MURIEL NEWMAN: The Anatomy of Dependence

In spite of the Coalition’s best efforts to create jobs and boost economic growth, State dependency continues to grow with the latest June 2025 statistics showing over 12 percent of the working age population receive welfare.

According to the Ministry of Social Development, of the 406,000 New Zealanders on a benefit, some 216,000 are receiving Jobseeker Support, 80,000 are on Sole Parent Support, 106,000 receive Supported Living Payments, 1,400 collect Young Parent Payments, with the balance receiving emergency benefits.

The main ethnic breakdown shows around 47 percent of all beneficiaries are European, 36 percent are Maori, 10 percent Pacific Islanders, and 3 percent Asian.

While this indicates Maori are seriously over-represented in the overall benefit data, when it comes to Sole Parent Support, the discrepancy escalates: Maori now make up the majority of single mothers at 42 percent, followed by Europeans on 37 percent, Pacifica on 13 percent, and Asian on 3 percent.

The burning question is what’s going wrong for a small country like New Zealand to have so many people dependent on the State?

To answer that, we need to look back at the major changes made to welfare.

For the first thirty years, the system worked well. Introduced by Michael Joseph Savage in 1938, State welfare supplemented the community-based charitable efforts that had traditionally assisted the needy.

Right up until the sixties fewer than 15,000 people received a benefit, with less than a thousand unemployed. While the temporary assistance was not overly generous, it was sufficient to support someone until they found a job. The incentive to seek employment was strong, with someone in work appreciably better off than on welfare.

For single mothers, social assistance was time limited from when she was 8 months pregnant until her baby was either three months old if bottle-fed, or six months if breastfed. Additional support was also available for those whose relationships had broken down, while they regained their independence.

The system not only reflected the importance of work but it reinforced a well-established social contract between taxpayers and the government – that only people ‘of good moral character and sober habits’ were entitled to welfare. Those who were indolent or otherwise ‘undeserving’, were assisted instead by charitable organisations.

No-one starved and there was no welfare dependency.

In the late sixties, however, amid growing concerns that the benefit system was losing relativity with rising living standards, the Holyoake Government established a Royal Commission of Inquiry. Their report, Social Security in New Zealand, was published in March 1972.

New Zealand’s welfare problems began when Norman Kirk’s Labour Government, which was elected in November of that year, began introducing the Commission’s recommendations.

Three changes, in particular, proved disastrous.

Firstly, the ‘good character’ requirement for State support was replaced with a ‘universal benefit’ entitlement that forced taxpayers to fund destructive, criminal and anti-social behaviours – a situation that continues to this day, with most criminal gang members receiving welfare.

In fact, MSD research from 2016 not only found that over 90 percent of all known gang members had been on a benefit, but that 60 percent of their children had suffered abuse or neglect, with nearly a quarter having had youth justice involvement by the time they were 10.

A second major change – to enable a beneficiary to “enjoy a standard of living close enough to the general community standard for him to feel a sense of participating in the community and belonging to it” – increased benefit levels closer to a working wage. By eliminating the urgency to find a job, welfare became a “lifestyle choice”.

The third change, driven by the feminist movement, was the introduction of a stand-alone benefit to enable single mothers to raise children on their own without the need for fathers.

This proved to be disastrous. By subsidising family breakdown and sole parenthood, the single parent benefit not only marginalised fathers, leaving mothers struggling to raise children on their own, but it entrenched a culture of dependency that put children at serious risk of abuse and neglect.

As the former Governor General Sir Michael Hardie Boys explained in 1998: “Fatherless families are more likely to give rise… to the risks of being abused, of being emotionally, even physically scarred, of dropping out of school, of becoming pregnant, of living on the streets, of being hooked on alcohol or drugs, of being caught up in gangs, in crime, of being unemployable, of having no ambition, no vision, no hope, at risk of handing down hopelessness to the next generation, at risk of suicide.”

In 2003, the former Principal Youth Court Judge, Andrew Becroft, was forthright in describing the dire consequences of boys being raised without fathers: “Many have no adult male role model – 14, 15, and 16 year old boys seek out role models like ‘heat seeking missiles’. It’s either the leader of the Mongrel Mob or it’s a sports coach or its dad. But an overwhelming majority of boys who I see in the Youth Court have lost contact with their father…”

With clear evidence that children from single parent households are more likely to be poor, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems – with boys more likely to become involved in crime and girls more likely to become pregnant – it is shameful that a disastrous policy that rips apart families and leaves children vulnerable to serious harm, is still in place.

The OECD has been highly critical of the way sole parents are treated in New Zealand. With assistance for mothers with children in most other countries, temporary and work-related, they attribute the weak work requirements and generous payments associated with our stand-alone sole parent benefit as being responsible for encouraging women with children to stay on welfare for far too long. This, they say is why New Zealand has one of the highest rates of child poverty and deprivation in the OECD.

John Key’s National Government entered office in 2008, promising to turn the situation around. Their Welfare Working Group, established in 2010, was tasked with identifying ways of reducing long-term benefit dependency.

The Working Group found only a third of able-bodied beneficiaries were work-tested, and they recommended major reform: “Most working age people are able to participate in paid work, either immediately or after some preparation and transition support. We propose that all people seeking welfare support would apply for Jobseeker Support. This common support would start with the assumption that people can work and would send strong signals about the value of paid work.”

Their plan was to enrol all beneficiaries on Jobseeker Support from where they would be directed into three different pathways: the jobseeker stream for those who could move into paid work with minimal support; the transition to work stream for those who needed more intensive training and support; and the long-term support stream for those with permanent and severe impairments, where work contributions would be encouraged but not required.

Their plan for sole parents was to transition them into work: “The Working Group is of the view that participation in paid work, particularly full-time work, is the best means for sole parents to provide long-term financial security and avoid poverty for themselves and their children…”

They proposed 20 hours a week of part-time work once a child was three, increasing to 30 hours a week, once a youngest child was 6 – similar to OECD recommendations.

However, instead of introducing a single work-focussed benefit, National’s response left the welfare system essentially intact with the dole renamed as Jobseeker Support, the Domestic Purposes Benefit as Sole Parent Support, and the Sickness and Invalid Benefits as Supported Living Payments.

As a result of retaining the separate benefit for single parents, while more intensive case management saw the numbers decline to 58,600 in June 2018 – from well over 100,000 in the early 2000s – they have now risen back up to levels not seen since 2013.

This week’s NZCPR Guest Commentator is Dr Michael Bassett, a former Labour Government Minister who was first elected to Parliament in 1972 and has closely followed the corruption of welfare into a system that “farms” the vulnerable, trapping them into a dangerous cycle of intergenerational dependency: 

“We are now in a situation where as many as three generations of kids have never experienced the real family lives that as late as the 1960s underpinned New Zealand society. Too many kids either truant from school, disrupt classes, or drift off into petty crime, or worse. Maori are the biggest ethnicity in this cohort. Eighty percent of Maori children are born to mothers who aren’t married. The prison statistic where 51 percent of prisoners are Maori tells its own story.

“Growing up alongside this festering mess is an expanding industry of social workers, charities, bleeding hearts, and aspiring left-wing journalists and politicians who see advantage for themselves in the continuing social collapse.

“Today, large numbers of jobs depend on social mayhem and the agonies that ensue from it. This industry prevents politicians, who have been at the heart of misplaced policies since the 1970s, from coming to grips with the real causes of the social mess before our eyes.

“Paying able-bodied people to stay at home and not earn their living is probably the biggest social miscalculation of the last sixty years. Unwinding it won’t be easy. There will be howls of outrage led by those who farm poverty.”

As Dr Bassett indicates, vast armies of people now make a living from dependency.

And the more disadvantage there is, the bigger the budget allocations to the agencies delivering support.

For tribal leaders, the vested interests and financial rewards are even greater. By claiming the disadvantage suffered by “their people” is caused by racial discrimination, they have locked in government funding worth hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for their separatist “by Maori, for Maori” agenda.

While it is illegal in this country to discriminate on the basis of race, under Section 73 of the Human Rights Act 1993 and Section 19(2) of our Bill of Rights, actions taken “in good faith” to advance those who have been disadvantaged by discrimination are not considered unlawful.

This is why tribal leaders continually declare government services are racist. Seldom challenged, their allegations open the door to great riches from separatism.

The root cause of intergenerational dependency in New Zealand is the sole parent benefit. For generations of children growing up in fatherless families without role models of parents who work for a living, repeating the cycle of dependency has become the norm – especially for Maori.

Back in 2004, the Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia, a former Labour Government Minister, created a scandal by effectively encouraging young Maori to ‘go forth and multiply’. 

The Labour Government, struggling to contain an escalation in sole parent benefit dependency at the time, was highly critical of her comments condoning Maori teenage pregnancy: “For anyone to argue that it’s a good thing for thirteen-year old girls to have babies is utterly irresponsible. Ms Turia has previously espoused a view that she thinks it is important to increase the Maori population and that early fertility and a shortening of the generation cycle is an appropriate way of doing this. We must do all we can to educate our kids to avoid early pregnancy. It is grossly irresponsible to argue otherwise.” 

Judging by the fact that Maori now dominate sole parent benefit statistics, it appears the underlying signal that having children on taxpayer-funded benefits helps “our people” is still intact.  

If New Zealand is to break the cycle of intergenerational welfare dependency and reduce the incalculable social harm it creates, support for sole parents must be merged into a benefit focussed on work – as recommended by the Welfare Working Group and the OECD.

Furthermore, all Government social service contracts for the able-bodied should not only be tied to measurable outcomes that reduce State dependency, but lucrative race-based funding streams must be eliminated as well.

This article was first published at NZCPR. Dr Muriel Newman established NZCPR as a public policy think tank in 2005 after nine years as a Member of Parliament. A former Chamber of Commerce President, her background is in business and education.