Moral failure impoverishes whole nation

What is honoured in a country will flourish there. Plato said that. The Greeks always had a word for it - except that while they gave birth to democracy, it was in a culture based upon slavery.

That word probably was "paradox"; our New Zealand word for what we honour and what we don't is simply "denial".

We've got 270,000 children who live in poverty and our supposedly conservative government put off any meaningful response to that alarming condition while rolling out its budget that would lead to a surplus of $75 million.

It is in pursuit of budgetary surplus that the government rationalised its unwillingness to increase parental leave after childbirth from its present 14 weeks to 26 weeks. This despite all the evidence of benefit from longer leave times.

The issue of address to child poverty was promised, then delayed at budget rollout, then whittled down to a public-private partnership to supply Weet-Bix and milk to our poorest school kids, as if that paltry response was all that is needed.

Even in the announcement of that food programme, the prime minister had to rehearse his neo-capitalist principles that feeding kids is the responsibility of parents, implying that his government is only acting to make up for the parental failings of poor people.

John Key's Government cannot resist the temptation to make it a morality play wherein social spending leads to the dreaded dependency.

The truth is that it's this government's unwillingness to confront and address child poverty in pursuit of an unnecessary surplus that is the breeding ground for fostering dependency.

While government signals its intentions to decrease the social safety net, relying upon disproven studies and outmoded theories, the nation's future wellbeing is potentially sacrificed. The government acknowledges that 270,000 children live in poverty but wishes away the problems implicit.

On the level of basic metabolism, poor people's food choices, dictated by limited funds, tend to those foods with higher carbohydrate content. It comes as no surprise that we see a paradoxical obesity in the midst of poverty - and the accompanying diseases of metabolism, diabetes and heart.

It's been documented that parents struggling to provide basic sustenance are less available to read to their kids and correspondingly kids from poor families have smaller vocabularies than their age-mates from well-off homes.

In the homes of the poor, kids are more likely to experience stress, directly or vicariously. Toxic stress and over exposure to hormones like norepinephrine or cortisol can interfere in the development of cortical brain tracts that make possible essential controls of impulse behaviour and that enable learning.

It is impulse-ridden behaviour that eventually gets expressed anti-socially in employment failure and even crime.

We ignore these findings at our peril. It's a moral issue in a time we can safely describe as post-Christian, where caring "for the least of these" is almost an accounting error.

In the long run, it's a serious debit - especially in costs of health care, law enforcement and limitations on productivity.

Oscar Wilde said that a cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Can you call a government cynical? I don't know, but I do know when Mr Key ran the London currency desk of Merrill Lynch he surely knew the price of everything.