Social policy review vital for future

Press, 13 March 1986, Page 3

Social policy review vital for future

By

OLIVER RIDDELL

in Wellington

A Royal Commission on Social Policy, to make recommendations on what sort of country is wanted in the future, has been set up by the Government. It will examine principle and practice in social policy, and its terms of reference and membership are expected to have been settled by June.

This Royal Commission would weight fundamental questions of economic and social philosophy and set the standards by which method and performance in social policy might be measured, said the Prime Minister, Mr Lange. He expected it to start work in September and report to the Government in 1988.

Substantial and growing evidence showed that social services no longer served the purposes for which they had been intended or met the expectations which the community had for them. Social policy had developed through a piecemeal process of making alterations and additions to a basic framework set up in the 19305, Mr Lange said. An increasingly large proportion of resources were spent on income support and social services that reflected a society which no longer existed. If social policy was to succeed it had to reflect society as it is and not as it had once been. It had to take account of cultural, technological, and demographic realities. Social policy had to allow everyone the means to live decently, said Mr Lange, and the Royal Commission would be asked to draw up a priority list for specific policy in various areas of Government activity. Once the principles were established, they would be built into all relevant policy and not just the traditional big three: health, education, and social welfare.

Existing social policy was marked by inconsistency and inefficiency; it

was ofteh unfair; it stigmatised; it lacked purpose. There was no equity in a situation in which Brierley shareholders did extremely well but others did badly. Mr Lange said that this was a watershed Royal Commission. The last one into social security in 1972 had not looked at the roles of women, the alienation of some Maori people, and other “crunch” issues that needed to be looked at this time. “The issue to be looked at is not social welfare but social policy, not how much benefits should be but the nature of society, and how to give people in the 1990 s the sort of chance people in the 1950 s had had,” he said. The Royal Commission has been described by National’s spokesman on social welfare, Mr Venn Young (Waitotara), as having so wide a brief its result must be “more like a party political manifesto” than a recommendation to a Government. “It is an exercise in futility when so many new policies have been introduced before the inquiry,” he said.

The Government had already turned the social welfare system upside down with the extensive redistribution of incomes and benefits planned for October 1 next to coincide with the goods and services tax.

But Mr Lange said the Royal Commission was not looking at social welfare or the mechanism by which it was delivered — it was looking at the social policies on which a social welfare system might be based.