On Saturday Labour promised to reinstate the Māori Trades and Training Fund (MTTF) at a cost of $21 million annually. The fund was initially set up as part of the post Covid recovery spend. National later cut it to economise.
It’s part of the by Māori, for Māori kaupapa, so is run by marae and iwi for mostly Māori participants. Reinstated, it will be exclusively for Māori. An evaluation of the scheme was generally positive.
To get them into work or upskill them into better work, the spend on each participant was “from $19,116 (excluding wage subsidies) in 2020/21 to $10,510 in 2023/24”.
Based on the scheme’s numbers to date I would estimate that Labour’s budgeting to spend $21,000 on 1,000 participants annually.
How many Māori are unemployed right now? Just under 50,000 are on a Jobseeker-Work Ready benefit and a further 39,000 are on a sole parent benefit. Both of the numbers are the highest of any ethnicity including European.
So aren’t these high numbers a good reason to ‘invest’ more in reducing them?
No. They are a good reason to stop spending billions on benefits which have led to a collapse of work ethic, an indifference (if not disdain) for education and inter-generational dependence on handouts.
That’s what Labour has to get its head around. This policy is yet another go at putting out a bushfire with a watering can.
But no. Hipkins is openly using this hook to reel in the Māori electorates. Announcing the policy, he made his play:
Today we launched our Māori campaign... And we’re fighting to win all seven Māori electorates – with strong Māori voices in parliament, grounded in their communities and fighting for the future their whānau deserve.
Then he blathered on about honouring te Tiriti, tikanga Māori being “part of who we are” and wanting his kids to grow up bilingual.
What this signals is Labour’s intention to resurrect and press on with a separatist agenda. Buying Māori votes with spending that doesn’t make sense from any viewpoint. It doesn’t make good economic sense. It puts the cart before the horse and it is racially based.
Historically, it has been Labour’s creation and constant expansion of welfare that has made Māori more prone to unemployment and family breakdown. Āpirana Ngata predicted the problem when high family benefits started to flow into East Coast communities. Today thousands of Māori children grow up in workless, fatherless homes and we wonder why its hard to get them into the workforce?
Meanwhile, at every election, Labour promises to solve the problems of its own making. And sadly, many Māori keep believing the promise.
This article was originally published on the author’s blog.
