The missed chances of trying to solve child poverty
In a country as rich as ours, child poverty is an abomination: not a necessity, given the wealth and advancement all around us, but a choice. A choice not to ensure the nation’s resources are fairly shared, not to ensure a life of dignity for all, not to ensure that compassion is fully extended to those who struggle.
Conservatives sometimes blame our poverty rates on the poor themselves, and their supposed idleness, but that doesn’t really wash. Compare New Zealand’s child poverty rate, which in 2018 was nearly 14%, with that of Finland, where it was just 3%.
The Finns don’t excel because they’re superhumanly strong and self-reliant individuals. They’ve just made a collective choice to be compassionate, to care for others, and to provide communal supports – benefits, social housing, public services – that, like a trampoline, catch people when they’re falling and lift them up again.
It is in this context that we should interpret Thursday’s statistics, which show that, after many years of decline, New Zealand’s child poverty rates rose in the 12 months to June last year – unsurprising news, given the damage that inflation inflicted, but deeply disappointing nonetheless.
The data provide the penultimate verdict on Jacinda Ardern’s much-touted quest to reduce child hardship. (The final verdict will come next year, with data from mid-2022 to mid-2024, a period that reflects Labour’s policies and time in power.)
Before Ardern, John Key and Bill English had already made some inroads into poverty, although they allowed the gap between poor and middle New Zealanders to widen, leaving the former increasingly unable to keep up with rising costs or afford the things that society deemed necessary.
Ardern then systematised and, on some key measures, accelerated the reductions in poverty. Between 2018 and 2022, as Labour increased tax credits, lifted the minimum wage and raised benefits sharply, the number of children living in households below the main poverty line fell by around 49,000.
Even through the pandemic, Ardern ensured child poverty declined: a striking success. But in the 12 months to last June, as Labour failed to cushion the impact of inflation on the poorest, that figure had ticked back up by 12,000, leaving a net reduction in child poverty of around 37,000.
Other hardship measures tell a similar story: initial declines under Labour, then a partial reversion throughout the cost-ofliving crisis. The end result? Some 145,000 children are still below the main poverty line. Labour won’t, for various reasons, get full credit for its successes. Few people pay attention to abstract statistics; they remember instead the recent news stories of lengthening foodbank queues, of unaffordable groceries, and of people still having to sleep in cars, despite Ardern’s pledge to end this practice.
Some National Party figures, meanwhile, are already engaged in revisionism, selectively comparing Labour’s pandemicera results with their party’s record during the economic boom years of 2013-17, and distorting dates to suit their argument.
Labour will find this frustrating, of course – but it was within their power to have put such false arguments out of reach. Given Ardern’s rhetorical commitment to the issue, and the targets she set herself, Labour should have continued to cut poverty harder and faster after 2019, once its tax-credit rises had taken effect.
It should also have done more to help the worst-off weather inflation’s storm, instead of pivoting to the middle with cost-of-living payments that explicitly excluded beneficiaries. Nor did Labour focus enough on the very poorest, the ones living on the streets and battling multiple dysfunctions, for whom – according to frontline social workers – little has changed.
In the end, Ardern’s mission ran out of road, lacking both the political will and the requisite cash; much of the latter Labour spent instead on questionable pursuits like health service reorganisation. Nor did the party ever make poverty reduction a crusade that would have mobilised every ounce of the state’s resources and the public’s sympathy.
Labour’s record should have been unimpeachable. The fact that it isn’t lets National muddy the waters.
Not that the latter has a plan for getting the child poverty numbers back on track – except a relentless focus on getting people off welfare and into work. Which is fine as far as it goes.
But four in 10 children in poverty already have a parent in a full-time job. Work doesn’t pay in this country, or not at the bottom end.
Where to from here? While there will, given humankind’s frailties and life shocks, always be a few people – perhaps 2-3% of the population – in temporary hardship, it’s not unrealistic to think we could end long-term poverty. We can break the cycle.
But to do that, we’d need to ensure work actually pays, as well as look after beneficiaries better, fix the housing market – and fundamentally reorient ourselves towards an ethos of collective care. Utopian? The Finns don’t think so.
Max Rashbrooke is a senior research fellow in the school of government at Victoria University of Wellington/Te Herenga Waka.