KEY POINTS:
The New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services has announced its vision that poverty elimination and quality of life be an election issue.
It called for greater awareness and action about Aotearoa New Zealand's entrenched social problems.
Despite the criticisms made in a Herald editorial, recent research shows that the council's call for action is in line with the concerns of average New Zealanders.
I conducted focus groups with a wide range of New Zealanders and was surprised by the collective consciousness they demonstrated. New Zealanders are happy to take responsibility for themselves in many ways.
But, despite years of user-pays policies, most still believe access to decent education, health, housing and adequate income should be a right of citizenship. They also believe that being a good citizen requires us to think about the collective society, or at least others in our local community.
The focus groups showed how New Zealanders are concerned with what they consider to be excessive individualism and consumerism within modern society. They are disgruntled by 20 years of policies aiming to encourage greater individual responsibility. "If we just look after ourselves," we've been told, "then all will be okay". My research participants didn't buy any of this, suggesting Kiwis still believe we are in this boat together and it's not just sink or swim.
These findings contradict predictions that an increase in private health insurance, greater social assistance targeting and an emphasis on individual responsibility in the welfare system would radically change public attitudes, making them shun the notions of solidarity promoted by Savage's first Labour government and left largely intact in policy until the mid-1980s.
New Zealanders also still see a role for government in taking responsibility for creating the kind of social and economic conditions where individuals are able to practice self-reliance and independence.
Internationally low wages and poor housing affordability meant that even middle-class participants in the research were feeling the pinch, making many feel that you can only be a first-class citizen in this country if you are politician, a sports star or an actor on Shortland Street.
But it was the benefit recipients who really felt second-class. The benefit cuts of 1991 have never been restored, so an unemployed person now receives less than 30 per cent of net average wages. Survival is a daily struggle, made even tougher by what participants described as disrespectful and often downright degrading treatment by Work and Income officials and policies that blame individuals for their circumstances.
It comes as no surprise, then, that New Zealanders feel distrustful of politicians of every persuasion as they try to make sense of how successive governments have ignored the growing social problems that result from long-term poverty and the family dysfunction that comes with it.
In this way, they endorse the Council of Christian Social Services' view that poverty and social inequality must make their way on to the political agenda before it's too late.
* Dr Louise Humpage is a sociologist at the University of Auckland whose study Understanding Social Citizenship in New Zealand is funded by the Royal Society Marsden Fund.
