The Poverty of the Politics of Poverty

Udayan complained the other day that my writing is too 'vanilla'. Luckily for him, I have been a little unimpressed with the NZ blogosphere of late, and so here is something a little more strongly worded than usual. Normal posting will resume shortly; I have a few thought experiments on the morality of tax which will be coming soon.

Like many, I am little worried that the social development minister Paula Bennett thinks it's appropriate (read that link because I will assume you know what I'm talking about!) to chuck private information into the public domain to win some cheap debate points. But unlike some local commentators, I don't think it's worth hyperventilating about. It's clearly inappropriate, but saying that it is 'about the right to free speech without fear of reprisal' is way off-base. It's also a little hypocritical for those who are provoked into a righteous rage whenever someone even mentions that the 'more Government' isn't the answer to every political question to tell us to 'beware of unbridled Government'. But it's pretty apparent that many people are only opposed to Government power when it's wielded by the 'bad guys', and are quite happy for themselves or their friends to have it - witness Obama's somewhat limp redaction of Bush-era civil-rights abuses.

Let's be quite clear here - these two ladies are certainly criticising the Government. But they are also making empirical claims about the amount of welfare they receive, which appear to have been misleading, to make their case for more welfare sound stronger than it actually was. That puts them in a very different situation than your average National-hating blogger, some of whom are now ridiculously suggesting that they could be the next target. Get over yourselves. More importantly though, you should realise that National's reponse, while bad, isn't straight out of Mussolini's playbook. There's a world of difference between abusing your power to embarrass your critics and abusing it to correct them when they lie about their means. Both are bad, but only one is really a threat to the fabric of democracy. The former discourages criticism full stop, the latter discourages lying about yourself in the public sphere to try to get more money.

I think that in any healthy debate, both actors should as a general rule be able to correct factual inaccuracies in the other side's case. In this specific situation, the error related to private information, so the Government should have definitely proceeded more carefully (read: not given out the information). The appropriate response would be to defend their programs with averages and hypotheticals.

I guess a large part of the reason I am annoyed here is my views are coloured by my own situation - I am a student and (if Paula Bennett's figures are right) have an income (including weekly student allowance, not including course fees) of less than half what those women receive. In terms of Government transfers, I get less than a quarter, and I have to pay that back when I graduate (or more accurately, when I start working full-time :) ) I appreciate that it's difficult to raise a child and study at the same, but with student loans and subsidised child care on top of what they already get, I'm very sceptical that these two women can't afford to study.