Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Child poverty - it IS a choice

The Children's Commissioner is leading a social media campaign to battle child poverty.

"Child poverty - it's not choice." That's the message that outgoing Children's Commissioner Dr Russell Wills wants to spread through social media in a challenge to Government policy.

It's not the choice of the children living in low income households.

But the majority of them end up there through the choices made by their parents.

When one in five children every year is being born directly onto a benefit or into precarious financial circumstances that will see them dependent on a benefit within their first year...


...somewhere along the line choices are made. They are the sole responsibility of the parent. Not you, not me and not the rest of NZ.

Yes, the government, as our representatives, makes choices about how the consequences of those choices are dealt with but the horse has bolted by then.

The Children's Commissioner does his charges no favours by refusing to acknowledge the facts behind child poverty. An illness cannot be cured if it is misdiagnosed and wrongly treated.

But it's an interesting choice of message, "Child poverty - it's not choice".

Clearly the public perception the anti-poverty advocates have identified and want to stamp out is the reverse.



7 comments:

JC said...

I think the poverty/obesity issue is an excellent example of why things go wrong.

We are told that many children go hungry because the caregiver doesn't get a big enough benefit but in the same breath we are told the same group of children are obese.. WTF?

The semi official answer remains the same.. more money, but how the hell did that kid get fat on so called poverty income?

Once you get through all the nonsense rationales and excuses you are left with the fact that the parent and kid are spending too much on food and neglecting things like paying the rent, exercise and budgeting. More money won't help because the evidence is stark.. it goes into even more food, more obesity and no change in life skills. In fact it stands to reason that more money erodes life skills even further.

More money is not an answer and in fact the CC and like minded bodies are being every bit as lazy as their charges in reaching for it.. perhaps they are just so beaten down by the whole poverty thing they can only reach for one small part of the problem and hope it fixes the rest. It won't of course.. within a week of getting more money they will be demanding more.

The classic example here is the benefit increase for the first time in 40 years.. once the poverty industry got over its shock at actually winning something they were back on stride and as strident as ever about demanding more money.. within days or sometime just hours. Perhaps *they* are the problem and not their charges.

JC

Andrew Berwick said...

The classic example here is the benefit increase for the first time in 40 years

a completely ridiculous decision by Key - we need to eliminate benefits, not increase them!

Brendan McNeill said...

Sue Bradford on the news earlier today said 'child poverty is linked to adult poverty' - goodness, who knew?

david said...

His latest annual Child Poverty Monitor, out today, says children living in households earning below 60 per cent of the median household income after housing costs, have almost doubled from 15 per cent of all children in 1984 to 29 per cent last year.

So Lindsay, you have the figures, has the number of households earning below 60 percent of the median household income doubled(which could imply a significant redistribution of income amongst below average earning households, but could also be caused by a change in household composition) or has the number of children born to low income households doubled? or some of each.

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Your questions have far more complicated answers than I can provide.

Off the top of my head, the change in household composition is significant. The increasing percentage of two parent, two earner households is lifting the median.

Regarding family size, on average, even low income families are getting smaller.

Also, in the 1980s sole parent benefits kept those children just above the 'poverty' threshold. After the cuts in the early 1990s, they fell just below.

For rigorous analysis of the figures you quote, go to the source (P119)

https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/monitoring/household-income-report/2015/incomes-report.doc

Anonymous said...

[choices] are the sole responsibility of the parent. Not you, not me and not the rest of NZ.

Wrong wrong wrong. We know the #1 fact influencing that "choice" is the welfare system: yes the benefits, the renamed DPB, but also the state healthcare, state education. The vast majority of NZ's tax take is greedily consumed by children of parents who don't love those children enough to care for and educate them at their own expense.

Thought experiment: take away the benefits; state health system; state education system; state Plunket; state healthline; state health visitors; state subsidies and "free" doctors visits and all the rest --- and the number of bludger kids will go to almost zero overnight

david said...

Also, in the 1980s sole parent benefits kept those children just above the 'poverty' threshold. After the cuts in the early 1990s, they fell just below.

That sounds the most likely explanation then. Was it an actual cut in allowances?