The Destruction Wreaked by Faux Human Rights

Righteous Anger Over Chinese Poppies

In New Zealand our veteran's association is called the Returned Services Association, or the "RSA".  Anzac Day is the statutory holiday when we remember our veterans and express our thankfulness for their service to us all.  In the last couple of years controversy has swirled around the Anzac season.  It has to do with the Chinese.

Well, indirectly.  The RSA raises funds at this time of the year by selling artificial red poppies which the public buy in large quantities and pin to their coats.  It is an effective visible way of showing respect for our veterans and our commitment to the memorial Anzac season.  It also funds the on-going activities and services of the RSA.  Two or so years ago, the RSA decided to get its red poppies manufactured in China. People resent that.  Previously the poppies were manufactured in New Zealand.  Now the job has been exported; working people in New Zealand have missed out.  Folk are protesting the "Chinese poppies" as an alien, unwanted, exploitative violation of the true spirit of the Anzac season.

The back story, however, is far, far more sinister.
  It is a cautionary tale.  In 2007 the Minimum Wage Amendment Act was passed by the socialist Labour government.  The Minister of Disability Issues, Ruth Dyson was the politician who promoted and passed this enlightened piece of socialist legislation (since kept on the statute books by the soft-socialist National Government).  At the time, Dyson trumpeted the legislation with this panoply:

The [new law] will mean that all sheltered workshops will have to pay everyone they employ at least the minimum wage, unless an individual worker has an exemption. It will also mean that all people who work in sheltered workshops will have access to holiday and sick leave entitlements. To counter concerns about the continuing financial viability of sheltered workshops, the ministry has put in place a system of individual minimum wage exemption permits for workers who are ‘significantly and demonstrably limited’ in their work.

Throughout New Zealand at the time were sheltered workshops where intellectually and physically disabled people enjoyed the dignity and comradeship of work.  Like very other person they could get up in the morning, make their way to their place of employment, work productively, and return home.  They were making a contribution and they were earning their way--at least in part.  Naturally, the tasks and occupations tended to be manual and repetitive.  Because they were paid less than the minimum wage, the whole system worked.

The RSA got its poppies made in such sheltered workshop.  The work was manual and repetitive, but it was meaningful and largely enjoyable to disabled people otherwise shut up in their homes with nothing to do. Those working on the poppies also had the added bonus of knowing they were making a significant contribution to veterans and their families.  The lower wages paid meant that the poppies could be manufactured much more cheaply than if the minimum wage were to be paid.  The RSA could on-sell the poppies at an inexpensive price, but still raise significant amounts of money for their charitable work.

But the socialist mindset saw only one thing when it gazed upon the sheltered workshops: exploitation.  Sweat shop exploitation.  Degradation of workers.  An abuse of human rights.

Up to 2007, most sheltered workshops in New Zealand were run by the IHC--a partially state funded charity to assist the intellectually handicapped.  Stupidly, the IHC got fooled by the socialist propaganda and eagerly supported the new legislation.  What happened?  At the time anyone could predict the inevitable outcome--anyone that is, except those looking at the world through socialist glasses.

Karl Du Fresne, former editor of the Dominion newspaper, reviewed the devastation three years later, and found that 76 sheltered workshops had closed:

I spoke to parents of disabled adults all over New Zealand who felt betrayed and angry over the changes imposed in 2007. I use the word “betrayed” because the law change was enthusiastically supported by IHC – the very organisation those parents looked to for support. And although the government and IHC insisted there was widespread consultation beforehand, the parents I interviewed, many of them long-standing members of IHC, refute that. One said parents were shellshocked by the announcement that IHC’s sheltered workshops were to close. Another had heard only rumours before the changes were announced and said she suspected that the people consulted were a vocal group of the “higher-achieving” disabled who didn’t speak for those with intellectual disabilities.

The RSA, unable to get its poppies manufactured at a reasonable price had to withdraw its contracts with sheltered workshops and turned to China for their manufacture.  In the process, it prevented a cost blowout of a quarter of a million dollars per year.  That is money which would be sucked up out of the work and services of the RSA to veterans.

The socialist ideologues had succeeded marvellously in pricing the disabled off the job market.  Now the disabled feel far more affirmed and worthy.  They are able to sit at home, forcibly indolent, contributing nothing--but, their "rights" are affirmed and the socialists have treated them with Respek.  And we can all nurse our self-righteousness by whining about the RSA getting its poppies manufactured in China.  How commercially gross.  How disgusting.

Former MP, Muriel Newman exposes the "we-know-best" elitism which repeatedly vomits forth from the socialist mind to the damage and hurt of the most vulnerable:

A shocking aspect of the way the Labour Government went about changing this law was their failure to consult with the families who were going to be affected. Marion Miller, the former Chairman of the Southland Regional Council along with her husband Russell, collected over 7,000 signatures for a petition to Parliament asking the government to delay the law change until the families of disabled workers were properly consulted. 

While their call was ignored, research I carried out at the time clearly showed the benefits of consultation: when a similar law change was introduced in Canada, families were not consulted and most workers in sheltered workshops lost their jobs; however, in Australia, job losses were minimised because families were properly consulted before the law change. What they found is what Marion Miller and thousands of other families had been trying to explain - that the social participation and camaraderie that workers enjoyed in their sheltered workshops far outweighed any wage issues.

Ah, but don't worry the "we-know-best" socialists had a plan.  Workers who lost their jobs in sheltered workshops because their newly-imputed human rights priced them off the market were going to be affirmed by the smothering love of "community participation". 

Labour’s law change provided sheltered workshop workers who lost their jobs with ‘community participation’. Unfortunately this turned out to be little more than a glorified day-care programme, not only rendering the lives of attendees relatively meaningless, but also, in some cases, giving rise to severe behavioural problems. And it hasn’t all been plain sailing for those who were placed in regular employment either – Marion Miller explained that in her town, 50 percent of those who were placed into employment later resigned from their jobs because of their inability to manage the extra pressure of being ‘employed’ in the workforce. 

But at least these folk have been saved from the indignity and exploitation of a sweat shop.  Whilst forced into useless, degrading indolence, at least their human rights are intact. 

Yes, its appropriate to get mad over the RSA manufacturing its poppies in China.  But let's make sure our seething outrage is rightly and justly directed--not toward the RSA, nor toward those dirty, sweat-shop Chinese--but toward the paternalistic, condescending socialists in New Zealand and their doctrines of faux human rights which in their issue prove so destructive and so degrading to the most vulnerable amongst us.