After almost ten years of Labour-led government, what have we to show for it? A bunch of wealthy polluting dairy farmers, an unruly underclass of gangsters, taggers, assorted criminals and hopelessly poor people, and the rest comprised of bewildered and helpless hard-working people. Many of them aren’t workers any more, thanks to a grotesquely overvalued dollar and an economic climate that has ruined many a business, thanks to Michael Cullen’s thoughtless and derelict “rich prick” policies.

And now we have become one of the world’s finest exporters of taxpayer-funded talent.

Part of this ground-breaking economic transformation was Labour’s amazingly complicated “Working for Families” welfare policy.

It is the vital component of what Helen Clark and Michael Cullen like to call their path towards Economic Transformation (a phrase we hear less often from them, now that the financial chooks are coming home to roost, unemployment is rising, and most of our manufacturing is done in China).

They’ve transformed our economy, all right. Getting on for 50,000 a year are getting out and many of them are skilled young workers who cannot see any personal benefit in being over-taxed to help other working people’s families through Clark and Cullen’s Working for Families policy. They believe that the Government is gradually removing all incentives to achieve personal prosperity.

They are right.
Take 29-year-old freelance writer Miles Erwin, living a happy, single, childless life in London. In an excellent but mis-headlined report on the flood of talent from our shores (“No country for young folk”), the Dominion Post reported him as saying:

“…there isn’t that much New Zealand can do to get people like me back. There’s no real economic benefit to me going back. Government and Opposition policy seems fixated with families and there’s no encouragement for non-married, career-minded people to be in New Zealand.

“Why would I want to work and pay taxes for the Government when its flagship policy is Working for Families?”

There are around 600,000 New Zealanders living overseas who may agree with Miles.

Quite a number of much older, childless couples living in New Zealand will also agree with him.

There is a fatal flaw for Labour in its relentless and blunt redistribution of wealth to families who have a job or two, or three. It works like this:

A man and a woman have children. They must both work all the hours God gives to sustain the kids and pay the back-breaking mortgage interest on their home (this interest rate being controlled by people who know that to sustain the flaky economy and insatiable borrowing, their role is to attract foreign funds, no matter what the cost). Clark and Cullen construct a system of benefits so complex that Stalin would have been proud to employ them as advisers in the Kremlin.

They call it Working for Families. But no WFF benefits go to unemployed people, because Clark and Cullen figure that everyone should work (although they do not think too hard about achieving full employment). Full employment in New Zealand is not possible, because much traditional skilled work is now done more cheaply overseas, and the Government hasn’t twigged about the wealth you can earn from skilled NZ-based Internet workers who should have enjoyed high-speed broadband access to their marketplaces. But still can’t.

Labour was desperate to grab and hold middle class voters, believing that their core constituency of truly poor people would always vote Labour. That may be true, but those left in poverty and on benefits by Labour are now causing increasing trouble… which Labour handles by putting more and more of those who step out of line into tax-paid prisons, while they desperately seek more policemen to fulfil their election promise of 1000 more on the beat and try to beat a rising crime wave.

Once all this WFF State aid to working families has been applied (and assuming the middle class kids survive), the talented ones go on to higher education, where they rack up large student loans. Unable to find any job opportunities in New Zealand that would come anywhere near helping them repay the loan (because that part of Labour’s economic transformation has not yet been implemented), they flee overseas. The Government still likes to call this the OE, but in fact it is the EI – the Economic Imperative.

These days, most of them don’t come back. Some return when they are well into middle age and have hopefully made a pile of cash that Cullen was unable to lay his hands on. This is a great country for anyone who doesn’t need to earn a living… but these returnees will soon be pensioners. And pathology sets in, causing us problems down at the Health Centre.

While the bright youngsters are away, Mum and Dad proudly say that son or daughter has a high-flying job in London, Melbourne or New York. But they’re in sad denial because, deep down, they want them home.

So what Working for Families actually achieves is an economic transformation where New Zealanders (childless or not) pay taxes to help raise kids who then leave to join the talent pool elsewhere. Because so many skilled youngsters migrate, that leaves fewer (mostly unskilled) to look after the ageing population or earn taxable income to support an increasing pension burden.

This policy should really be called “Working Against Families”.

It takes money from people who are unable or unwilling to have children. It excludes people who cannot or will not work. It seems to be myopically focused on encouraging people to mindlessly breed. It probably breaches human rights legislation. It’s all very well to encourage and fund people to raise brilliant children, but you also need to create a place where they can work, prosper and enjoy their lives, in New Zealand.

Labour keeps on headlining Working for Families as its flagship achievement. What they’ve actually achieved is a social shift that’s produced an enormous class gap and badly damaged the country.

The Dominion Post was wrong to call its story “No country for young folk”. This is still the world’s best place to raise children (unless you are jobless). The trouble is that our children go away because their elders have been unable to provide a career path for them in their own country. Thanks to years of harmful meddling, neglect and mismanagement from the likes of Clark, Cullen, Dunne, Peters and the Greens, New Zealand is not a place for poor or old people, or ambitious young adults.

We have given this Labour-led lot more than 3500 days (and an army of publicly funded bureaucrats) to solve our nation’s hardest challenge: how to create a working environment that will attract diverse skills and businesses to the last place on Earth, keep our well-earned talent at home and offer everyone in New Zealand the chance of wealth and respect, instead of suspicion and envy.

All that Labour and its fellow-travellers can show for their decade of negatitivity is an increasing welfare-dependency, where the bright fly away, and we’re left with a few clever people who can’t or won’t leave – along with a pool of folk for whom there is no hope whatever because they are old or retired, or unskilled, or simply stuck in a welfare rut that the Labour-led State helped to dig.

Labour’s immigration policy means that we cannot retain immigrant doctors, nurses or police, because these excellent people (some of whom have studied for more than ten years) face a “not made in New Zealand” approach that often does not recognise their qualifications, imposes ridiculous constraints, and treats them with contempt.

At the last election, Labour urged voters: “Don’t put it all at risk.”

At the next election, voters will be wondering: “Given the state we’re in, what did we put at risk?”