Dialogue: Children the silent needy as poverty casts its blight

So rife are the problems associated with child poverty that urgent remedies are required, write INNES ASHER, DIANE ROBERTSON and SUSAN ST JOHN*.

Third World diseases, the origins of which have been clearly linked with overcrowding and income poverty, are rampant in Auckland.

The inexorable upward trend in the statistics has slowed, but there is no sign of a reversal, as might have been expected after two years of a Labour-Alliance Government.

At best, these diseases are extremely costly to treat; at worst they are fatal or permanently deforming.

Some people do know that children with meningococcal disease can be maimed, brain-damaged or lose limbs to gangrene.

They may also be aware of the clear connection between this disease and crowded living conditions, when people cannot afford to rent enough space for their family.

But how many Aucklanders realise that another Third World life-threatening infection, cellulitis (where a scratch in the skin becomes a deep infection of the surrounding flesh), has more than doubled since 1994?

This has resulted in more than 400 costly admissions a year for children to Starship and Kidz First.

Inadequate income with overcrowding often prevents the most basic hygiene and health care necessary to prevent cellulitis, forcing sharing of clothes, towels and bedding, and poor nutrition. Insufficient money and poor access often precludes seeing a doctor for early treatment.

Frightful diseases, almost unheard of in other developed countries, are shocking doctors and nurses. For example, at Starship, each week a child is diagnosed with bronchiectasis. Affected children have damaged lungs, chests that become deformed, and they can cough up to a cup of putrid phlegm a day. A shortened life is inevitable once lung damage has progressed because there is no cure.

The most common cause is under-treated pneumonia and chest infections in children, related to poor living conditions and inadequate medical treatment.

Another clear indicator that things have become steadily worse in Auckland shows up at the Auckland City Mission food bank. Over the past five years, the demand for food parcels has doubled. Children are especially affected.

It is not that families have become lazier or more careless with money. Of course, it is easy to point the finger at the stereotypical substance abuser or gambler who runs out of food, but most families simply do not have enough money for the basics of living.

By the time families seek help from the City Mission, all their benefit entitlements have been exhausted and, on average, they have a $20 to $30 shortfall in such utterly basic needs as food, soap and toilet paper.

Increases in the cost of basic items such as milk and meat have had a serious impact on how far family incomes can stretch. The problem is not poor budgeting, but too little money and too much accumulated debt from past weeks of trying to make ends meet.

Although families on benefits predominate in use of the food bank, the number of families on low wages is increasing rapidly. Income-related rents have helped a few families, but more than half of all clients are in private rental accommodation.

The tentacles of poverty reach into every aspect of children's lives. For instance, even if one child in a family is taken to the doctor, it is not uncommon for the others to share the same medicine, thus ensuring under-treatment and high long-term costs to the children, the parents and society.

The Child Poverty Action Group believes the problem of child poverty in Auckland - and New Zealand - must first be acknowledged.

It is going to take a sea change in public opinion to shift the required resources towards children and put us back in the league of countries that do look after their children.

If that does not happen, the baby boomers can forget about having meaningful pensions - working-age population will not be up to producing the required goods and services.

A child with bronchiectasis today becomes an ailing 20-year-old tomorrow, with little capacity to work productively. Moreover, untreated poverty in today's children ensures that tomorrow a huge amount of society's resources will need to be devoted to sickness benefits, health and custodial care.

Many of the poorest of families had about $27 a week taken from them in the mother of all budgets in 1991. Then, in 1996, they missed out almost totally on tax cuts.

Worse still, about 300,000 poor children were deliberately excluded from the child tax credit that gives an extra $15 a week to each child as a top-up to the family support tax credit.

These are children who have a parent receiving a student loan or superannuation or ACC, the DPB, a sickness benefit or unemployment benefit.

The Government must fix the whole tax credit system for children and index it for inflation just like superannuation. As a matter of extreme urgency, the child tax credit should be extended to include all low-income children.

The extra $15 a week for a child would make a real difference to family budgets, and would be a highly cost-effective and immediate band-aid because it goes only to the poor.

The cost of this emergency measure is around $250 million - about 42 per cent of what is to be set aside this year for the superannuation fund, and about the cost of abolishing the superannuation surcharge in 1998.

If family support had been properly adjusted each year for inflation from 1986, when it was introduced, more than $250 million would be being spent anyway. So it is wrong to regard this as new expenditure for which families with children should have to beg.

Further on, a great deal more needs to be done. The invisibility and voicelessness of children must be addressed by making children the first call on society's resources, not the last.

* Innes Asher is head of the Starship respiratory service, Diane Robertson is the Auckland City Missioner and Susan St John teaches economics at Auckland University. All are members of the Child Poverty Action Group.