© Anne Else; 24 May 1999

This month we've had yet another visit by an English economist, a Lord this time, brought out by the Business Roundtable to tell us that our welfare reforms have not gone far enough. Lord Skidelsky wants the state to stop providing education, health care and pensions, and instead pay only for those who are too poor to buy their own essential social services. But he thinks governments should toughen up the definition of poverty. At a certain point, he says, "being poor does not necessarily mean that you are entitled to a large television set and all the other material things that go with modern life, and that we (he means the state) have to provide them".

What exactly are the basics of modern life? It's quite a long list. Food, obviously, and reasonably healthy food at that - a meagre bowl of thin gruel three times a day may have been good enough for Oliver Twist, but it won't keep children or adults well enough to foot it in today's demanding world. Clothing, of course - nothing fancy, but it has to be decent. Dickensian rags would get you arrested today. Shelter is vital too, along with furniture. But if it's perpetually damp or overcrowded, so that you can't keep the house or yourself clean and dry, it will drag down everyone who lives in it. Get the food and shelter right, and many health problems won't arise or won't get serious. Get them wrong, and you'll breed lifelong problems, from damaged intelligence to rheumatic fever.

What else? Well, you can't live in a city without using power and water supplies, so you have to be able to pay for those. They cost more after they are sold to private companies. A bank account is essential too. But the less money you have in it, the higher the charges. And you'll need some kind of transport just to get to the supermarket to buy the food, let alone get to a job or to school. Oh yes, of course you'll need an education, and that certainly doesn't come free. Let's hope it's good enough to help you find a job that will pay for it all.

But the catch-22 is that if you don't have the basics in the first place, you are much less likely to be employed. The longer you go without any of them, the more difficult you'll find it to get back into the mainstream. And the longer you are out of a job, or can only get bits of jobs, the harder it is to hang on to the basics.

The day Lord Skidelsky appeared in the paper, I got a report from the Methodist Mission emergency relief service in Christchurch. It's a pity the Lord didn't have time to visit them. They could have shown him that the poor already go without a lot more than large television sets. In the year to March, this one foodbank gave out over 3200 food parcels. The average value of each parcel was about $30. But those families could not survive without it.

Today one in 9 people are still officially jobless - and that's not counting most of the sole parents, the sick, or the disabled. One in three of the unemployed have been out of a job for over six months, and one in 12 for over two years. Maori unemployment is over 19 percent. In the past year, part-time jobs grew by 30,000, but full-time employment fell by 19,000. Yet our economists are hailing a drop of half a percent in the official unemployment rate as a "sharp fall".

In the first three months of this year, there was an increase of 28.5 percent in the number of people coming to the Christchurch mission for basic support, compared with a year ago. This included growing numbers of workers who earn too little to live on. The report says "the poverty problem has grown significantly worse, with little or no evidence of any improvements in the situation of those most socially and economically disadvantaged."

While the Lord Skidelskies of this world witter on about television sets, the hidden reality is that the poor are quite clearly getting poorer - so poor, in fact, that they are unable to buy enough of the basics to stay healthy, let alone stay in the race for jobs, or equip their children to join it. For them, just getting back to basics is an impossible dream.

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