Plea for children's voices to be heard

New Children's Commissioner John Angus says Auckland's proposed Super City is an opportunity to give more attention to the needs of children.

Dr Angus, who replaced Dr Cindy Kiro last month, is writing a submission asking for children's needs to be considered in the bill setting up the Super City.

"Children are big users of public transport, swimming pools, recreational facilities and libraries, so their interests as consumers need to be taken account of in any changes," he said in Auckland yesterday.

He picked up a theme in the report of the Royal Commission on Auckland Governance of the need to tackle extreme inequalities in social services.

"I think there are opportunities to look across Auckland as a whole at the distribution of services to children. The royal commission touched on some of those things - the distribution of early childhood education services across Auckland, for example, is quite skewed," he said.

"A new governance structure for the city as a whole should have systems in which that can be looked at, and maybe levers to pull to change that distribution of resources.

"If we lose that opportunity, we will, from the social sector's point of view, default back to the sorts of arrangements that existed before, which have many of the social services primarily driven out of Wellington."

He said his staff were consulting the commissioner's young persons reference group and youth councils in the seven Auckland council districts to help them to make submissions on the bill.