The Child Poverty Report 2024 has just been published. It's an overview and selected findings, as opposed to a full report which is due in 2025.
Poverty can be measured in various ways.
Material hardship is measured by asking survey questions about deprivation. Has a child gone without fresh fruit and veges, been subject to postponed doctor visits, experienced a cold and damp house, etc. The DEP-17 scale has 17 items and experience of 6+ is considered material hardship; 9 or more, severe hardship.
The following graph shows that children in beneficiary households experience material hardship at rates that are consistently, "four to five times the rates for children in working households":
While the fall in the hardship rate is good news, the percentage of all children living in beneficiary families increased from 15 to 19 percent between 2017 and 2024 (see Table 6).
So the rate of hardship has fallen but there are more children subject to it.
In my opinion, the growth in benefit-dependent children is primarily the result of increasing benefit payments and incentivising more families to opt for welfare and stay on it for longer.
The following further graph from the report illustrates the steep rise in beneficiary incomes over recent years (but does not include Best Start, Winter Energy Payment or Accommodation Supplement.) A sole parent with two children receives just under $700 weekly. Adding in the exclusions however, pushes that figure up to $1,057 weekly (April 2023). See Page 6, https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/research/benefit-system/total-incomes-annual-report-2023.pdf
In respect of children in workless households, in 2022 (latest data) New Zealand was second only to Romania when compared to 26 European countries.
By family type the highest material hardship rate occurs in sole parent families at 32 percent (compared to 12 percent overall.)
The report notes, "New Zealand also has a relatively high proportion of sole parent households compared with European countries."
Most children on benefits are in sole parent households (70%).
In conclusion, the report shows that in general child well-being has improved and poverty has fallen.
However, the part of the equation that relates to those children living on benefits is not sustainable policy.
The numbers cannot be encouraged to keep growing. That will only ramp-up inter-generational dependency and further deplete potential productivity.
The feasible approach is that which Clark and Cullen adopted during the 2000s (but Ardern and Robertson shunned more latterly).
That was, work is the best way out of poverty. Always has been and always will be.
Simply shoveling ever more money into perpetually unemployed households is just another moribund idea from the Ardern era.
Thanks Lindsay, more good research from you. Sadly the concept of kids growing up in a sole-mother household is just too much part of 'modern life'. Many of these women are just naive and scared, looking for security. Of course the stats show that a vast percentage of them are Maori young women. Why have these women no sense of self-worth? Why has their 'whanau' or wider tribal family not raised them to be confident women, with the power to discern and not shack up with f***head guys who just want sex and bring drugs, gangs and violence into the household. They are not well educated, not well raised and not empowered to be confident adults. They are often…
“…incentivising more families to opt for welfare and stay on it for longer.”
That was always a significant cause of NZ’s slow economic growth. It’s hard to get ahead when there’s so many ‘hangers on’.
Anything this Government does to change the incentives will be positive for the country and the children.
Father's must pay for their children and if the mother doesn't know who the father is then she should know a range of suspects and they should all be DNA tested.
Work is the only way out of this situation and mothers who can't work because of the number of children they have should be able to survive on the income generated by the father/s.
The ordinary taxpayer who has their own family to support should have to support someone else's, except in extreme circumstances.
No mention here of the army of men who sire children and then walk away from their responsibility to provide for the child. Nor of the women who refuse to name the father and yet expect the State to provide a benefit. So where are the sanctions on solo mothers who refuse to co-operate. It seems the State is not being assiduous enough in tracking down these errant fathers and demanding reimbursement of taxpayer money.
Here's a thought. DNA testing assists greatly in the identification of any child's father. At the very least. payment of additional benefits should be contingent on every child having its DNA recorded at birth. And given the high likelihood that these kids will sooner o…
These are 3rd world statistics-something one would expect to see in Central America or Africa.
It’s a shame how far NZ has fallen.