Every day I go deep into South Auckland. I have a good friend who let’s me share an office with him and it just happens to be in the middle of industrial Manukau. Sometimes i stop over there when I am deep in the grip of a depressive episode.
Going there everyday for nearly 5 years has given me an insight that I doubt any politician ever has.
So when I read this comment by Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats leader in the UK I caught my self nodding in agreement.
Speaking at an event organised by the CentreForum think-tank, Mr Clegg said: ”Under Labour huge sums of money were spent pushing low-income households just above the statistically defined level of household income – sometimes by just a few pounds a week – but with no discernible impact on the real life chances of the next generation.
”Tackling poverty of opportunity requires a more rounded approach. Welfare reform, for example, should be based on the need to improve people’s lives, not just raise their incomes.
”And I know this is what is animating the work of Iain Duncan Smith at the Department for Work and Pensions.”
Setting out the coalition’s “ethical and economic” imperatives for improving social mobility, Mr Clegg rejected criticism that its only goal was cutting public spending.
“Let me be clear: tackling the deficit is our immediate priority. But it is not our be-all and end-all. This Government is about much more than cuts,” he said.
“Our determination to fix the deficit is matched by our determination to create a more socially mobile society.”
Mr Clegg said the Government’s actions to improve life chances would be for the “long term” and take “years, if not decades, to bear fruit”.
This is the sort of thing that National, here, needs to expound upon. After nine years of Clarks special kind of socialism and social-reforming the people of Manukau are no better off. This is why Labour lost in 2008 and why Labour will lose again in 2011. The people that they prey on for votes simply don’t trust them.
After nine years of spending iterally billions on “lifting people from poverty”, those same people who backed Labour for three elections in a row are still living in the same shitty streets, with the same shitty neighbours, with their kids going to the same shitty schools. For them nothing, and I mean nothing, has changed.
All those billions have done what?
Labour politicians will tell you that they have alleviated poverty. Stuart “The Mangrove” Nash even wrote a pithy piece on Red Alert Alert using the exact words I quoted above.
Labour’s Working for Families has lifted thousands of children out of poverty and it has always been my view that it is the most effective income-redistribution policy ever, with more than 370,000 families receiving help through the scheme. About 80% of these families have an income of less than $59,000 a year. It is these had working New Zealanders that the scheme was designed to help, not those who are earning the big bucks with the smart accountants.
He mentions a magical figure of $59,000 a year. This is just $1000 below the threshold that Cullen’s rich prick tax and yet socialist wankers like The Mangrove say that Working For Families lifted them and their children our of poverty. The hypocrisy of a man who was safely ensconced in a luxury hotel in Las Vegas with one of his mistresses on election night 2008, while the poor his party lifted from poverty abandoned Labour is astonishing.
I make an offer to Stuart Nash, a man who proudly shows off his adopted Labour credentials, come to South Auckland with me, spend just a day and I bet you will never mouth such utterly contemptible inanities. Spend a day with me in Ryan Place, a street where literally millions of dollars of taxpayers money is being spent “educating” poor people but where the threat of violence lies just a heartbeat away. In fact I bet you would be too chicken to even walk the block with me.
Don’t believe me, ask Farrar, he has seen where I hang out. It isn’t for the faint hearted, and for sure none of the people wandering the streets around Ryan Place have never seen a Labour politician, nor a National one for that matter up close and personal when they haven’t been soliciting or bribing for votes.
I dare you Stuart, or Trevor or Simon or any other politician, I dare you to come and spend a day with the Whale and see why we need radical and effective welfare and education reform.
It so isn’t about controlling access to alcohol or anything else. Hell if I lived their lives I’d lobby for more alcohol to be available. We are losing our country and it isn’t because of alcohol or any other so called social ills, it is because politicians have lost their touch with the people, and in losing touch they have lost the ability to provide solutions.
I dare them to find it. I can tell them that the solution isn’t more welfare. Come and see, if you dare.
