Budget is trickery, Kiro tells Whangarei child poverty group

Cindy Kiro at a post-budget address to Whangarei Child Poverty Action Group. Photo/John Stone

A magician's sleight of hand - that is how former Children's Commissioner, Professor Cindy Kiro, has described the 2017 Budget.

From Auckland University's Faculty of Education and Social Work, she and Associate Professor Mike O'Brien, Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) social security spokesman, were in Whangarei yesterday for the local CPAG's traditional post-budget debrief.

Ms Kiro said the magician analogy suited the Government using one hand to attract the public eye, while the other hand went unnoticed and did something entirely different.

"There is no clear target or strategy for child poverty that arises from this Budget," she said.

"The overall Budget is 'steady as she goes', in an unprecedented year of Government surplus, when it could afford to be otherwise.

"It's intended to look generous but when you look into it's not. It's a magic show when as many as 270,000 children need our help."

Ms Kiro said people were all for tax relief but taxation was the basis of paying for health, education, infrastructure and defence forces, to name some services.

"So what is good about a tax cut when we need those taxes to meet those costs, and more?"

The national CPAG body said the tax cuts offered nothing for beneficiary families, and the package would lift only 35,000 children out of housing poverty, fewer than half of those who were suffering hardship.

Ms Kiro said the Budget had missed the opportunity to put money, resources and a new mindset into many problems New Zealand's poor faced, particularly in Tai Tokerau.

She advocated spending money on education for primary caregivers, saying the mother's education was crucial to whanau outcomes.

Mr O'Brien spoke of the importance of universal rather than targeted change-programmes.

He criticised the Government's using the term "social investment", something he said was geared to measuring return or profit at the end of a process rather than focused on providing the means to make change earlier.

"We need to ask why would we invest in something from which there is no return."

The Treasury's analyses was based on linking risk with outcomes but, with one-third of children identified as at-risk having good outcomes in life, "we need to be very wary about that as it seems to be a bit hit-and-miss."

The Budget did nothing to deal with homelessness, he said.

Increasing accommodation supplements did not provide more or better housing but might cause rents to rise, Mr O'Brien said.