The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JULY 16, 1908. OLD AGE PENSIONS

New Zealand Tablet, 16 July 1908, Page 21

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JULY 16, 1908. OLD AGE PENSIONS

HAT Seneca calls ' the incurable disease ' ' of old-age has, for our poor, 'been robbed of many of its fears and clothed with new hopes in the Dominion of New Zealand by our Old Age Pensions Act of 1898 and its amendments. The annual report of the Department ' charged with the administration of this ■ beneficent •• . mejasure records that, at the end of Ma.rch, 13,569--' aged people were aided by it to pass in comfort' through the period of repose of life—' the rest that' ' precedes the rest that remains '. The cost to "the country during the' year was £325,199— which works.' out .at the rate of 6s ll'd per head of the population. ' *9' ■ ' New Zealand has, happily, no hereditary paupers, and no pauper class. Her Old Age Pensions Act has

shown the pauper-producing Mother Lands one of the cheapest and simplest methods discovered since' the middle ages for dealing, with a reasonable degree ' of effectiveness, with one of the deepest and most trying problem's of poverty— namely, the poverty that, in older and less favored countries, has left so many, in the evening of their days, in a state of living ,' death without its quiet '. Ever since 1898, our' legislation for old-age poverty has been the means of pile-driving new- ideas on the subject -into the minds of statesmen in- English-speaking countries ; it has indirectly led to similar provision being made, on similar lines, in Australia ; and even in such a conservative country as England it has, undoubtedly, to a considerable degree influenced the decision of the British Ministry to -offer •to decent .senile want an alternative other than the workhouse or the gaol. The principle of punishing poverty as a crime was introduced into England during the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century. That social crime against the poor is perpetrated to this hour. " In ' The State and Pensions in Old Age', Booth shows that ' the bulk of pauperism later in life is due not to vice, or drunkenness, or unthrift, "biut to misfortunes which, under present conditions, must be counted unavoidable. The vicious and the, drunken', adds he, ' usually pay their penalty by an early death, and we find a general agreement among those who know how the poor live, that the . standard of decency and sobriety rises as age advances. But in hundreds of cases a thrifty or "deserving past life" does not appear to affect the ultimate result. With this evidence confronting us, we are necessarily led to revise some of the conclusions and to consider more carefully whethe/r the conditions' of life in old age can be mitigated by any action on the part of the community '. '

Among European countries, Germany, France, A,ustria, Hungary, and Denmark have had for many years past forms of provision lor old-age poverty. That of Denmark resembles the New Zealand system in so far as it dispenses with contributions ; but its benefits are so paltry that they barely enable a Danish Darby or Joan- to starve more or less respectably and, for the rest, to patch their grief, as best they may, with proverbs. England— with the most terrible povertyproblem of any modern European nation— is now in travail with an Old Age Pensions scheme on non-con-tributing lines. It was indeed - high time for the British State to devise some humane and Christian way of relieving old-age indigence, -instead of relegating it to that grave of decent poverty, the workhouse.