Covid’s legacy will be more overcrowding and hunger
While we have many reasons to be grateful for the way New Zealand has been guided through nearly 12 months of calamities, the worst is still coming for families facing greater adversity and need in the year ahead.
The latest Child Poverty Monitor report tells us around 150,000 Kiwi kids are experiencing material hardship in households that cannot afford six or more essential items including enough to eat, fresh vegetables, and warm clothes. It also found 235,400 children, or about 20.8 per cent of all people aged under 18 years-old, live in lowincome households. Even Treasury has confirmed the campaign against Covid-19 will further increase poverty and hardship in our communities in the New Year.
For me, a frightening indicator of the increasing hardships ahead has been reports from friends in Animal Rescue who are met by children rushing out of homes begging for food when they visit properties in various parts of Auckland to recover distressed pets. We already have a food security crisis which will only get worse for many families in the year ahead.
Expansion of the Government’s lunch programmes to 800 schools will contribute to overcoming food insecurity in many deprived communities. But only lunches are being provided to children who are still receiving no breakfast or dinner.
So the need for our breakfast programmes continues and increases. Before the lockdown, KidsCan was feeding 30,000 children but this has now increased to more than 41,000. Post-Covid another 27 have been added to the schools we support.
And along with the schools, 65 early childhood centres are being assisted with donated food, clothing and shoes. As a result of the pandemic’s impact on the economy we have another 130 early childhood centres on our waiting list. Families with under-fives find it just as difficult as those with school-aged children to make ends meet in the Covid economy.
Many of the parents who previously put extra sandwiches in the lunch packs of their own children for them to share with their foodless friends are now short of enough to meet their own family’s needs. While some sectors of our economy have bounced back and there are businesses doing much better than expected, for many low-wage earners, such as those in our tourist towns, the cutback in employment opportunities has been large and potentially long-term.
Rising rents are taking 50 to 60 per cent of many family incomes so how much to spend on food, shoes and visits to the GP is no longer a choice. Whether they are on minimum wage or a benefit, for these families there is always a deficit, no matter how cleverly they budget, and adequate food is the first sacrifice.
The rise in the minimum hourly rate to $20 due in April may seem to be offering significant, if delayed, help to low-wage earners in urgent need. But it will also increase costs for many businesses which will simply raise prices to recover losses. The more effective solution to the food security problem is to increase benefits and reduce taxes so low-wage workers get to spend more of what they earn.
With rents already high and still rising, serious overcrowding of state and community housing will worsen. With overcrowding come chronic health, crime and other social problems which will only increase the costs the whole community will have to cope with in the decades ahead.
We are often told that until everybody is safe from Covid-19, nobody is. Much the same could be said about the disease of poverty.
Rising rents are taking 50 to 60 per cent of many family incomes so how much to spend on food, shoes and visits to the GP is no longer a choice.