The Salvation Army's annual stocktake on New Zealand's social health has earned high credibility. It owes this to its recognition of progress as well as problems.
Its latest "state of the nation" report notes continuing improvement in many of the country's most persistent concerns. Child poverty, for example. It finds children in material hardship, as measured by an absence of some essentials, has dropped from 21 per cent at the peak of the 2008-09 recession to 14 per cent last year, the level it was before the recession. That trend is not evident in the more standard statistical measure of poverty - living on less than 60 per cent of the median household income - but that is because earned incomes have risen.
Average weekly earnings rose 3 per cent last year while the cost of living rose only 0.1 per cent. Half of the increase in earnings came from pay rises, the rest from working more hours. At the same time, unemployment dropped for a second year in succession, though the proportion of the population employed did not rise as much as it did in 2013 and 2014, the peak of the Christchurch rebuild.
The population grew again by 2 per cent, slightly greater than the growth in employment which suggests the numbers retiring exceed the increase in new workers and immigration.
Perhaps most heartening, the report says increases in the statutory minimum wage have helped lift the incomes of the lowest paid faster than the highest paid employment, in finance. The gap may be wide but, contrary to careless rhetoric, it is apparently not necessarily getting wider.
