Blaming poor eases our guilt

Demand for food banks skyrocketed over the Christmas period with an estimated one in five families needing assistance. Not surprising. Figures released before Christmas show about 235,000 Kiwi kids are currently growing up in poverty. Twenty per cent of these children live in severe material hardship; their households are unable to afford nine or more essentials items.

Treasury predicts the impact of Covid will see these figures increase over the coming year.

Having previously worked on these issues at the Office of the Children’s

Commission, I know what many New

Zealanders think about these households. They told us clearly.

Many of us think children are growing up poor because the adults responsible for them are too lazy to work or make poor spending decisions.

Child poverty is caused by lazy parents and their big screen

TVs, smokes and six packs.

Even if you are a kind, generous person, could you look me in the eye and tell me that no part of you has ever blamed people for being poor? That they somehow deserve to be poor through the bad choices they have made?

Blame eases the guilt about having more than enough, while others go hungry and live in houses that make them sick.

The evidence clearly shows that the spending decisions of poor people are as good as those taken by any of us.

And about 40 per cent of children in poverty belong to the growing number of working poor households. Yet I am amazed how we compartmentalise the issues.

... when we dismiss efforts to address pay equity and the gender pay gap we miss a critical strategy to address child poverty.

None of us would wish children in our fine country to grow up malnourished. Yet we cringe at raising the minimum wage and benefit levels. All of us hope that every child has a warm, safe place to sleep each night, yet as home-owners we desperately want our house prices to remain high and our rental portfolios to be as profitable and taxfree as possible.

Women-led households with children are those most likely to be in poverty. So when we dismiss efforts to address pay equity and the gender pay gap we miss a critical strategy to address child poverty.

We are focused on our economic recovery but will those shovel-ready jobs direct employment to those doing it tough? The dots don’t look joined up to me.

In the after-glow of our summer break, it is time to consider whether we are serious or not about tackling the entrenched hardship too many children experience.

We gave our Government a clear mandate to address these issues. But we need to encourage them to be bold and make sure our siloed, often self-interested, view of issues does not get in the way of sorting out the bigger picture.

We can’t keep having our cake and eating it as well.