They may be, but only because they probably don't know what they're missing? When I read on the Internet that about 49 per cent of New Zealanders are content with the economic situation, one assumes that all his getting much better for everyone.
I contrast this with the news that New Zealand food banks are under huge pressure to supply practical assistance to those struggling to make ends meet. The introduction of an Emissions Trading Scheme will add 5% to electricity bills making the financially vulnerable even worse off while providing profits to those participating in the scheme, all in the name of global warming reductions. The increase in GST can do nothing to alleviate the financial difficulties that will fall on more New Zealanders in the coming months.
The same economic pressures apply in Britain with the potential for much greater unemployment than has been seen for years. The cry from many people is stop giving money to overseas aid and give aid to the growing number of poor in Britain instead.
Extreme poverty gone
The authors, Claire Melamed and Joseph Hanlon, of an article in the London Sunday Times (4-7-10) in defending the giving of overseas aid state that Britain has actually ended extreme poverty. It has done this by giving people money. Jobseekers allowance, housing benefit, state pensions and child benefits are all direct descendants of an approach that governments have taken to ending poverty since the first Elizabethan Poor Law of 1598.
This may be the case but in another part of the same newspaper Jenni Russell, no relation, believes that families need fathers. She states that fathers should work to support their children. Single mothers who want to care for children should be allowed to stay at home. In Britain of 2010 these beliefs are provocative. Her view is that both main (failed) parties think the answer to single mother’s poverty is to compensate them for the loss of a male breadwinner when the children are young and then to give them a financial incentives to push them back to work.
She reports that 40 per cent of the country's 1.9 single parents are living on benefits because, in the absence of a second bread winner, they can't support themselves. They prefer the security of being kept by the state to living with badly paid or non working men.
Men facing lifetime of aimlessness
It is said that men are facing a lifetime of aimlessness and emotional isolation without the ties of work or family to give them meaning. However, the drugs trade gives them work opportunities and entrepreneurial skills.
Thousands of young men have been disenfranchised by shifts in the economy and the pointlessness of the education system.
Jenni Russell believes that benefits or to encourage parents to live together and should ensure that all work and all attempts to stand the job market are rewarded. In fact they do neither: single parents are given so much extra financial help that unemployed and low paid parents are substantially better off living apart.
Not only in Britain, but in New Zealand the social damage caused to families by economic upheavals and patch work band aid applications of financial assistance, together with an army of social assistance enforcers and a lack of purpose in life, has been the result of government policy failures. Each puncture of the whole results in a plaster being applied until finally the whole looks nothing like the original- just a bunch of plasters holding each other together.
Cash helps
So back to Melamed and Hanlon. In their support for help to poor countries they advocate giving cash to people. In the poorest areas of Brazil giving money directly to poor families resulted in near halving of child malnutrition. Because it's no good throwing money at people the government should have a policy that no one will ever again go without enough money to feed their children, clothe them, educate them and cure them when they get sick. Our old people would no longer start slowly to death as they awaited the charity of strangers.
We really could choose to end extreme poverty for everyone. We know how. The only question is: do we want to?
But not cash alone
Of course, cash is by no means a panacea. For education rates to be improved there have to be schools. In the long term there also has to be investment in jobs and roads, credit are available for small businesses, plus all the other hallmarks of a successful economy.
And you cannot have a successful economy with a financial system that requires more money to be paid back -to a few -then actually exists. Starting with a new financial system, based not on borrowing, governments could plan a wholesome, or holistic, overall policy that helps provide incentive, purpose, hope, paid employment and financial security for all.
And this won't come with financial incentives and rewards for the rich, but with political parties which reject the present unjust, dishonest, fraudulent debt financial system.
- contributed by Mortimer Russell, DSC’s American born UK correspondent