Welfare campaigners say Ardern helped force child poverty to the forefront of the political agenda. What’s less clear is how much difference she made to the lives of deprived kids. By Rebecca Macfie.

Roughly 48 hours after Jacinda Ardern announced her resignation, child rights advocate Jacqui Southey boarded a plane for Geneva for a journey tinged with sadness and discomfort.

Southey, director of research at Save the Children New Zealand, was heading to a meeting of the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child to discuss the grim lives and damaged prospects of young children living in poverty.

By pure coincidence, the data in Southey’s briefcase covered the five years of Ardern’s tenure as prime minister and minister responsible for child poverty reduction. It is contained in a report prepared by major child rights groups including Plunket and the Council of Christian Social Services for the UN committee’s sixth periodic review of this country’s performance on children’s rights.

It is packed with carefully referenced details, including the fact that one in four preschoolers have learning, behaviour and health developmental delays that are directly linked to economic deprivation. It cites a mortality rate among Māori babies that is three times higher than for non-Māori and non-Pasifika, and immunisation rates for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) that have dropped as low as 32 per cent in some Māori and Pasifika communities. It points out that, depending on which poverty line is chosen, 11-20 per cent of children are living in households suffering economic hardship.

When in opposition, Ardern declared that New Zealand was “not a good place to be a child for a lot of children”. Five years after she became prime minister and took on ministerial responsibility for the reduction of child poverty, it’s still not.

But Southey is among many child-rights advocates who nevertheless defend Ardern’s record – hence her note of discomfort as she prepared to discuss our bleak statistics for children under 5 at the UN.

For years, there was a refusal by many New Zealanders and political leaders to even acknowledge the existence of child poverty, says Southey. As recently as 10 or 12 years ago, discussion was “completely shut down”. A “vitriolic narrative” had dominated from the time of the infamous 1991 Mother of all Budgets, which “vilified people on low incomes as a means to justify significant budget cuts … and it’s still perpetuated by some senior politicians now”.

She credits Ardern – along with advocacy groups and successive Children’s Commissioners – as having played an important role in challenging that narrative and forcing child poverty to the forefront of the political agenda.

Even as a junior opposition MP, Ardern was focused on the issue, says Southey. When she became prime minister in 2017, “she made good on her promises”.

“She took the mantle of child poverty reduction minister on for herself, and she [legislated] to change child poverty. So she did more than talk about it. She had a good understanding that laws and policies change lives.”

The Child Poverty Reduction Act, passed in 2018, brought in measures and targets that must be reported on annually. As part of the Budget process, the government must show progress against the targets and explain how the Budget will reduce child poverty.

After some political wrangling, the 2018 legislation achieved rare bipartisan support. National’s child poverty spokesperson, Louise Upston, told the Listener this week her party would retain the act if it forms a government after the election.

Mike O’Brien, a long-time activist for children’s rights and a spokesman for the Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG), says the act was a milestone. “The annual reporting, the regular attention to that, and having to do that as part of the Budget cycle – [means] there has to be some connection between the Budget as an economic document and what we are doing as part of child poverty reduction.”

But so what, if children are still going hungry, their parents don’t have time or transport to get them to a doctor, or they are sickened by mouldy, overpriced rental housing? So what, if their chances of a decent life are still being snuffed out before they even start school by the neuro­logical, health and educational impacts of poverty?

In Ardern’s defence, the number of children falling below the various poverty lines has fallen under her watch. At the last reporting date, in February 2022, there were 66,500 fewer children in low-income households (after taking account of housing costs), and 21,900 fewer experiencing material hardship compared with 2018.

But after increasing dramatically following the deep benefit cuts and state housing policy changes of the early 1990s, the percentage of children living in poor households (defined as less than 50 per cent of median income after housing costs) declined during the 2000s and, in the years leading up to the 2017 election, was again trending down.

So, how much credit can Ardern take? O’Brien says important advances were made to alleviate poverty during her premiership, including increased welfare benefits, significant boosts to the minimum wage, the introduction of school lunches in low-decile schools, healthy homes standards, and ramped-up construction of social housing.

“But, that said, we could have done more. We should have done more. We could have gone faster, particularly after 2020, when the Winston Peters [New Zealand First] handbrake came off.”

The Ardern government’s failure to fully implement the recommendations of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group has been a major source of contention with child advocacy groups, including CPAG.

O’Brien recalls meeting with Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson on one occasion and telling her she had “the political capital” to do more.

“But she kept saying to us she was wanting to build a constituency that would endure … that whatever changes she put in place wouldn’t just get tipped out by a subsequent government, and that part of the task was to build that kind of constituency. My view, which I expressed to her, was that she could drive that constituency, that she had the kind of mana and the standing and the formal authority to lead that rather than responding to it.”

On the other hand, perhaps the existence of the Child Poverty Reduction Act and Ardern’s ministerial responsibility for it prevented things from getting even worse for impoverished families under the extraordinary pressures of the past three years.

Victoria University of Wellington social policy expert Jonathan Boston thinks so. Boston, who co-chaired the 2012 Expert Advisory Group on child poverty commissioned by then-Children’s Commissioner Russell Wills, has “no doubt whatsoever that there has been more public funding directed towards dealing with child poverty than would otherwise have been the case if there had not been the act, the accountabilities around it, the public reporting requirements, the improved data collection and analysis by StatsNZ. If there hadn’t been that, I’m pretty confident things would be even worse than they are.”

But he identifies a significant blot on Ardern’s legacy – the 2022 legislation stripping the Office of the Children’s Commissioner of much of its influence.

“Here we have a prime minister who committed herself and her government to making significant and sustained reductions in child poverty, and made that her first priority, and clearly demonstrated the most profound concern for the ­wellbeing of the least-advantaged citizens in the country.

“And then you have a situation where her Government amends legislation which reduces the role and significance of the very office that has helped create a context in which reducing child poverty is a political option.

“There is a tragedy about that. And I’m afraid that’s one of the things that she will regret.”