A real solution to child poverty - Steven Joyce

Ending child poverty doesn’t happen just because you declare it a goal. Photo / 123RF

OPINION

So it indeed turns out that ending child poverty doesn’t happen just because you declare it a goal.

Jacinda Ardern made that very objective the centrepiece of the Labour Party’s election campaign launch back in 2017, and announced she would start by measuring and publishing unimpeachable statistics about the progress her government was making in achieving it. The latest version of those statistics, up until June 30 last year, came out this week, and made it clear that the goal is no closer than six years ago, and, by some measures, further away.

At the same time we learned that, despite record low rates of unemployment, there are nearly 70,000 more people receiving job-seeker benefits than in 2017, and that adults on the benefit are now on average expected to remain so for 13 years, with teenagers a whopping 24 years.

So what does this tell us? Firstly, that a politician declaring they want to do something doesn’t on its own mean anything (a lesson we have learnt repeatedly in recent times). In this case it contained a whiff of conceit. I’ve never met a politician who doesn’t want to end child poverty – the only political question is how they plan to go about it.

And we now know the recipe was clearly wrong. Leaving more families dependent on benefits is a case of misplaced “kindness” which is not a path to reducing child poverty. On top of that macro-economic conditions are much more important than whatever the government does or doesn’t do on the micro front. High inflation and out-of-control government spending always hurts those on the bottom rungs of society the most. The first thing a government must do is control inflation.

The second thing is to ensure that those who can work, do. The talkback airwaves were full this week of examples of people who weren’t trying, and that needs to change. I don’t know how anyone can see taxpayer-supported income as a lifestyle choice, but there are clearly some who do. That’s just storing up future trouble for them and society. The very public consequences of the withdrawal by Carmel Sepuloni of most benefit sanctions should also be a salutary lesson for those who promote the lunacy of a government-funded universal basic income.

The big lesson from the previous Government’s failure though is the more uncomfortable one. Long-term welfare dependency and poverty has been with us for decades, and it will take a concerted effort over considerable time to alleviate it. It will also involve doing things differently.

There is no getting away from the fact that there is a large group of families who are so marginalised from society as we know it that they are unable to lift themselves sufficiently to become functioning participants in that society.

Two personal experiences from my own time in government may help illustrate the challenge.

With the economy going well in the second half of our term, we turned from looking at national-scale challenges to particular regions and sub-regions experiencing high unemployment and high deprivation. We wanted to know what initiatives might help in particular areas of the country.

In Northland we had stubbornly high unemployment, so MPI’s Ben Dalton was dispatched to see what we could do to help stimulate economic growth and investment in the region. He rang all the big employers in the area to ask what it would take for them to take on more staff. Their answers floored him. They would all take on more people tomorrow if they could find them – and all in a region with high recorded unemployment. What followed was a journey of discovery.

Finding a group of disengaged young people, matching them with employers prepared to take them on, putting them through an intensive job and life skills training programme, and micro-managing their lives for six months via a patient but firm wrangler and ex-netballer called Jo.

I met some of these young people at their graduation and heard stories of methamphetamine abuse, absent parents, teenage pregnancy, insecure housing. They were living tough lives. But thanks to Jo, the programme, and a group of patient employers, these young people were getting a chance. We need 20 Jos in Northland.

The other meeting which stopped me in my tracks was a meeting with a Pasifika-owned primary health provider in Manurewa. I thought I was at the meeting to talk about the health needs of their customers, but they wanted to show me an app they had made. It wasn’t a health app as such, it was an app to remind their customers of all the commitments they had for meetings with government agencies that were scheduled to “help” them.

It turns out that there were so many meetings arranged with so many agencies, that many if not most people couldn’t handle them all. Meetings were often missed, chains broken, and people went to the back of the queue. I could see how it happened. The level of personal organisation we were expecting of these families would be difficult for people who were well-organised and without too many challenges. These weren’t those people.

Those experiences and others taught me a number of things. That some families are so overwhelmed in so many ways that they need extra help in the form of mentors, navigators, or wranglers, to help them negotiate those challenges and the agencies sent to help them, to steadily build something approaching what we would see as a normal life.

That siloed government agencies are not well-placed to work with the whole family in all their problem areas (remember the old saying about six government cars up a driveway) and the co-ordination costs of getting several centralised agencies to work together on individual families is huge.

That often government agencies are not trusted by families anyway – they need an adviser who is clearly on their side. That one right person in the right place can make a lot of positive difference if we are prepared to empower them to do so. And all this will take time, family by family.

That suggests a family-centred social investment approach where we stop worrying about what the programme is called, stop declaring it must all be run by a central government agency, and instead back individuals and organisations who can prove they are getting results. They could be community housing providers, whanau ora organisations, primary health providers, or committed social workers like Jo. We need to back them and trust them.

And we need to remain wary of politicians who offer “quick fixes” like ending child poverty. In the case of the most marginalised families with the most complex needs, there simply aren’t any.