Posted on 27-11-2002

Don't Forget The Workers
by Chris Troter, The Dominion Post 22 November 2002

It is disturbing to witness both the Left and the Right seizing upon the
plight of young New Zealanders to advance their respective agendas.

For the Left, the rather curious concept of child poverty (aren't all
children poor?) not only allows them to take up residence on the high moral
ground, but it also gets them off the hook when confronted with the problem
of poor families. For the Right, it's the other way around. The deprived
condition of so many children allows them to reiterate the importance of
traditional family values in the raising of healthy and productive young
citizens. This serves as a welcome distraction from the wealth of evidence
identifying the Right's own neo-liberal policies as the prime causes of
child poverty in the first place.

Into this highly politicised arena the Innocenti Research Centre of Unicef
has tossed When the invisible hand rocks the cradle: New Zealand children
in a time of change, an investigation into the effects of New Zealand's
neo-liberal reforms on the health and welfare of New Zealand's children.

The title of the study, with its ironic reference to Adam Smith's famous
metaphor (in which the self-interested individual is allegedly "led by an
invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention")
betrays the ideological leanings of its authors. But even allowing for the
left-wing sympathies of its New Zealand research team, the report has
amassed a depressingly large amount of evidence about the negative impact
of Rogernomics and Ruthanasia on Kiwi kids. But did New Zealand children
take the biggest hit? According to the report, "From 1984 to the mid-1990s,
change was "rapid and radical. The reforms restructured the economy, the
welfare state and the public sector."

It is surely indisputable that the effects of these changes were felt most
directly by unskilled and semi-skilled male workers -many of them Maori and
Pacific Islanders - for whom full-time, well-paid employment opportunities
shrank dramatically. The massive downsizing of the freezing industry and
the corporatisation of the railways, the forest service, the postal service
and the ministry of works cast tens of thousands of able-bodied men adrift.
Overnight they found themselves in a world that no longer needed or valued
their labour. Unfortunately, the social effects of what amounted to the
mass psychological emasculation of thousands of Kiwi men were not deemed
worthy of investigation.

But is it reasonable to suggest that the adverse effects of neo-liberalism
on children and young persons can somehow be abstracted from the fate of
their fathers? Unemployed males are prime candidates for depression,
alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence. All of which have a profound
impact upon their immediate and extended families. Stripped of the dignity
of work. men who were used to being the breadwinners suddenly found
themselves unable to contribute to the household economy or, even worse (at
least from the perspective of the tough masculine culture of manual
labour), dependent on the earnings of their wives or partners. The age-old
New Zealand tradition of 'shooting through'. was one solution and topping
yourself was another. Small wonder that the Unicef report shows a doubling
of the male youth suicide rate between 1985 and 1989.

Regardless of whether husbands and fathers became violent, committed
suicide or "shot through", the effect upon their families was the same.
Single-parent households, the product of historically high levels of male
unemployment, were much more likely to experience poverty and all the
illnesses and behavioural problems that accompanied it.

The Left -still bedevilled by the legacy of anti-male feminist prejudice
has turned a blind eye to the appalling experience of working-class men. It
is so much safer to restrict the discussion of poverty and its effects to
children. And no matter how loudly United First leader Peter Dunne and his
colleagues trumpet the need for a return to traditional family structures,
the Right will never eliminate the downward pressure on wages exerted by
mass female participation in the labour force (New Zealand women still earn
only 83 per cent of average male earnings) by restoring the concept of the
family wage".

The stubborn fact remains, however, that the curse of poverty afflicts New
Zealanders of all ages and they deserve a very visible hand.