"Four decades and ten PMs later!" - Ian Shirley

Late Emeritus Professor Ian Shirley, AUT 
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This article was published on January 12 this year. Professor Shirley died on the 20th. The article, and those listed at the end, are important contributions to NZ public policy. -- ACW


It has taken over four decades and ten Prime Ministers to see a New Zealand government with both the foresight and courage to take the first steps in provoking a fundamental shift in this country’s social policy arrangements. It began with the ‘families package ‘toward the end of 2017 which replaced tax cuts for the wealthy and this has been followed by focusing on children as the country’s most vulnerable population – not just ‘children in trouble or troublesome children’, but all children who represent this country’s future as well as its greatest asset.

Those of us working in public policy over recent decades have consistently argued for a major shift in the reductionist economic thinking that led Treasury in the 1980s to argue:

"Families and tribes are not organic entities with mortality, rationality and senses, they cannot feel pleasure or pain … the individual person is the logical basis for [social policy] analysis".

It was only ever a ‘logical basis for social policy analysis’ if driven by an antiquated form of laissez faire economics and it is this reductionist approach that has permeated economic and social policy in this country since the 1980s. 

As a consequence, human groups, institutions and collectivities of one sort or another have been reduced by economic theologians to a world of rational individual beings seeking to maximize their productive capacities. 

Even concepts such as justice and fairness were prescribed by individual rights and responsibilities with major social policy domains such as health and education reduced to a range of commodities that could be purchased by individuals for their own enhancement and wellbeing.

In Treasury’s terminology, the purpose or function of education was ‘to prepare the individual for his or her economic role’. Education we were told was ‘a private commodity not a public good’. In contrast to New Zealand’s historical emphasis on fusing economic and social policy, the neoliberal reforms artificially separated social and economic policy - in the process social policy was reduced to a form of social plumbing, plugging leaks and patching a failing neoliberal experiment.

Research in which we have been engaged since the 1980s has consistently argued that a fundamental shift in our social policy arrangements would require a radically different framework as well as the political will to ensure its implementation in practice. 

The first of these requirements is in place driven by an MMP government and a Prime Minister representing generational change in policy thinking. This combination has framed an agenda with the potential and foresight to radically alter our social policy arrangements. On its own however the framework will not be enough. It will require an equally radical response from the various working groups and the plethora of individuals and groups in both government and civil society charged with implementation.

For the purpose of this discussion I want to set the implementation issues aside for a moment and concentrate instead on one aspect of social policy research that reinforces the framework that has been adopted. The research program I am referring to stems from our international study of comparative Family policy[i] and especially the subsequent research on childhood[ii].

Children and childhood: the nation’s greatest asset

The research program on family policy in New Zealand was a logical progression from its central role in underpinning the ‘male wage-earners welfare state’ coupled with the primary significance accorded ‘the family’ in the nurturing and raising of children. Historically speaking the familial form that dominated policy discussions throughout the twentieth century assumed the nuclear family was the norm with any other construction being regarded as an anomaly. 

This was particularly so for sole parent families[iii] who were frequently treated as problem households especially in the care and protection of children. Likewise, the extended families of Maori and Pacific households did not fit the nuclear model and when policies were being developed to accommodate these diverse cultures and communities, social service practices were drawn from European traditions that were demonstrably inadequate.

Social scientific research, especially in the application to economic and social policy, was also inadequate especially through the 1970s and 80s when the focus tended to be primarily on ‘captive populations’. Research practices at this time came under a sustained attack from leading researchers such as Dr. Lois Bryson[iv], who challenged social scientists to question whose interests were being served by focusing on individuals and pathology. Bryson advocated a more critical approach that would lead social scientists to study up the organization, focusing on those in power, and this inevitably led to what became basic questions for social scientists conducting public policy research, namely: who plans, on what basis and who benefits? The scope of Bryson’s critique led to a rethinking of research topics and a desire among many researchers to focus more specifically on research outcomes.

This critical approach to social scientific research had particular relevance for research on ‘the welfare state’ where the emphasis was aimed at studying down on marginal groups such as beneficiaries, the unemployed, truants and solo parents. Even children were treated as a captive population and thus the desire to rethink our approach to children and childhood became a major research initiative.

An international review of the literature on children was initiated when I signed a contract with the Social Policy Agency[v]. The emphasis was on defining ‘the determinants of good childhood outcomes’ with emphasis on children as social actors, influencing, as well as being influenced by the worlds in which they live. We were asked to place primary emphasis on good outcomes as defined in the literature with particular emphasis being paid to the wellbeing of children. The aim was to assess the range of factors that influence good childhood outcomes, leading to what is described in the literature as individual and social wellbeing.

From the individual child to childhood and to children as a population group

The two most important factors in the constitution of modern Childhood are identified as legislation prescribing compulsory education and laws setting parameters for child labour. A child became someone who had not finished elementary education and was too young to work. These defining characteristics were followed by penal laws raising the age of criminal responsibility and regulating sexuality and marriage. Even the protection of children was confined to legal sanctions against murder, maiming and incest. When the protection of children against adult cruelty and neglect followed, it was modelled on legislation aimed at preventing cruelty to animals.

Not only did the rights of children come last in the family hierarchy, but early protective legislation defined children as subordinate members of society who owed obedience and deference to the father of the family, to the master of the school, and to other institutions loco parentis. Whereas the emancipation of adult males was a liberation from gerontocracy, feudalism, slavery and other socio-economic tyrants, the emancipation of women and children has been a process of liberation from patriarchy with children’s rights only emerging 50 years after the first significant advances of women.

The historical ambivalence in the treatment of children is reflected in the changing priorities of the social sciences. Childhood has rarely been explicitly studied at all, but when it does feature as the focus of research agendas, the main emphasis has been on children as passive recipients in the ‘process of becoming adults’. Children are treated as ‘non-people in non-places’ with research focusing on the child as an outcome of genetic and environmental processes, rather than a social being actively engaged in life. Good outcomes for children traditionally means developing those skills, competencies and cultural practices that enable a child to make a ‘successful’ transition to adulthood. Children are dealt with as ‘human becomings’ rather than human beings.

A second theme evident in the research literature centres on the preoccupation with negative indicators and outcomes. It is a bias encapsulated in research on dysfunctional families and ‘children at risk’ where the emphasis is either on children in trouble or troublesome children. The international literature is preoccupied with:

"Neglected children, children who are victims of violence and sexual abuse, children who have disappeared, children of divorced families, criminal and deviant children, truants indeed, even hyperactive and exceptionally talented children seem to constitute a problem"[vi].

Whereas the human development literature generally adopts a life-cycle approach in explaining the transitions made by individuals as they proceed from one stage of development to another, policy-related studies on childhood are dominated by a ‘welfare’ focus where the emphasis is on those individuals or groups who deviate from the norm. The welfare approach is problematic for two reasons: first it focuses attention on a minority with ‘explanations’ inevitably limited to groups that have already been defined as deviant; and secondly, it begs the question, what is normal development?

A third theme to emerge from the international literature concerns the narrow definition of ‘risk’ and the limited range of factors that are used in focusing policy options and in prescribing social service intervention or ‘practice’. Whenever children are viewed as a population group they are generally perceived as a collection of individuals – the dependent cogs of the family unit within a society of adults. Even the statistics we collect on children are almost exclusively focused on ‘the family’ or ‘the household’ and as a consequence the child is viewed as a ‘by product’ of the main unit of observation. This reductionist approach to childhood is exemplified in studies of children at risk where the focus centres on individual differences and pathologies, thereby excluding environmental factors such as housing, work-poor households, the economic circumstances of the family and the pervasive influence of ‘unfavourable neighbourhoods’.

Conclusions that can be drawn from the research programme on childhood

The focus on children and childhood as articulated by the Coalition government represents the most fundamental shift in social policy in over four decades. As a policy focus it gives New Zealand the opportunity to make a comprehensive start in addressing economic and social inequality, the most significant social policy issue of this 21st century.

By focusing on childhood and children as a population group attention is drawn to the comparative wellbeing of children vis a vis other populations and subgroups of the population. The emphasis is on addressing structural issues in promoting economic and social wellbeing.

That said, major challenges remain and these challenges stem primarily from implementation. While the child wellbeing strategy adopts the Prime Ministers focus on children as a population group, it fuses childhood and adolescence in a comprehensive set of outcomes that are dependent upon New Zealand society as a whole and that includes the complex range of institutions both public and civil that are somehow engaged in promoting positive outcomes for children. 

In my view it is not possible to effectively measure the outcomes of this process. As a consequence, the innovative framework proposed by the government will tend to be watered down in a wishy-washy language of well-being and the fundamentally flawed concept of social investment.

If the process of implementation is to be advanced then in my view it will require: 

• Distinctions to be drawn between those aspects of the policy that will be the primary responsibility of government and those that will mediated by other parties such as parents, whanau, caregivers, and schools. We need to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of public policy for children in general and child poverty in particular.
• Separating youth from childhood and concentrating our initial efforts on New Zealand children. A separate working group could be established to develop a policy strategy for young people. The research evidence required in advancing youth policy is not currently as comprehensive as that established for the well-being of children.
• Forming a working group with the national and international expertise required to construct technical guidelines for both measuring and monitoring the economic and social wellbeing of children.

Totally revamping the current approach to ‘social investment’. 

As implemented in New Zealand social investment is a form of targeting that utilizes data to focus in a very intensive way on captive populations. While it has the potential to provide limited evidence and knowledge in the ‘treatment’ of individuals it does not advance either the policy framework or systems capable of making a fundamental shift in New Zealand’s social policy.

Building a ‘development fund’ for New Zealand children that combines a radically different approach to social investment based on grouping government funding for children across social policy domains such as education, health, housing and social services as well as funding those ‘treatment’ type policies and services aimed at ameliorating child poverty. (In the short-term I align myself with those who would give precedence to assign public funding for children over the budget responsibility rules that have been advanced for the 2019 budget).

Finally, I am somewhat ambivalent in placing too much emphasis on the UN Convention on the rights of the child. It stems from an historical focus on individual children as defined in law and as our research has demonstrated it reinforces a pervasive cultural framework that has done little to advance childhood outcomes especially for Maori and Pacific communities. 

While a ‘rights focus’ is frequently used in discussing child-centred practice, where is the evidence to show that it is a fundamental concept in advancing the economic and social wellbeing of children? As in the case of ‘social investment’ the ‘rights’ of children may have a role to play in ensuring some children such as those that are disabled have access to services and support but in policy terms we need to demonstrate how articulating a ‘rights’ perspective is consistent with a strategy aimed at promoting ‘good childhood outcomes’.

References

[i] Shirley, Ian; P.Koopman-Boyden, Ian Pool, Susan. St.john (1997), Family Change and Family Policies: New Zealand. The New Zealand section of an International Family Study of twenty countries commissioned by the Mannheim centre in Germany and edited by S. Kamerman & A. Kahn, Clarendon Press, Oxford (2017-304).

[ii] Shirley, I.,V. Adair, A. Anderson (2000), The Determinants of Good Childhood Outcomes. A Report for the Social Policy Agency, Auckland & Wellington.

[iii] Baker, M., J. Pryor, J. Millar, I. Shirley (2003). Lone Parenthood and Outcomes for Children. A review of the Literature, prepared for the Ministry of Social Development, Wellington

[iv] Bryson, L. (1979). How do we Proceed now we Know Science is not Value free? A paper to the General Symposium, Social Responsibility in Science, in W. Green (editor) Focus on Social Responsibility in Science, Auckland (87-105)

[v] Shirley, I., V. Adair, A. Anderson (2000), The Determinants of Good Childhood Outcomes, A Report for the Social Policy Agency, Auckland & Wellington

[vi] Qvortrup, J. (1987). Introduction in international Journal of Sociology, Special Issue on Childhood, Vol 17, Issue 3, (3-37).



More ...
On my blog Ian Shirley on Free Speech in Who's Interests? (To be published at the weekend pn250)
Some Podcasts https://thepolicyobservatory.aut.ac.nz/publications/the-human-laboratory
Call for reform of public sector
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1806/S00151/prof-calls-for-reform-of-the-public-sector.htm
NZ Pioneer on social policy 
https://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/saturday/audio/201857067/ian-shirley-public-policy-pioneer
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Shirley
Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/ian-shirley-3077521/