Leaders gamble, poor lose

night’s leaders’ debate, he might have picked up the strong whiff of something equally unpleasant and toxic: desperation.

English, the man who for so long has kept the cards closer to his chest than his beloved National Party tie has now become the great gambler. And the campaign to combat poverty could be the poorer for it.

English is a numbers man and on Monday night we heard plenty of them. There was Labour leader Jacinda Ardern’s 290,000 children living in material deprivation and the National leader’s own 155,000. But the figure that drew the greatest surprise and audience reaction was 50,000 – that’s the number of children English has pledged to lift out of deprivation by April next year. He then doubled down on Monday night: another 50,000 for good measure over the following couple of years. His opponent was forced to applaud this substantial, if rather belated, entry into the poverty debate.

Following the debate Ardern pledged to match National’s numbers, to pull 100,000 children from poverty by 2020. That should be good news, but it’s not: it’s a cynical card game inspired by possibly the most compelling number not mentioned during Monday night’s debate: the four percentage points separating National and Labour in Stuff’s Poll of Polls.

It’s a meaningless race to the bottom of populist politics that undermines the complexity of tackling poverty as an endemic, intergenerational issue; that reduces it to something comfortably dealt with in the space of an electoral cycle. Both leaders know this: English himself acknowledged it later on in the same debate.

Having gone all-in with his grand pledge, he rounded on Ardern’s own weak attempts to extricate herself from the momentary brilliance of the English headlights. The prescription, he told Ardern and the nation, was good policy that lifted incomes and tackled the ‘‘very difficult toxic mix of social issues – family violence, criminal offending and long-term welfare dependency’’.

‘‘Passing a law doesn’t get rid of child poverty,’’ he exclaimed.

Neither does an unrealistic goal inspired by your own desperation to avoid the material deprivation of life in Opposition.

- Stuff