Jarrod Gilbert: Why I’d happily shout Bill English a beer
The evening I first met Bill English, I had committed — deeply committed — to an afternoon of drinking beer. He’s a very straight guy; no good should have come of our chance meeting. This was back in late 2015 and the then Finance Minister in the Key Government was working up an idea of a social investment model.
I’d like to write about it, I told English at the party we were attending. With what can only be a hat-tip to Heineken-inspired diplomacy, he invited me to the policy launch and a sit-down interview. He probably regretted that. The piece I wrote carried a headline calling him boring. The article itself was more generous.
I liked English’s ideas then, and I’m pleased the National Party is attempting to breathe life back into them now.
I love Jarrod Gilbert and believe he is one of the most important voices in social policy and I respect him immensely, and because he is such a genuinely kind bloke, he would have a beer with Bill English for his social investment model.
I however would not have a beer with Bill English.
Oranga Tamariki is a Frankenstein monster, a neoliberal welfare experiment conjured up by Bill English and big data.
Luxon has already promised to revive this horror process if elected in 2023.
So what is the ‘social investment’ model?
Let’s look at Oranga Tamariki.
The argument is that children from backgrounds with specific features were the worst in terms of cost to the state, so if the State stepped in and removed the children quickly enough, that cost will fall.To do this they passed law reducing the legal rights of parents, streamlined their 0800 numbers and weaponised uplifts.
They also ensured that people with children taken from them are ineligible for legal aid so they couldn’t fight back legally.
Oranga Tamariki has always been about saving the State money and the welfare of the child is secondary to that!
Since the Royal Inquiry into Historic Abuse, the Public Services Commission has done all it can to remove OT oversight and roll it into the ERO so that it saves the State money if children are abused in our care.
That Labour have acquiesced to this and removed the Children’s Commissioner from providing OT oversight is disgraceful.
MSD in the 2000s oversaw obscene tactics that included hiring private detectives to dig dirt on victims who were complaining about being abused in state care in a Test case that if MSD had lost would have cost the State untold in damages.
The elite Wellington Bureaucratic class wanted to remove the threat of costs and damages from poorly funded social services and the ‘social investment model’ is a means to spend money on the most costliest of those social problems without actually universally funding services.
For the State, amputating social responsibilities and the legal threat of damages frees them up from having to spend any money in the first place.
Rather than creating more taxes like a Capital Gains Tax or Financial Transaction Tax to properly funded the welfare of children in State care, it’s easier to amputate the responsibility altogether.
Social Investment is a bullshit term for ending universal provision of welfare under the guise of providing more resource for the most at risk target demographic.
Beer is too good for Bill and his hyper religious perspective that believes the Church should be the welfare provider of choice rather than the State. Using neoliberal dynamics to do that doesn’t make any child safer, it just makes it cheaper and that makes us all poorer.
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Bill also wanted to introduce an overnight charge for public hospital patients. That would have massively impacted on the children of the poor who don’t have private medical insurance or workplace insurance schemes.
Depriving legal aid to parents deprived of their children is discriminatory and wicked.
I always felt he did whatever he could for his own kind and not for anyone who was in need. We’re a liberal democracy. Even National claims to be a liberal political party. We should always endeavor to have a caring, generous, social and economic liberal prime minister. We don’t want or need any divisive social or economic policies such as those that have rocked the UK economy in recent times.
Daniel Lang. He’d be an interesting case study. He always struck me as a Peter Pan sort of character, the boy who never grew up, and he did seem to live a very narrow and circumscribed life from Dipton onwards, whereas others have had more interesting lives than they had ever wanted. The career politicians are possibly worse though, psychologically, male and female; I know a friend of Bill’s Mum, Norah, who says that she was a lovely Catholic woman.
Also let’s not forget Bill’s extremely favourable payout to South Canterbury Finance investors and the fire sale of its assets off-shore interests. Tax money spent for the benefit of the wealthy.
Peter Kelly. And let’s not forget that in spite of wanting to save the state costs, he was perfectly happy trying to claim a paltry housecleaning allowance for his own children’s home. He had six kids including five sons, a few of whom should have been capable of wielding a vacuum cleaner, or a duster, or a dish cloth, by the time that they started school. I was.
Peter, the payout was a result of deposit guarantees that were put in place by Michael Cullen and honoured by National when they got into govt – God knows why they let finance companies into the scheme. Don’t know about the fire sale of assets but I believe the Crown managed to get back a decent chunk of its $1.5 billion.
Hapuku, SCF was admitted to the scheme on the day the National Government were sworn in, 19 November 2008 – maybe to protect investors in Bill’s electorate? I recommend ‘The billion dollar bondfire’ by Chris Lee.
Yes, funds were recovered by selling assets like HNZ off-shore so profits now flow overseas.
At least Bill’s version of Oranga Tamariki wasn’t taking children from foster parents on the basis of race!
There’s always and excuse for the right, always.
Bill Double Dipper and the huge household expense allowance claims flatly lied to NZ public about his deliberately hidden privatisation agenda.
He is scum.
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