Michael Bassett: Money won't cure cycle of child abuse

COMMENT

So Child, Youth and Family will get another chief executive. The Government intends to spend an extra $120 million on the service, new staff will be recruited, and we are asked to believe that children and families in distress will be better looked after.

"Major management problems" within CYF, "critical information gaps" and "a culture resistant to change" will be fixed, resulting in more effective services. Keep your eyes on the heavens: a herd of pigs will soon fly past.

What we are dealing with is just another stage in the collapse of the state's welfare services and the fatal conceit of politicians who think "the Government" can fix everything.

Having created many of the problems that afflict CYF children, our politicians want us to believe they have a solution. The reality is that a runaway benefit system has been attacking the fence at the top of the cliff these past 30 years, destroying family values and the sense of parental responsibility that my generation took as axiomatic.

Instead of trying to restore those values, and hold parents accountable for their failures, the politicians are buying another ambulance to pick up those they first pushed over the top.

With one hand the state pushes children over the cliff, while the other hand fumbles, or drops them at the bottom. Worst of all, the public averts its gaze, many falling for brainless political assurances that changes at CYF will fix things. No wonder there's low staff morale within the service.

There have always been some unwanted and abused children, and there always will be. We need public services to help them. It's more than a century since Minnie Dean, the Southland baby farmer, was hanged for murdering babies in her care. But the difficulties confronting today's children born at the bottom of the heap have reached epidemic proportions.

The mess could be reduced if there were more determination to hold parents accountable for their children instead of implying that some obscure, dark force is to blame for the deaths of Wairarapa children Saliel Aplin and Olympia Jetson, or the 15-year-old drug dealer in South Auckland.

CYF's problems could be made manageable, but the recruiting of new cases has to be slowed. When will we find a politician prepared to try?

The first thing that needs tackling is the excessive number of children born to those with little or no interest in their upbringing. "The rich get rich and the poor get children" used to have a degree of inevitability about it. But it's ridiculous in an era of free contraception and relatively easy access to abortion.

What we have done since the introduction of the domestic purposes benefit in 1973 is guarantee that poor people will have more children than they can cope with. The benefit system encourages those caught in the welfare poverty trap to breed.

Educating and nurturing even one child in a single-parent household - and, let's be frank, that's where most of those in danger come from - is a big ask for any mother. Some take solace in multiple partners, especially if they increase the number of dependants, and hence the family's income.

Too many men (usually themselves on benefits) batten on to vulnerable women, and abuse their partner's children. Many kids start their lives in poverty, and will remain enmeshed in the net until death.

The problems originate in dysfunctional homes and a benefit system that does so much to cause them in the first place. Domestic violence, crime, and drug and alcohol abuse are those children's constant companions.

Over the past decade the problems have grown to such an extent that the police cannot contain the fall-out from what the domestic purposes benefit, plus too-readily available sickness and unemployment benefits, are doing to society.

All people, even the stupid, respond to incentives. Pay them to breed, then advertise your willingness to accept responsibility for their fecklessness, and they will produce more children.

For people genuinely interested in our children's welfare it is time the parents were held responsible, not the state. Instead of the parents of the slain teenager blaming others for what happened, I want to see them answering how their child was allowed to drop out of school at 14 and become involved with a gang.

Extra funding for CYF's ambulance services will cure nothing. The problem came about in the first place because bleeding-heart politicians underestimated the damage they would do to society with the new benefit regime.

I voted for the domestic purposes benefit and several other benefits without enough thought. We encouraged people to shuck off their responsibilities on to society as a whole.

The state cannot act effectively in loco parentis. Teachers and social workers know it only too well. How many more children will die before today's politicians work it out?

* Historian Michael Bassett was a Labour Cabinet minister in the 1980s.