Welcome to today’s daily kōrero!
Anyone can make the thread, first in first served. If you are here on a day and there’s no daily thread, feel free to create it!
Anyway, it’s just a chance to talk about your day, what you have planned, what you have done, etc.
So, how’s it going?
Thought for the day
I’m listening to a podcast, about poverty and mental health. It is based on an Irish perspective, but the issues they are talking about are generalizable to NZ. What do you think about poverty and the ways out of it?
A lot of what they are talking about is education, which resonates with me as I’m a firm believer in the power of education to transform society as a whole.
Where is my mind podcast https://pca.st/episode/5b707bf4-ba79-4a0c-97c6-fd383246c62a
Education is really important. But you can lift people out of poverty just by straight-up giving them money too. A properly-funded welfare system (or a UBI) would go a long way to truly ending poverty. Childhood poverty is such a strong predictor for anti-social behaviours like gang membership, crime, unemployment, that it blows my mind we don’t just funnel money to people to break them out of the inter-generational poverty loop.
It is almost always cheaper and more humane to give poor people money when they need it (both directly and via services.) Than to mop up the mess with police, prisons, Healthcare etc etc.
People seem to think poverty is a choice, and maybe it is, but it’s a choice by governments and citizens not to help those who need it.
This is a very good point.
I can’t believe that it took so long for a government to specifically measure child poverty; because as they say once you can measure it you can do something about it.
If we didn’t have a housing crisis, then also simply putting homeless people in a home greatly reduces the burden on the other services (healthcare, police, drug rehab etc…) that they make use of.
I have a lot of thoughts on this. Having worked in tertiary, one thing you notice is at entry level, it’s easy to tell what kind of school a student went to, and this seemed to be pretty closely correlated with decile. And this isn’t just in their skillsets it’s also in their expectations and level of entitlement.
Having used education to lift myself out of poverty when I was young, the only reason I was able to do that was ironically just as much of an accident of birth as my being poor in the first place. If I’d only been an average student, none of the opportunities I took would have been available to me.
Having been plunged back into poverty, I think people don’t really factor in the huge underlying structural issues which entrench it.
I think we rely too much on expecting people to dig themselves out of a hole they were born into, and not enough on government intervention. But unfortunately we don’t have a good path to change anything.
I think I’ve talked about this before but I would love for us to do a (probably) world first trial where we pay everyone in the country with residency or citizenship a UBI, probably set at the level of a single person on superannuation (as I think this is the highest “benefit” style payment). Then adjust tax rates so that working people are taxed more to balance the extra money to basically make it the same. Then stop paying superannuation or benefits. Basically, set up a UBI but most people get no more or less than they get now. The important thing being the no strings attached money, so you can go and start a business or study or get an apprenticeship knowing that money is always there and you don’t have to lie to WINZ to get it.
Other things I’d like to see are a very widespread government state house programme. Build heaps of new houses, so there are enough houses for everyone and then keep going, so increasing population is covered and any surplus houses mean people can move out of old cold places into nicer newer ones, removing the old cold ones from the housing stock. This would reduce demand on the health system, and create a proper housing market not driven by a lack of housing. It would also cause the rentals that politicians (or their donors) own to fall in value, so it’s unlikely to happen.
Another thing is to stop throwing people into prison. The data shows the more people you throw into prison the more criminals you create, and the crime rate only falls short term. I’d like to see a more rehabilitative approach, where we don’t put non-violent criminals in prison (especially young ones) and instead help them to get back on track. Prison leads to some pretty terrible financial outcomes locking people in poverty, so unless we have a firm reason to lock someone up I don’t think we should. Instead we should spent that $150k per prisoner per year on rehabilitation programmes that happen out of prison.
These are only some things that come to mind to help pull people out of poverty, and they are all government interventions. The problem is the amount of people on the top of the pyramid who have a vested interest in keeping the system the way it is.
ETA: Dentists! I can’t believe I forgot dentists. There are massive societal health benefits in having healthy teeth (one reason we have free dentists for under 18s), we should be extending dental care way past 18, and preferably bringing them into the public system.
As I have said to others in many conversations “you cannot punish your way out of crime”; society needs to decide what we want the justice system to do. Are we a restore and rehabilitate type of people or are we a punish and detain type of people?
Exactly! I also think there’s a misconception that heavier sentences act as a deterrent, when largely they don’t.
There isn’t a lot of evidence that harsher punishments lead to less crime.
But harsher punishments intuitively seem like they reduce crime, to those already unlikely to commit crime. Because obviously getting into trouble with the justice system is the worst thing that can happen, therefore getting in more trouble is worse. Thus harsher punishments must make crime less likely.
What the people who think like this seem to miss, is that their experience of life is not the same as those that commit crime (as a general rule); these people are mapping their own experience onto all people rather than trying to understand the experience of the “other”.
The way I see it, international statistics around recidivism rates are pretty conclusive. So at this point I have to wonder, is having punishments a higher priority than having lower crime rates, in our society?
For some, the punishment is the point. But I would say that given the choice between punishing people or having lower crime, almost everyone would take the lower crime rate.
If they would, then it’s hard to explain why as a country we have chosen not to.