We all know life is not like it is on the big screen. But in a small nation like New Zealand, one with such a remarkable and progressive history of caring for others and doing charitable works, we should be able to look after our most vulnerable and do it in a way which gives them a decent quality of life, not just the absolute basics.
During a cost-of-living crisis, it becomes even more difficult for a government to provide that support.
That should mean it ends up with those most in need, those whose potential could still be fulfilled with help, not given to others who have already ‘‘made it’’.
It’s our younger generations which we should be nurturing, for their own sake and for what they will be able to contribute to the New Zealand of the future.
The latest Child Poverty Report 2026 says about 50,000 more Kiwi children are now living with material hardship compared with three years ago.
The total number of children suffering from that level of deprivation reached almost 170,000 last year.
This depressing news seems even more dispiriting when placed in the context of last week’s Budget, which didn’t do much for anyone unless you happen to be a road.
Material hardship is defined by Statistics New Zealand and the Child Poverty Reduction Act 2018 as technically not the same thing as poverty, which focuses on a lack of income.
Instead, hardship measures non-income-based deprivation to show what household living conditions are like, by considering the ability to buy food, accommodation, clothing, heating and other essentials.
In most of our eyes, though, it’s the same thing — poverty.
It’s clear this government is increasingly failing our vulnerable children — as previous governments have also done, let us not forget.
Retired Starship Hospital paediatrician Innes Asher told RNZ the first few years of a child’s life were the most important for their future. She said the government’s policies this term had ‘‘eaten away at the edges of things that can help children thrive’’.
Like many others, she takes issue with the government’s approach that focusing on building a stronger economy, and taking a stricter approach to social welfare, will ultimately flow through to address child poverty.
She also points to an OECD report which underlined that rising inequality in New Zealand has effectively knocked more than 10% off the country’s growth.
Just three months ago we highlighted figures from Statistics NZ that showed Tamariki Māori, Pasifika children and children with disabilities experienced higher rates of poverty.
At that time, the government was happy to put its eggs into the support-parents-into-work basket as the best way to lift children from poverty.
But, as we have seen with other aspirations based on the vision of a booming economy, that is failing — and failing badly.
What’s even worse is the government’s policy of actively reducing benefits in the hope it will somehow encourage the unemployed into jobs which don’t exist but that the government wants to exist, so they can then take credit for them as a consequence of an apparently booming economy.
Nobody could doubt that doing something to reduce child poverty is extremely difficult.
While the Jacinda Ardern-led Labour government passed the 2018 Act and made a series of targeted policy interventions to lower deprivation levels, its initial success in cutting the number of children in poverty from 185,000 in 2018 to about 135,000 four years later soon reversed towards the end of its time in office.
It’s time to remind the prime minister, the finance minister, coalition party leaders and the like, that child poverty is one of the worst problems that could afflict any decent society.
Putting direct action off on the hope of a mirage-like recovery, a fantasy surplus in a couple of years’ time, is totally the wrong way to go about it.
