open space. It was regularly used for events organised by the Flagstaff Hill Area Residents’ Association, which even had a flag that it would raise “on occasions of neighbourhood festivities”, in the words of Neil Prior, its former chairperson. City councillor Iona Pannett, who grew up on the hill, recalls a “really awesome” neighbourhood that sported a community garden and allowed children to run free, and where the adults held progressive dinners. But with the decline of the association, regular use of the flagpole – and indeed the open space – seems to have petered out.

Nonetheless, in 2015, the council bought the land from a couple, Mike and Gay O’Sullivan, who had built the nearby townhouses and obtained planning permission for a further dozen on the hill, but then had a change of heart. The sale, the Dominion Post reported, had gone through on the basis that the land be kept as a reserve. (Returning it to its original mana whenua owners does not seem to have been contemplated.)

In the run-up to the purchase, several councillors got lost on their way to a meeting at the site, raising – not for the first time – questions about their general levels of competence and professionalism. Undeterred, one councillor, Helene Ritchie, enthused about the site’s potential, predicted it could become an outdoor theatre space or a community garden.

It feels almost redundant to state that none of those things happened. Now, the land just sits there, largely unloved, providing nothing more than a spot to read or eat lunch for a vanishingly small number of users.

When contacted by The Spinoff, the council did not appear to have any plans to improve the site. But could other uses for it be found? Housing is out. So too, in all probability, a playground: the stroller access is awful. But how about a natural enhancement? The hill could host an orchard of fruit trees, or a glade of native specimens, supporting the halo effect of kākā and kererū spreading from Zealandia, the Karori wildlife sanctuary. Or, as Ritchie envisaged, a community garden for a post-renovation Dixon Street flats.

The current failure to adequately use the site speaks to a certain neglect of public space. In an ideal world, public bodies are problem-solvers, finding potential in languishing sites and, in conjunction with their communities, building something better. This spirit, though not totally absent in Wellington, is hardly at its greatest height. The result is a desperately underused space punctuated by a largely redundant flagpole – a phallic symbol, like all such things, but not an especially virile one.

The Post: Luxon needs to live up to his maiden speech, and his beliefs

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This Easter, many kids will have got chocolate eggs; others got a slap in the face.

On April 1, the National-led government increased the minimum wage by a miserly 45c, or 2%, even though inflation is running at 4.7%. Tens of thousands of minimum-wage workers, and their families, were handed a metaphorical parcel marked, “Falling living standards inside”.

In his 2021 maiden speech, Christopher Luxon listed his Christian heroes, among them Kate Sheppard, Martin Luther King and the anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce, all people who looked out for the underdog. So some of us expected better from the prime minister. Maybe that makes us April Fools.

Still: charity, as they say, begins at home, and Luxon has an opportunity to address hardship in his own backyard.

Under the last government, core public sector employees were brought under the ambit of the living wage. Whereas the minimum wage, now $23.15 an hour, is a legal requirement, the living wage, soon to rise to $27.80, is voluntary.

It’s a rate an employer pays if they want to ensure staff have something above the bare minimum – and with it a chance of feeling they belong to, and can participate in, the society they have helped build. Life, in this view, shouldn’t be a matter of mere survival, of just putting food on the table. Work should enable a life of warmth and dignity, one where families can afford birthday presents and new clothes, maybe even a holiday or two.

Modelled on successful overseas campaigns, and launched here in 2012, the Living Wage Movement represents grassroots change, the agglomeration of energies of New Zealand’s churches, community groups and unions. Adept at mobilising frontline workers to tell their stories and win over business owners and politicians, the movement has signed up some 370 firms and organisations – including seven councils – that together employ 50,000 staff.

Each worker earns roughly $10,000 a year above the minimum wage. In an era when the people who keep the economy afloat – cleaners, bank tellers, retail staff and the like – have so often struggled to make headway, the living wage is a local success story, a beacon of light.

The last government, as well as placing core public sector employees on the living wage, began requiring state agencies to put their most vulnerable contractors – cleaners, caterers and security guards – onto the higher rate as their contracts came up for renewal. But when questioned this week whether he’d preserve the policy, Luxon gave a tepid answer.

Although change was “not a priority for us at the moment”, ministers would contemplate it “further down the road”. This uncertainty, as one Ministry of Health cleaner told The Post, creates “huge anxieties”.

If Luxon is to live up to the “compassion, tolerance and care for others” that, in his maiden speech, he said Jesus embodies, he surely must promise these low-paid, precarious contractors that they will indeed get the living wage.

He’d do well to remember, too, that ensuring work pays is hardly a crazed left-wing notion. Indeed it’s a core tenet of what is sometimes called compassionate conservatism, the belief that, even if large hierarchies are inevitable, everyone has responsibilities to each other. We all, in this view of things, share the same boat, and anyone in work should enjoy the full fruits of the Kiwi dream.

Overseas, living wage advocates have included Britain’s Conservative finance minister, George Osborne, and the “Big 4” accounting firms, which – like most employers – have found that staff paid the living wage are better motivated and quit less often, reducing turnover expenses and recouping some of the payroll costs immediately.

Closer to home, literally every bank in New Zealand is now a living wage employer, thanks in part to an endorsement by the Banking Association. And for many years now, the wage’s rate has been calculated by the Reverend Charles Waldegrave, in a fine instance of applied Christianity.

Over and above the 50,000 workers in formally accredited living wage organisations, there are, at any given moment, dozens of jobs advertised as paying that rate – even in firms that haven’t officially signed up.

For the movement’s executive director, Gina Lockyer, this shows the living wage “has become a really accepted thing, something that people aspire to”. More broadly, she thinks, “It’s changed the conversation about what a wage is designed to do and… what your life at home should look like as well”.

It’s even been mentioned on Shortland Street – a sure sign it has entered the vernacular. The movement’s plans now include getting more multi-nationals on board and pressing Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown to fulfil his promise to adopt the rate. And, of course, trying to ensure that our prime minister lives up to the values he espouses.

The Spinoff: Chris Hipkins might just be the one to make a wealth tax work for Labour

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The year is 2049, and the recently elected leader of the Labour Party is calling for “a conversation” about taxes and New Zealand’s failure to tax either wealth or the income it generates. This scenario is, following Chris Hipkins’s re-opening of the tax debate last Sunday, a wearyingly predictable one. We have been here before, had this “conversation” countless times, to no avail. It is the tax obsessive’s equivalent of Groundhog Day.

Here, though, is another, equally plausible scenario: the year is 2019, and the recently elected leader of the Labour Party, having unequivocally campaigned in 2017 on introducing a capital gains tax, is now overseeing the first year’s takings.

This scenario is credible because tax reform in this country is not, despite its many setbacks, a lost cause. Its failures to date have as much to do with internal Labour Party dynamics as with any obstinate reluctance on the part of the public to entertain the idea of change.

The recent history of our tax debates starts in 2008, after Helen Clark’s government, having not overseen any major changes bar a new 39% top rate, is removed from office. At this point Labour clocks something the Greens have long since identified: a massive loophole in the tax system. Income from wages and salaries is taxed, and quite thoroughly to boot; with some minor exceptions, income generated by selling assets – capital gains, in other words – is not.

This loophole – for such it is, even if the term is not always used – spurs Labour to campaign in 2011 and 2014 on a capital gains tax (CGT). The proposal is only modestly popular, achieving perhaps 30-40% support, and leaders Phil Goff and David Cunliffe both get tripped up in debates trying to answer questions about it.

Next comes the crucial moment: Cunliffe’s successor, Andrew Little, takes CGT off the table, saying he won’t campaign on it. This is vital because, when Jacinda Ardern comes to power just before the 2017 election, the party has not carried out detailed policy plans, campaigned on or even been prepared to defend a CGT for two and a half years.

It is thus entirely unprepared for the wave of National Party attacks that begin once Ardern throws CGT back into the fray. Labour panics, promises a tax working group, and then, in government, is unable to defend its own policy for 18 months while the group does its thing. In the meantime a torrent of right-wing attacks, CGT counter-arguments and outright misinformation pours into the breach. The debate is lost, Winston Peters (at that point deputy prime minister) opposes any meaningful CGT, and the opportunity vanishes. Ardern rules out a CGT not just for now but for all (her political life) time, something that effectively prevents the party from making good use of its post-2020 absolute majority. It remains entirely possible that, had Labour campaigned consistently from 2011 to 2017, it could have faced down the attacks, won the debate, and got a CGT over the line; but that is not what has happened.

Tax reform, then, seems dead and buried. But the party keeps making ham-fisted attempts to disinter it. Post-2020, Cabinet agrees to let David Parker commission a report from Inland Revenue that – it should be clear even at this early stage – will expose the fact that rich people effectively pay very low tax rates. Cabinet does not seem to have thought hard about the problem this will create: either the government will have to bring in some kind of tax to deal with the situation, or it will have to stand up and say, “We are very pleased to have exposed this terrible issue that we intend to do nothing about.”

When the report comes out in April 2023, and reveals that our richest people pay a tax rate on their income (including capital gains) of roughly 9%, Cabinet ostensibly chooses the second option. Among tax reformers, a now-familiar sense of despair descends. Then, in June, it transpires that, for the past 12 months, Parker and finance minister Grant Robertson have been exploring not a CGT but something altogether more radical: a wealth tax.

Whereas a CGT taxes the income people earn when they sell an asset, a wealth tax, as the name suggests, just taxes the wealth itself. Labour’s proposal, it turns out, was to ask people to pay an annual 1.5% levy on all the wealth they hold over a $5m threshold. The plan is similar to, though less ambitious than, the policy on which the Greens campaigned in 2020. The moment the public learns of this plan, however, is also the moment Hipkins rules it out. The gloom of despair becomes an enveloping black cloud.

But post-election, it becomes clear that, by dangling the prospect of major reform and then taking it away, Hipkins has sparked serious discontent within Labour, and indeed the wider left. As one Labour MP told me last year: “We’ve uncorked something here that can’t be put back in the bottle.”

Hipkins knows all this history, and must be aware that to call once more for “a conversation” on tax and then do nothing would surely spark more than just discontent. While the ability of the Labour Party to disappoint its support base should never be underestimated, the intent this time must be serious.

Life has moved on, too. A CGT, for instance, is now a familiar – if still controversial – topic. I have seen unpublished polling that has support at roughly one-third of voters, opposition at one-quarter, and the vast majority of people unsure or neutral. The public is at least open to being convinced, and a CGT has a ready-made pitch: income is income. Let’s tax it all the same way. A wealth tax also seems to do well in surveys, although pollsters suspect that its support crumbles once people better understand the idea.

There are, finally, growing pressures on public spending – the need to deal with climate change’s effects, for instance, or the health demands of an ageing population – that will be hard to answer without major tax reform. It is not impossible, of course, that we are still in a tax-based Groundhog Day loop, and have just reached the equivalent of the point in the film where Bill Murray has spent several thousand days learning to play boogie-woogie piano. But we may also have broken the pattern. This time, it might be different.

The Post: Charter schools won’t fix our educational failings

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Is the government about to waste tens of millions of dollars on a schools policy that won’t achieve anything? It’s a question that’s been bothering me ever since the coalition agreements were signed.

The National-ACT agreement envisions setting up an undefined number of charter schools, which would be able to abandon the New Zealand curriculum and employ unqualified teachers, among other dubious benefits. Based on an American model, a few such establishments – unsuccessfully rebranded as “partnership” schools – were set up under John Key’s 2011 agreement with ACT, but brought into the state system by Labour.

This time, though, there’s a big difference: ACT leader David Seymour wants existing state schools to convert to charters. It’s an ambition befitting a larger and more confident party.

The problem, though, is that charter schools are an ideological rather than a pragmatic project. They don’t address any of the actual issues we face. An overly strict curriculum and excessively qualified teachers, for instance, are not the things holding back our education system.

Charter school advocates claim principals need more room to innovate, but there’s already immense leeway for experimentation. We have Māori immersion schools, special character schools, Catholic and Protestant schools. We have one of the world’s most flexible education systems.

The American data on charter schools, meanwhile, are deeply unimpressive. Charters’ unqualified teachers are less effective than their public-school counterparts. A 2016 meta-review – a summary of pre-existing research – found that standard public schools outperformed charters on six of seven major categories of learning, including Year 4 maths and Year 8 science.

Charters probably worsen performance in nearby schools, skimming off the pupils with the most motivated parents and reducing those schools’ per-student funding. Overall, researchers have concluded, charters “are not, on average, producing student achievement gains” compared to standard US high schools, which themselves are not high performers internationally.

Charter schools, in short, won’t turn around New Zealand’s educational failings. But they can rack up vast costs. A recent official information request suggests the Key-era charters cost up to $48,000 per pupil, far above the $9000 allocated to each student in mainstream schools.

Worse still may be in prospect. If, under Seymour’s plan, state-school boards decide to convert, their teachers’ employment situation could change dramatically. For charter schools to be meaningfully different, principals might want staff to transform their work patterns, teaching longer hours or being paid on a different basis. Boards might also want to push staff onto individual contracts less generous than the recent raft of union-negotiated ones, which have started to address the long-term underpayment of teachers.

Things could then get pretty murky. Labour law experts say charter schools could be deemed, in essence, the successor to the teachers’ current employer, the Ministry of Education, meaning that existing terms and conditions would be carried over. So if, as seems likely, boards wanted change, they could end up in messy bargaining with justifiably angry teachers or face even messier industrial action.

If, moreover, someone’s job changes significantly, New Zealand employment law quite rightly allows them to argue they’ve effectively been made redundant and are entitled to a pay-out. Bearing in mind that a teacher’s standard redundancy pay-out could be in the order of $100,000, and that even just 50 converting schools could employ thousands of staff, redundancy costs could easily spiral into the tens of millions of dollars. And this would be money spent to achieve nothing: the purest possible form of waste, delivered by a government supposedly obsessed with efficiency.

Ministers could probably legislate to remove teachers’ redundancy protections. But that would be hideously ironic from ACT, a party ostensibly committed to the sanctity of contract.

As things stand, the situation remains unclear, and hard questions must be asked of Seymour. Either way, it’s all a colossal distraction from the real task of fixing education.

Some of the repairs must be made outside the classroom: we should reduce poverty, for instance, so that thousands of kids don’t have to miss class because they’re working to support their family. And we should lift our financial assistance to poorer schools, which is low by international standards.

When it comes to what happens within the school gates, we have a reasonable idea of what’s needed. Better qualified teachers would help. So too a knowledge-rich curriculum that provides more learning materials, greater guidance to struggling teachers, and enhanced clarity about what they should teach, rather than the overly loose curriculum we have now. We also need better structures to spread successful teaching practices from school to school, just like the old system of advisers and inspectors did.

All this will take time, energy and resources. There isn’t, famously, a lot of free cash lying around. The last thing National can afford is to waste huge amounts of it on something entirely tangential to the educational task at hand.

The Spinoff: Luxon’s budget problem is not going away

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“Don’t tell me what you value: show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.” This phrase, a favourite of US president Joe Biden’s, resonates here at a time when our National-led government is reducing the rate of benefit increases in order to fund a $2.9bn tax cut for landlords.

Budgets more generally are also posing a problem for Christopher Luxon and co. Every week that passes seems to tighten the fiscal noose – a noose, moreover, of their own making.

Last month came the little-reported news of a massive financial mistake in National’s estimates. During last year’s election campaign, the party had claimed that by increasing benefits more slowly than Labour had planned (linking them to inflation rather than wages, in technical terms), it would save $2bn over four years. The true figure, it turns out, is $669.5m. 

And the news keeps getting worse. Two weeks ago, we discovered that National’s largesse towards landlords, reinstating their ability to deduct mortgage interest costs from their tax bill, will cost substantially more than the $2.1bn previously estimated. And last week, Inland Revenue estimated that the planned tax on online casino operators would raise just $145m over four years, far short of the $719m figure National bandied about on the campaign trail.

Yet worse news may be due. Last year National costed its plan to raise tax thresholds at $8.9bn. But wage increases since then will have pushed more people into higher brackets, further raising the cost of cutting their tax bills. The Climate Commission, meanwhile, has warned that auctions of carbon credits – earmarked by National to help fund $2.4bn of its tax cuts – are “not a reliable source of income”. 

And don’t forget that – thanks to Winston Peters’s veto – National has to do without the $3bn that it (somewhat implausibly) claimed it would get by taxing foreign house-buyers. Even just based on what we already know, the government has to find at least an extra $5.7bn to fulfil the financial plan it outlined on the campaign trail. Peters acknowledged as much at the weekend.

It is, admittedly, hard to cost policies in opposition, when a party lacks access to Beehive spreadsheets and models. (Which is why the finance minister, Nicola Willis, should make good on her previously expressed support for an independent fiscal institution that would, among other things, cost opposition policies.) But despite National being supposedly the party of the economy, and despite Luxon having had a much-vaunted team of fiscal wonks advising him, the party seems to have made a terrible fist of the job. 

Not only were independent economists right to be sceptical last year about the party’s pledges; its future claims will be even more closely scrutinised. New Zealanders expect their leaders to be both compassionate and competent, but currently National is struggling on both counts.

It also faces a familiar dilemma as the May 30 budget approaches. To fill the $5.7bn gap and run its promised surplus by 2028, it has three main options: raise more revenue, borrow more, or cut more public services.

User charges – such as the higher car-registration fees trailed by transport minister Simeon Brown – could boost the coffers, but not by $5.7bn. The tax threshold rises could be delayed, effectively increasing revenue – but at the cost of some embarrassment to Willis. Borrowing more for infrastructure, and delaying the date of returning to surplus, would be perfectly sensible, and Luxon has refused to recommit to the 2028 target. But any big moves here would run counter to National’s anti-borrowing rhetoric.

Deeper public service cuts, therefore, may be in prospect. National has insisted that its efficiency drive, including 6.5-7.5% budget cuts for dozens of agencies, will, over four years, shave $6bn off government spending without harming “frontline” services.

But while most public servants would admit there is some back-office fat to be trimmed, analysis by trade union economist Craig Renney – who was consistently right about National’s financial problems on the campaign trail – suggests some services currently within scope for cuts are absolutely those that Joe Average would consider “frontline”. These include Customs, firefighting, search and rescue, Predator Free New Zealand, cybersecurity and District Court services.

The axe may, ultimately, fall elsewhere. But even the prospect of cuts to such services heightens the absurdity of the $2.9bn landlord tax break.

Bear in mind there is no hard evidence that Labour’s removal of the interest-deductibility provisions increased rents. Treasury research refutes the idea that landlords’ costs are the main driver of rent increases; far more important are tenants’ incomes, which determine how much landlords can realistically extract, and a lack of houses, which inhibits the competition that might otherwise force rents down.

There is no serious reason to believe landlords will pass on any substantial amount of their $2.9bn tax cut to tenants. Nor, at a time when we want to shift investment away from property and make life easier for first-time buyers, is there any logic in allowing landlords the same interest deductions that other businesses enjoy.

And so the tax cut remains a huge handout to people who are, according to Statistics New Zealand surveys, disproportionately concentrated in the country’s wealthiest tenth. A handout that comes as the government is cutting funds for food banks and wheelchair users. A handout that is, in the final analysis, funded partly by taking away from beneficiaries some of the extra money they would have got under Labour. What was that saying about values?

The Post: To solve our housing crisis, we should look to Vienna

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At the tail end of New Zealand’s postwar state house-building boom, a strange edict was handed down to the government agency overseeing construction: don’t design anything with french doors.

The reason for this odd instruction? State houses had raised quality standards to such an extent that private builders were simply copying the designs and adding a few flourishs – french doors included – to distinguish their product. In order to keep commerce happy, state housing must not – the government decided – enter that territory.

This story, related in Ben Schrader’s excellent book We Call It Home, is relevant again this week, following our current government’s announcement of a tougher line on emergency accommodation.

The move to roll back emergency housing is a good one, given the scheme’s $340m-a-year spending on frequently awful motel rooms. And the government can take this line because Labour, after initially letting the sector boom, cut motel tenant numbers from 5000 in 2021 to under 3000 late last year. It did this partly by building or acquiring over 13,000 state houses.

The direction of travel, then, is positive. But National’s crackdown poses problems. People who have “unreasonably contributed” to their own housing situation, presumably by getting kicked out of other places, will be barred from emergency accommodation.

Yet people in dire straits often lead chaotic lives battling multiple dysfunctions, and almost inevitably make mistakes: is it really to the nation’s benefit to bar them from motel rooms if, as seems likely, they then just wind up on the streets?

A Wellingtonian I interviewed last year, Iosua Clarke, told me he was in emergency housing because “it’s hard finding accommodation, especially for [ex] inmates and fullas in the struggle. No-one will really take us”. It’s noteworthy, meanwhile, that the social development minister, Louise Upston, refuses to promise that the crackdown won’t worsen the crisis of homelessness. People, after all, need somewhere to go. In many cases, that is unlikely to be a private flat. Quite apart from the discrimination Clarke describes, the private sector is simply unaffordable for many.

Hence why New Zealand, like most developed countries, has long provided state housing, the rents for which are currently set at one-quarter of a tenant’s income.

There is widespread acknowledgement that we have too little social housing, a term that includes state homes but also NGO-provided accommodation that attracts similar subsidies. In 1990, social homes made up 5.4% of all houses, an already low number by developed-country standards. By last year that figure had plunged to 3.3%.

The main culprits in that decline were the National governments led by Jim Bolger and John Key. Subsequent Labour administrations made a start on undoing the damage. But we still need, in 2024, to build a staggering 43,000 social houses overnight just to get back to that 5.4% figure – that is, the level of social housing provided in 1990.

In opposition, the new housing minister, Chris Bishop, promised to “build enough state and social housing” to clear the state-house waiting list, which then sat at 25,000 families. That’s a pledge to which he must be held.

But we can also have higher ambitions. The current debate on social housing assumes that, even if boosted, it will remain marginal, a second-best alternative to private provision.

This is not, however, based on evidence that the private market works better as a rule. Rather, it is pure ideology, as a glance overseas demonstrates. In the Netherlands, nearly one-third of housing is provided outside the market, often built by the state then handed over to charities to run.

In Vienna, fully half of all residents live in state-owned or state-subsidised co-operative housing. Rents are low by global standards. And the apartment blocks aren’t brutal monoliths: as a quick online search reveals, buildings like the Sandleitenhof or Reumanhof are stylish constructions, often indistinguishable from private developments and sporting huge arched entrances, soaring architecture and quiet gardens.

If modern New Zealand state housing doesn’t look like that, it’s only because we’ve lost so much public competence and building knowledge since the first Labour government’s big construction push – and, more recently, the abolition of the Ministry of Works. As Schrader once told me, Labour’s original vision was that state housing, rather than being a residual service, should have “a social status equivalent to home ownership”.

For a while that vision came true. “When I interviewed [the first generation of] state house tenants, they said it was great to have a state house and they had sort of ‘made it’,” Schrader said. “It was a step up in the social hierarchy.”

Though this vision runs counter to current New Zealand thinking, in which the state just provides base-quality, cookie-cutter services, it’d be familiar to the Scandinavians, who like to say that for the public, nothing but the best is good enough. When it comes to housing, that principle should be our guiding light.

The Post: The missed opportunities and unfinished business of solving child poverty

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In a country as rich as ours, child poverty is an abomination: not a necessity, given the wealth and advancement all around us, but a choice. A choice not to ensure the nation’s resources are fairly shared, not to ensure a life of dignity for all, not to ensure that compassion is fully extended to those who struggle.

Conservatives sometimes blame our poverty rates on the poor themselves, and their supposed idleness, but that doesn’t really wash. Compare New Zealand’s child poverty rate, which in 2018 was nearly 14%, with that of Finland, where it was just 3%.

The Finns don’t excel because they’re superhumanly strong and self-reliant individuals. They’ve just made a collective choice to be compassionate, to care for others, and to provide communal supports – benefits, social housing, public services – that, like a trampoline, catch people when they’re falling and lift them up again.

It is in this context that we should interpret Thursday’s statistics, which show that, after many years of decline, New Zealand’s child poverty rates rose in the 12 months to June last year – unsurprising news, given the damage that inflation inflicted, but deeply disappointing nonetheless.

The data provide the penultimate verdict on Jacinda Ardern’s much-touted quest to reduce child hardship. (The final verdict will come next year, with data from mid-2022 to mid-2024, a period that reflects Labour’s policies and time in power.)

Before Ardern, John Key and Bill English had already made some inroads into poverty, although they allowed the gap between poor and middle New Zealanders to widen, leaving the former increasingly unable to keep up with rising costs or afford the things that society deemed necessary.

Ardern then systematised and, on some key measures, accelerated the reductions in poverty. Between 2018 and 2022, as Labour increased tax credits, lifted the minimum wage and raised benefits sharply, the number of children living in households below the main poverty line fell by around 49,000.

Even through the pandemic, Ardern ensured child poverty declined: a striking success. But in the 12 months to last June, as Labour failed to cushion the impact of inflation on the poorest, that figure had ticked back up by 12,000, leaving a net reduction in child poverty of around 37,000.

Other hardship measures tell a similar story: initial declines under Labour, then a partial reversion throughout the cost-of-living crisis. The end result? Some 145,000 children are still below the main poverty line.

Labour won’t, for various reasons, get full credit for its successes. Few people pay attention to abstract statistics; they remember instead the recent news stories of lengthening foodbank queues, of unaffordable groceries, and of people still having to sleep in cars, despite Ardern’s pledge to end this practice.

Some National Party figures, meanwhile, are already engaged in revisionism, selectively comparing Labour’s pandemic-era results with their party’s record during the economic boom years of 2013-17, and distorting dates to suit their argument.

Labour will find this frustrating, of course – but it was within their power to have put such false arguments out of reach. Given Ardern’s rhetorical commitment to the issue, and the targets she set herself, Labour should have continued to cut poverty harder and faster after 2019, once its tax-credit rises had taken effect.

It should also have done more to help the worst-off weather inflation’s storm, instead of pivoting to the middle with cost-of-living payments that explicitly excluded beneficiaries. Nor did Labour focus enough on the very poorest, the ones living on the streets and battling multiple dysfunctions, for whom – according to frontline social workers – little has changed.

In the end, Ardern’s mission ran out of road, lacking both the political will and the requisite cash; much of the latter Labour spent instead on questionable pursuits like health service reorganisation. Nor did the party ever make poverty reduction a crusade that would have mobilised every ounce of the state’s resources and the public’s sympathy.

Labour’s record should have been unimpeachable. The fact that it isn’t lets National muddy the waters.

Not that the latter has a plan for getting the child poverty numbers back on track – except a relentless focus on getting people off welfare and into work. Which is fine as far as it goes.

But four in 10 children in poverty already have a parent in a full-time job. Work doesn’t pay in this country, or not at the bottom end.

Where to from here? While there will, given humankind’s frailties and life shocks, always be a few people – perhaps 2-3% of the population – in temporary hardship, it’s not unrealistic to think we could end long-term poverty. We can break the cycle.

But to do that, we’d need to ensure work actually pays, as well as look after beneficiaries better, fix the housing market – and fundamentally reorient ourselves towards an ethos of collective care. Utopian? The Finns don’t think so.

The Guardian: New Zealand needs a new vision for the social security system – not more flipflopping

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This week’s announcement by New Zealand’s new conservative government of a “tough love” welfare policy is simply the latest instalment of 30 years of flip-flopping that have left the country with a fragmented, ineffective and less-than-fully-humane benefit system.

Inspired by Jacinda Ardern’s rhetoric of “kindness”, the previous Labour-led government poured an extra $16.5bn into welfare, carefully delivered in instalments so as not to alarm the middle classes. The core unemployment benefit rose from $215 a week to $340. Even after adjusting for inflation and higher rents, the average beneficiary’s income grew by 43%, with flow-on effects including fewer children living in households where food runs short.

Anecdotal evidence also suggests Work and Income offices became more welcoming. Paul Clutterbuck, a 50-year-old Wellingtonian, said he had seen “a huge culture shift … moving away from beneficiary bashing and towards an environment of trusting the client to do the right thing”. Even so, many beneficiaries’ incomes were still $36-136 a week below the poverty line.

Now, as sure as night follows day, a centre-left policy of relative generosity is being replaced by a centre-right policy of relative toughness.

The National-led government has announced it will require welfare recipients to re-apply for benefits more often, tightly monitor how many jobs they are applying for, and use more sanctions against those deemed non-compliant, including cutting their benefits by up to half.

That is the “tough” part of their agenda – the “love” part, not yet fully fleshed out, will include more detailed skills assessments, job coaching and “job plans” for beneficiaries.

Many of these changes could have been copied and pasted from the relatively tough policies of John Key’s previous centre-right government, itself reacting against the relative generosity of Helen Clark’s preceding Labour administration.

In this ongoing policy loop, one of the frustrations for onlookers, and a source of stress for beneficiaries, is the emphasis on sanctions that derives from a flawed understanding of beneficiaries’ lives.

Battling addiction, poor health, low self-esteem and a lack of qualifications, welfare recipients often have few reserves – of money or emotional bandwidth – when disaster strikes. Their lives are frequently turned upside down by sudden health issues, the struggle to pay bills, dysfunction in the people around them and frequent moves in search of adequate housing.

Often it is these life shocks, not a lack of motivation, that stops them turning up for job interviews.

Unsurprisingly, punitive approaches achieve very little. Studies of Britain’s increasingly harsh welfare system, for instance, have demonstrated that sanctions don’t get people into paid employment more quickly. In fact, they can slow that process by destabilising already unstable lives. What sanctions definitely do is increase the misery of their recipients – and their children.

Why, then, do sanctions remain popular among conservatives? Because they fit a comfortingly simplistic idea of welfare claimants – and because, according to one survey, most National voters don’t know anyone who lives on benefits.

Although Ardern’s government massively increased beneficiaries’ incomes, it didn’t fundamentally shift public opinion on welfare. Nor did it set out a compellingly new vision for the system.

These are the gaps that need filling. Welfare recipients must be better supported to tell their stories, in ways that allow middle class New Zealanders to understand what the social and economic barriers impeding beneficiaries’ progress are.

A new vision for the social security system, should spell out how it could provide security in tough times: wrap-around support from the moment people need it, adjusted seamlessly and in real time to changing needs and delivered in a way that enhances the recipients’ dignity.

Where paid work is the right goal for beneficiaries, the system would use carrots not sticks, investing generously in retraining programmes to bridge the gaps between the skills people have now and the skills they need, and ensuring the jobs available are high-quality and well paid.

The system would also assert the value of collectively supporting people who are caring for children or grappling with disability – and do so in a way that commands widespread support.

Then perhaps the constant oscillation of policy might finally be disrupted.