Numerous reports have indicated the depths of poverty in our country. The Child Poverty Action Group recorded that, in 2013, almost a quarter of New Zealand's children lived under the Ministry of Social Development's relative poverty line, while over half of those children had been in poverty for more than seven years.
Other New Zealand research has shown 10 per cent of children live in severe poverty and Maori children are twice as likely as European/Pakeha children to be living in a poor household. Colonial trauma is cultural, political and economic.
This data passes above our heads like the digital statistics that wrap around our stock exchange. Constantly updating, but ever present, the knowledge of endemic poverty has become normalised.
Stalling for time, we question the models of data collation. We barter around the edges - a reduction of 10 per cent? Twenty per cent? Five per cent? We look for an "acceptable" level of child misery and lifetime disadvantage. And, we blame the parents who didn't properly "invest" in their families, who "lacked ideas", or failed to play "the market".
Many crimes that cause great harm - for example, tax crimes, deaths and injuries at work, or violence by state workers - have little connection with poverty. These are crimes that we often do not even designate as crimes. We tend to re-label them as "evasions", "accidents", "force".
However, our best research repeatedly tells us that other crimes, including family violence or youth crime, are linked to poverty and inequalities.
The crimes we label, police, control and punish tend to be committed by those who endure significant economic disadvantage. In New Zealand, this has a further layer, as Maori suffer multiple levels of marginalisation.
Certain populations are made more responsible than others: Maori children and young people are four to five times more likely to be apprehended by the police than non-Maori. Over 60 per cent of female prisoners are Maori.
Like our poverty rates, these realities have become an unremarkable part of New Zealand life. And, like poverty, we regard these outcomes as the primary result of individual, whanau or cultural deficits. Yet, they have their roots in poverty and disadvantage.
Our current talk on responsibilisation insists those communities with the highest levels of poverty have to deliver solutions for their "risks".
But the real solutions for poverty and all its attendant problems - poor health (including obesity), insecure housing, family stress, mental health problems, limited educational achievements, some offences - will come from the "top down". In this respect, we might encourage the Government to step up and take responsibility.
Many options are already on the table - social assistance reforms, reconfigurations of child supports, increased social housing, the development of liveable wages. There is no "poverty of ideas". Rather, the political challenge seems to lie in the "poverty of responsibility, the poverty of caring".
Dr Elizabeth Stanley is director of the Institute of Criminology at Victoria University of Wellington.
