New Zealand is still struggling to make progress on child wellbeing and experience of poverty, despite Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s commitment to the issue.
While data released earlier this year showed improvements in overall child poverty measures, new reports show that is not being felt in the lives of many vulnerable children, who are still living in unaffordable, damp and mouldy homes, and with families who run out of food. The reports on the child poverty related indicators and child and youth wellbeing strategy for 2019-20 were released on Thursday.
In many categories, progress was standing still, or patchy data made drawing strong conclusions impossible.
The housing crisis has clearly hampered government efforts: there was no progress on housing affordability, despite increases to the minimum wage and increased benefits to families. The portion of children whose families were spending more than 30% of disposable income on housing remained steady, rising slightly from 35% to 36%.
Across numerous categories, the data was divided along racial lines, with Māori and Pasifika children experiencing worse outcomes. Māori and Pasifika children were much more likely to go hungry: the rates of children living in homes that ran out of food “often or sometimes” were 30% for Māori and 46% for Pacific families. Overall, 20% of children faced that kind of food insecurity, and the report concluded there was not enough data to know if there was an overall downward trend. For the 7% of children living in damp and mouldy housing, there was no statistically significant change. Māori children were also over-represented in referrals for Oranga Tamariki [child protective services] investigations, and had double the rate of attempted suicide.
Child poverty is a central political issue for Ardern, who has previously cited it as the reason she entered politics. Since winning office, she has appointed herself child poverty reduction minister, and passed legislation forcing the government to release regular reports on child poverty and wellbeing measures.
Max Rashbrooke, a researcher and writer on economic inequality in New Zealand, said: “Child poverty is like a huge oil tanker – it takes a long time to turn around.”
There had been improvements in what he called the “big bang” measures of child poverty: indicators released in February showed reductions across all nine measures, including the number of children living in material deprivation or low-income households. Thursday’s reports covered a wider range of indicators, to capture the bigger picture of child wellbeing in New Zealand.
“It takes time to convert income into greater wellbeing,” Rashbrooke said. Many lower-income families, for example, carried high levels of debt from previous years when they hadn’t been able to make ends meet – so additional income might go to paying down debt, rather than increasing how much families had to spend on essentials such as food, heating and housing. “Some of the problems are so ingrained, that you spend a lot of money erasing the problems of the past,” Rashbrooke said. Adding to that, the housing crisis meant income increases were being eaten up by higher rents and housing costs.
Ardern defended the slow or non-existent progress in Thursday’s reports, saying in a statement: “Many of the issues facing children, young people and their families are complex, stubborn and intergenerational, so we know change will take time, and will require sustained action across government and across our communities,” she said.
“While I’m proud of the government’s achievements to date reducing child poverty, the work is far from done.”
Rashbrooke said that so far, the government wasn’t taking the dramatic action required to meet its own goals in child poverty. Those include reducing children living in material hardship from 13% to 5% by 2027, and cutting those living in low-income households from 16% down to 5%. Those targets were “incredibly ambitious,” and would require much more action than the government was currently taking, Rashbrooke said. “They’re not willing to commit to the massive increases in benefits that would really see us slashing the rates of child poverty.”
The commissioner for children, Andrew Becroft, said in a statement there was “an inarguable need to increase benefits” and called for more spending for children in the upcoming budget. “In a country as wealthy as ours, no child should be living in a mouldy home, or running out of food, or ending up in hospital from preventable causes. As a country we can fix this – we just need to choose to.”
Also looming is the potential impact of Covid-19. It’s still unclear how the pandemic and lockdowns will affect children, especially those living in hardship.
New Zealand has not faced the same waves of mass job losses experienced in many countries: extensive wage subsidies mean that unemployment in New Zealand has actually dropped overall in March 2021, to 4.7%. But even that has been spread unevenly: Māori unemployment was at 8.7%. For Pasifika , it was 10.4%, up from the previous year.
The pandemic has also forced some children to leave school early, especially those in lower-income neighbourhoods. In August, around 200 students at New Zealand’s largest decile one school [lower deciles indicate lower neighbourhood income], Manurewa high school, did not return to the classroom after lockdown, with many instead working to support their families. The head girl at Aorere College, Aigagalefili Fepulea’i-Tapua’i, said following the lockdowns that Covid-19 forced hundreds of students to sacrifice their schooling to seek employment and support their families. “NZ wants to rebuild, but it’s on our backs,” she said at the time.
The reports on Thursday found overall school attendance was up slightly compared with 2019 – but the report warned that the 2019 year could be an outlier, and conclusions should not be drawn from that year. Comparing school attendance in 2020 to 2017/18, it had increased slightly at the richest schools. But in lower-income schools, attendance had dropped.
The data will not capture all the effects of Covid-19, but Ardern warned in her statement that without action, the pandemic could mean some children were left behind. “While it is too soon to assess the longer-term impacts of Covid-19, we know it has given rise to major challenges in the lives of our most vulnerable,” she said. “We will continue to take steps to ensure our recovery from Covid addresses inequality and doesn’t leave our most vulnerable children behind.”
“I personally see the issue of child poverty as a moral issue, but I’ve also heard from many who view it as an economic one, with the loss of potential among our future workforce,” Ardern said in a pre-budget speech on Thursday.
“Either way, it’s a challenge that requires an urgent response – both in spite of and because of the pandemic.”
She would not be drawn on specific child poverty provisions in New Zealand’s upcoming budget, which will be released on 20 May.
Ardern said there were some frustrations with the newly released data in that it was for the 2019/20 period, and so did not capture the impact of some of the government’s more recent action.