Russell Wills: Child poverty - the forgotten issue in the NZ election

"Child poverty matters because it drives poor health, education and social outcomes, and because it’s just wrong." Photo / 123rf

OPINION

Child poverty is the forgotten issue in the weeks leading up to New Zealand’s general election.

When Jacinda Ardern, as prime minster-elect of New Zealand in October 2017, announced she would also be New Zealand’s first minister for child poverty reduction, it was a remarkable stand.

Then, a whopping one-third of children in Aotearoa New Zealand were living below the poverty line and many were going hungry in a wealthy, agricultural country. Children of Māori, Pasifika and disabled families had higher rates still.

So what progress has been made six years later, and what does the future hold?

Ardern accepted most of the Solutions to Child Poverty Expert Advisory Group report I published as New Zealand Children’s Commissioner in 2012. Importantly, her government enacted the Child Poverty Reduction Act 2018, which commits all future New Zealand Governments to have a plan to reduce child poverty and Statistics New Zealand to independently report to Parliament and the New Zealand public on progress against that plan each year. New Zealand National Party leader Christopher Luxon has committed to leaving the Act untouched if it wins this year’s election on October 14.

Annual reports from Stats NZ, the country’s official data agency suggest that most measures of child poverty are down, a bit. In the 2022 report, the proportion of children living in households in material hardship (lacking 6 of 17 essential items) is down from 13.3 per cent in 2018 to 10.3 per cent in 2022. Household income poverty measures are also down, for example, one measure from 22.8 per cent in 2018 to 15.4 per cent in 2022.

Progress on child poverty slowed during the Covid-19 epidemic, despite Jacinda Ardern’s Government’s $50 billion fund to support business and jobs. Post-pandemic inflation worldwide was matched in New Zealand, even while employment remained high and real wages rose. Government policies led to increases in benefits, which were linked to the median wage. The minimum wage was increased and pay parity legislation led to wage increases in female-dominated workforces including nursing, caregiving and social work.

These will have been helpful for child poverty.

The situation, however, is still grim.

Statistics show 1 in 7 New Zealand children still live in households in poverty, 1 in 10 are experiencing material hardship and rates remain stubbornly high for children of Māori, Pasifika and disabled families.

After years of social housing neglect by successive governments, 4000 families are living in temporary and emergency accommodation, mostly motels and backpackers’ hostels. In the past six years, waiting lists for social housing have quadrupled, to 24,000. Motel-rich tourist towns like Rotorua are crying foul as their visitor accommodation is filled with out-of-town homeless families. Efforts to build social houses have progressed only slowly. The challenge of delivering preventive health care to homeless families is a prime cause for New Zealand’s dismal immunisation rates for Māori and Pasifika children.

Russell Wills is the former Children's Commissioner. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Currently, the Labour government is doing poorly in polls and a new government led by the centre-right National Party is looking increasingly likely. What might that mean for child poverty rates in NZ?

National has not released its child poverty targets at the time of writing. The party has, however, said it would de-couple benefits from the median wage and re-introduce sanctions for young people on welfare for more than a year. It has committed to build more social housing but will review existing applications and restore no-cause 90-day terminations for landlords. These aren’t promising for families in poverty.

While neither of the main political parties are talking about child poverty in this election campaign, community organisations and philanthropy have stepped into the child poverty space with remarkable results. In Hastings, the district council partnered with iwi, social housing providers and developers. Together, they are building social housing in Flaxmere, a dormitory suburb with a large, poor, Māori and Pasifika population.

The community is also stepping up. This includes groups like Share my Super, an initiative helping older New Zealanders with money to spare to donate their universal superannuation to carefully vetted charities working to alleviate child poverty, which has raised more than $1 million in a short time.

For now, however, child health services in New Zealand continue to see children living in crowded, substandard social housing, motels, tents and cars. Services have had to work differently. More mobile health services are delivered on maraeand in people’s homes, while the introduction of nurse-led clinics and nurse-prescribing for common illnesses all help offset the effects of New Zealand’s shrinking general practitioner workforce.

Clinicians throughout New Zealand have also become increasingly vocal about the scale and effects of deprivation, made harder by successive governments’ neglect of social housing and health care in general. We would like all parties to be more ambitious for our youngest citizens in this election.

Child poverty matters because it drives poor health, education and social outcomes, and because it’s just wrong. This is not who we are. New Zealand was once an egalitarian country where one’s life opportunities were not determined by the parents you were born to. We could be that country again, with the political will to make it so. That’s what I want to see my country debating in the remaining five weeks of this election campaign.

Dr Russell Wills is a paediatrician and former New Zealand Children’s Commissioner.