Peter Calder, NZ Herald, 3 June 1999
 

The dollars and cents of a thou sand lives are recorded on computer in missioner Charlie Fenwick's cramped, windowless office at the Methodist Central Mission opposite the Auckland Town Hall.

A spreadsheet meticulously charts the finances of 382 accounts - some belonging to individuals, but most to families - which the mission controls.

They do that because they've been asked to by clients bewildered over competing demands on scant resources. So the notion that beneficiaries who ask for emergency welfare payments for food more than three times in a year will be required to take budgeting advice doesn't impress Mr Fenwick much.

"Driving people to do this seems a bit silly to me," he says, waving his hand at the screen. "They are al ready doing it and if they come to us voluntarily it's a far better relationship than having them sent to us."

Almost all of the mission's bud get clients are trying to eke out a small income to pay not just for the present but also the past. Each client's account on screen includes a column which shows long-term debts being paid off at a rate - large enough to be meaningful, small enough to be possible - that mission staff have managed to negotiate.

Telecom features prominently, as do one or other of the major electricity retailers, signs of a recent past when even necessities were out of reach. Other entries hint at lives of catastrophe or despair - one creditor list includes St John Ambulance; another Women's Refuge.

The names of finance companies and debt collection agencies proliferate, testament to credit contracts that have got away on the customer. It's easy to see that as the strife of people living beyond their means, but buying a fridge or a washer on HP is no extravagance.

In any case, hire purchase is as much as anything else an expression of hope - a sign of a belief that things are going to get better. Too

many of Charlie Fenwick's clients are people for whom that's not really likely.

"The thing people don't get hold of," he says and he's talking here about outsiders, not his clients, "is that it's a life sentence. It's not just doing it hard for a few weeks and then prosperity. There is never going to be enough money to get them out of the poverty trap."

At the Auckland Baptist Social Services Trust in Mt Eden Rd, the story is much the same. In contrast to the spokeswoman for Work and Income New Zealand, who told us "our policy is that benefits are set at reasonable levels," chief executive Peter Browning says that five years ago, clients could manage on a monthly food parcel.

"Then it became fortnightly and then weekly. We've now reached the stage where a number of people need a weekly food parcel and cash. For a large proportion of people the problem is not budgeting skills - it's income."

Charlie Fenwick says the idea of compulsory budgeting advice be trays the contempt of the Government - and, by extension, of all of us - for people on low incomes. "They're economic units and they're non-viable," he says. But I absolutely admire all the people who come to us for budgeting assistance."

That's why he would never dream of going line by line through their shopping lists.

"I think it would be bloody insulting for me or my staff here to tell people what to buy or where to go to buy it. They know what to do best.

"When you're looking at these things from the bottom up it's a bloody sight harder than when you're looking from the top down. That's where the experts are who tell people what they should do."