Why I won’t be buying Bill English a beer

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.

 

Increasingly having independent opinion in a mainstream media environment which mostly echo one another has become more important than ever, so if you value having an independent voice going into this pandemic and 2020 election – please donate here.

If you can’t contribute but want to help, please always feel free to share our blogs on social media.