For Sunday Supplement, May 17, 1998

Wherever we look, less and less is required of firms in terms of regulation and information provision, all in the name of reducing costs of government and/or business. Whether it's food labelling to reveal genetically changed materials or odometer readings on car imports, it's now 'let the individual buyer beware'.

At the same time, individuals and families are having more and more responsibility put on them with less and less assistance from government. The Code of Social Responsibility is a prime example. You must be there for your children, make sure they're at school, and look after them: at the same time you, as a solo parent, must get out into the paid workforce fast. So looking after kids is rightly seen as important and real work in one breath but not in the next, where the need for support is constructed as dependency and saving government expenditure as paramount. And where are the jobs and cheap high quality childcare? Then there's the Community Wage. This scheme may at least be an unspoken admission that full employment at decent wages cannot be achieved at present, maybe never, even though there is much useful work to be done. But politicians pretends the jobs could be there if only the unemployed were more motivated, trained harder and looked more. In fact even for the highly educated, employment is scarce, and we suffer from many people being over-employed for ridiculously long weeks while others, anxious for full time work, are out of work or in part time casualised low paid jobs.

If we genuinely valued caring work for children, the infirm elderly, and other dependent people, we'd spread the paid and unpaid work more evenly between us all, and especially between men and women. We'd recognise that unpaid work in the home, the community and voluntary organisations is real work, however much a labour of love. We'd realise that it's largely arbitrary what work is paid and what unpaid, and that getting most of our status, identity and claims on resources from paid work is unbalanced. Almost all jobs are done side by side by paid AND unpaid workers - in caring and home maintenance work, management and agriculture, CABs and refuges, meals on wheels and Kohanga Reo, schools and hospitals. In fact it's been estimated that more than half of all work is unpaid, and this may be increasing. The Time Use survey about to start will tell us more. For example, deinstitutionalisation in the mental health field and shortening hospital stays after operations and childbirth puts more unpaid work onto family relatives, However, VALUING all the unpaid work properly does not mean paying for it by the hour. Instead, valuing this work and asserting our common citizenship, interdependence, and sense of community over individual values is best done through a Universal Basic Income. This recognises that almost all adults (and most children) make, and want to make, valuable contributions to society. It could remove the stigma and policing of some benefits, and the encouragement in unpleasant advertisements to dob in your neighbour for fraud. It could save millions in wasteful administration of welfare. It's the alienation resulting from poverty, victim blaming, and inequality that produces what little cheating there is - together with seeing white collar crime and money laundering on a much larger scale.

A Universal Basic Income and resurgence of community values could reverse the trends towards individualism and selfishness. Of course we all care about ourselves, and our immediate family, as well as the wider community. But the government's push to individualism is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If we know society is constructed so we don't look after each other, we have to become selfish. If we're trusted more, almost all of us will live up to it. On workfare, I was struck by hearing recently "I'll mow the old lady's lawn, but not because you something well tell me I have to!" A Universal Basic Income could help restore trust and community values and get the lawn mown without compulsion, policing or resentment. Next time I get four minutes, I'll explain how it can be afforded.

For Sunday Supplement, June 21 1998

In May on this programme I advocated a Universal Basic Income and said that in my next talk, I'd explain how it could be afforded - so here goes. But first, what do we mean by a Universal Basic Income? Well, just that: a living income to all, at a basic, not princely level, which would reduce poverty and be simple and cheap to administer and understand. It would help remove the stigma, dependency labels and policing of the current system, and reduce the poverty traps and incentive problems over entering or increasing paid work. For most of its advocates it should be tax free, with other income taxed, and recipients should include children, though probably at a lower level than adults. Including children in UBI, with this replacing or supplementing targeted family support, acknowledges collective responsibility for the costs of bringing up the next generation, recognises the collective returns that will result from investment in their futures, and says that children too are citizens, contributing both when young and later. We already have a prototype UBI for older people in the form of New Zealand superannuation. A UBI is about citizenship, community, and interdependence, and it puts a value on the contributions to society made in the form of unpaid household, caring, voluntary and community work. It also recognises that it's largely arbitrary what work is paid and what unpaid - the Community Work scheme is another demonstration of that.

So how do we afford a UBI? The question needs answering on two levels, a gut/general one and a more technical one. And there are, of course many alternative versions and ways of financing it. On a gut level, few would argue that New Zealand is incapable of providing a basic standard of living for all its people - it's a matter of the will to do it and eradicate poverty. That doesn't mean that full time paid jobs are there for all if only they'd look: on the contrary, victim blaming of those unable to find paid work is a smokescreen. But replacing people by capital has been profitable with job shedding from restructuring, increasing productivity, and technological breakthroughs. I don't even mind this: reducing shit work and replacing it by both other more useful activity and by some leisure is fine, but it means that the resources from the profitable enterprises can and should be available and able to be distributed more evenly across the population. And both the paid and unpaid work should also be more evenly spread, generally and between women and men: people doing 70 plus hours per work in paid work in one, two or three jobs, while others have no paid work or too little is absurd - and the overworked are only able to survive because they have others looking after them and their children/dependents.

On a more technical level, it can be argued that in one way of looking at things, we already all have a UBI or social dividend, including those on top incomes. Keith Rankin's discussions of UBI are based on the current tax scales and note that those earning over $38,000, where the 33% top marginal tax rate now starts, enjoy an implicit benefit of $5,130 per year through paying a rate under 33% on the first dollars of their earnings. Benefits contained within the income tax scale, he argues, are just as much (or little!) a payment or concession as benefits paid by the social welfare system. He advocates the integration of the two kinds of benefits through a flat tax/UBI system, with some supplementary benefits for those in greatest need.

Others prefer a more hybrid system, with progressive tax rates still imposed on higher incomes. There are also other ways of raising revenue, both to finance UBI and on their own merits, which have not yet been adequately explored in New Zealand. As respected an economist as James Tobin has long advocated both an international uniform tax on all cross-border financial transactions and a similar one within the United States. Internationally such a tax could go to the World Bank and be used to help the poorest countries. These taxes would be economically useful, increasing the weight given to long-range fundamentals relative to speculative opportunities. With the New Zealand dollar falling faster than logical criteria dictates, and currencies and futures trading a largely unproductive but profitable activity, a New Zealand tax of this type would be lucrative and make economic sense. Other ideas include trying to shift the emphasis to taxing 'bads' such as pollution and other activities destructive of land or environment, away from taxing 'goods' including useful work.

The UBI movement will be attempting to promote and publicise these ideas which offer far more promise than the current government's directions.