Past Judgement: Social Policy in New Zealand History by Bronwyn Dalley & Margaret Tennant

Author:Bronwyn Dalley & Margaret Tennant [Dalley, Bronwyn & Tennant, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780947522506
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 34643886
Publisher: Otago University Press
Published: 2004-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

The right to belong

The growing level of resentment against special assistance by the end of the 1960s was one of the factors which led to the Royal Commission to Inquire into Social Security 1969–72 and a radical reappraisal of what need meant in an affluent era. Economists, policy-makers and others have struggled with defining need for centuries, since Adam Smith, the eighteenth-century economist, defined basic necessities as things ‘the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without’.33 In his famous analysis of the needs of poor people in York a century later, Joseph Rowntree believed that bare subsistence was different from ‘living’. He argued that if only the barest of needs were met, society was assuming that ‘all human passion for frivolity, the relief of monotony and even irresponsibility, were ruthlessly repressed’.34More recently an Australian expert on social security law has claimed that Kentucky Fried Chicken is the privilege of every citizen in a modern era where takeaways are the norm. In his view the typical nutritionist’s austere budget for poor people ‘assumes a degree of economy and rationality in the purchase and preparation of food which pays little regard to social reality’.35

The Commissioners in 1972 followed reformers around the Western world who were redefining poverty so that the term no longer implied destitution but included this idea of ‘relative poverty’ – the feeling of being an outsider unable to share the pleasures of those nearby.36 While widening the concept of need, the Royal Commission’s Report also reinstated a rhetoric of rights, and above all, the right to belong:

no-one is to be so poor that he cannot eat the sort of food that New Zealanders usually eat, wear the same sort of clothes, take a moderate part in those activities which the ordinary New Zealander takes part in as a matter of course. The goal is to enable any citizen to meet and mix with other New Zealanders as one of them, as a full member of the community – in brief, to belong.37

The Commission led to a modest raise of benefit levels. At the same time, however, social security principles understood poverty in less generous terms than the Royal Commission on Workers’ Compensation that was held almost concurrently. For while accident compensation was making a radical move away from the concept of blame, it retained a strong sense of rights inherent to the workplace. Social security was designed to obscure difference and achieve a common culture, but ACC perceived need in terms of a person’s desire to return to his or her former way of life in a diverse community. Its benefits rewarded a victim’s past work experience and skills. Social security planners had no interest in supplying a manager with the smoked salmon that he was accustomed to enjoying; they preferred to raise everyone from the bottom rung nearer to the middle line. Moreover, social security served a larger number of beneficiaries and could not afford the comparative

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