Accident Compensation (index)
Keywords: Social Policy;
Category Archives: Social Policy
Is Progress Progressive?
We should not assume that all adopted innovations are progressive. Jonathon Haidt’s ‘The Anxious Generation’ illustrates that sometimes they require social measures to enhance well being. The Anxious Generation is a book which probably everyone engaging with adolescents should read. Haidt’s thesis is that smartphones replacing flip phones led to a marked deterioration in the…
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IN OPEN SEAS: How the New Zealand Labour Government Went Wrong: 2017-2023
Brian Easton Published in 2024 by Kea Point ISBN 978-0-473-72573-0 380 pages The book is rich in analyses of policy directions to progress Aotearoa New Zealand. An account of the policy development of the Ardern-Hipkins New Zealand Labour Government (2017-2023) which focuses on its policies in the context of New Zealand’s longer term economic history,…
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Law and Order; An Economics Perspective
What might the public’s increasing demands for safety and security tell the economist? Criminology and economics are quite different disciplines. Someone from one discipline trespasses on the other with the greatest of caution, something which, I’m afraid, not all economists have. There is a foolish economics literature about the ‘optimal level of crime’. Before it…
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Flooding Housing Policy
The Minister of Housing’s ambition is to reduce markedly the ratio of house prices to household incomes. If his strategy works it would transform the housing market, dramatically changing the prospects of housing as an investment. Leaving aside the Minister’s metaphor of ‘flooding the market’ I do not see how the announced strategy is going…
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What Is Social Investment Analysis?
Evaluating the impact of social policies will be very difficult but the government does not seem to be doing much real evaluation. A couple of terms that have recently become fashionable are ‘cost-benefit analysis’ (CBA) and ‘social-investment analysis’ (SIA), typically proposed by people who have never done either. They sound good but have their limitations….
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Mainstreaming Māori
Mainstreaming need not be inherently anti-Māori. It will be if it is done badly because it will be anti-those-in need, and proportionally more of them are Māori. That the Coalition Government says it will deliver public services on the basis of need rather than, say, race deserves consideration, even though many will jump unthinkingly to…
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Has Labour Abandoned The Welfare State They Created In 1938?
The 2018 Social Security Act suggests that Labour may have retreated to the minimalist (neo-liberal) welfare state which has developed out of the Richardson-Shipley ‘redesign’. One wonders what Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser and Walter Nash would have thought of the Social Security Act passed by the Ardern Labour Government in 2018. Its principles were…
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So Much to Do: Dr Sutch on Poverty and Progress
Commentary on Malcolm McKinnon’s Poverty and Progress in New Zealand: thoughts on WB Sutch’s work in historical and intellectual context. Stout Research Centre, 24 April, 2024 When Bill Sutch was first told by his physician that he had advanced terminal cancer, he responded ‘that can’t possibly be true, I have far too much to do’….
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The Case For A Universal Family Benefit
One Could Reduce Child Poverty At No Fiscal Cost Following the Richardson/Shipley 1990 ‘redesign of the welfare state’ – which eliminated the universal Family Benefit and doubled the rate of child poverty – various income supplements for families have been added, the best known being ‘Working for Families’, introduced in 2005. The result of the…
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Housing Tenure And Poverty: A Note
Note written for circulation in March 2024 This note explores housing tenure in the part of the distribution where the poverty line is, defining the line by the SNZ material hardship indicator. The note does not explore the AHC income-expenditure measure,[1] partly because there are insufficient observations but mostly because, as explained in the appendix,…
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Why Did Child Poverty Increase Recently?
Not so much from a lack of nominal income but from rising mortgage interest rates The just released Statistics New Zealand (SNZ) estimates child poverty for the year ending June 2023 show the proportions of children on nine different poverty measures are higher than they were in the June 2022 ending year. SNZ warns that…
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Ignoring Tax Tradeoffs
Public policy frequently suffers because we don’t look at alternatives. Thus far the Labour Party’s only ‘new’ election (economic) policy is to remove GST from fruit and vegetables. Even the accompanying promise of adjusting Working for Families is much in line with what it has being doing in the last six years. It is also…
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Notes on Tāone Hapū – Māori Gangs
Commentary: Aotearoa New Zealand Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 3 No. 1 (2023) Abstract This paper aims to promote discussion on the complex issue of Tāone Hapū (Māori Gangs), recognising the substantial literature which already exists but adding two further directions which tend to be downplayed: – while it is accepted that the urban Māori…
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Thinking About Housing Policy
Presentation to U3A Southland series on Housing in NZ, via ZOOM, 17 February, 2023. Throughout my life as a professional economist, I have been challenged by the question of whether goods and services should be provided privately or publicly. I recall in the 1960s, when there were strong calls for nationalisation of many things, the…
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McCarthy, Woodhouse and The Proposed Redundancy Social Insurance Scheme
This is adapted from a section of book, ‘In Open Seas’, which I am writing. I have published this extract because there has been some ahistoric claims about the characteristics of New Zealand’s public income support system. The 1972 Royal Commission on Social Security (the ‘McCarthy Commission’) pointed out that there was a case for…
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A Proposal for an Earnings-Related Redundancy Insurance Protection.
1 Summary 1.1 This short paper sets out a scheme for reducing the shock of lost income from redundancy. 2 Preliminaries: Dealing with a Private Market Failure 2.1 This proposal arises because the private market has not been able to provide adequate income protection for those who become unemployed from redundancy. In particular…
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Taxing Questions About Taxing Housing
The government’s recent housing package may work; will it do enough? Trick Question: Does New Zealand have a capital gains tax on housing? If you ask the Prime Minister she will say not. It is true that her government is increasing the scope of the ‘bright-line test’ on non-family homes to ten years. That means…
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Why Don’t We All Live in Australia?
Migration patterns provide further evidence that wellbeing is not simply measured by income. New Zealand’s GDP per person is about 20 percent lower than Australia’s. Some think that the difference arises because our economic policies have been inferior. They then leaps to arguing for new policies based on ideology rather than evidence. Frequently those policies…
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Do We Really Care about the Marginalised?
Social philosophy in New Zealand is muddled and incomplete. This year, 2021, is the fiftieth anniversary of John Rawls’ The Theory of Justice, described as the most important book on political philosophy written in the twentieth century. As you might expect it is a big book (587 pages with a follow-up one of 464 pages)…
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