Are we reducing child poverty by as much as is needed to reach the targets set by the government under the Child Poverty Reduction Act?

The current indicators about the level of poverty are not very promising, but on average they really only apply for December 2018 (that is the middle of the July 2018 to June 2019 year, the period for which they cover). The government has introduced a number of poverty-reducing policies since, but they are not yet appearing in the data. Some of their effects will be there in the Statistics NZ release next February but we shall have to wait until February 2022 to see the effects of the first term of this Labour Government’s policies (by which time it will be almost halfway into its second term).

Nevertheless, we can make some assessment (the Treasury publish their modelled estimates). The indications are that we can expect some reduction in poverty but they will be small compared to the track required to meet the statute’s target of halving child poverty in ten years. The government is going to have to do a lot more.

The problem is that while there is no shortage of goodwill, there has been little comprehensive and rigorous thinking. This is nicely illustrated by the 2012 Solutions to Child Poverty in New Zealand: Evidence for Action, prepared for the Children’s Commissioner by what was called an ‘Expert Advisory Group’. The group’s lack of expertise is evident from the report’s bibliography. Nine of them have no publications at all in it; the other two have but one each, neither of which is particularly central to poverty research. They were really a group of eminent persons of goodwill – the advisory system’s equivalent of generic managers; they could have been asked to design a flag,

(The bibliography itself failed to cover the vast literature on New Zealand poverty research. For instance, there is no reference to the work of the  Child Poverty Action Group whose practical experience includes visiting houses of the poor. The omissions makes the ‘expert’ report look like an All Black team without a scrum.)

Because they were so unfamiliar with the research, the ‘experts’ failed to notice that child poverty doubled between 1990 and 1994. (The relevant graph is on page 5 of the advisory group’s report.) In fact the government targets are, in effect, to return us to the income distribution before Rogernomics and Ruthanasia. The Child Poverty Reduction Act could be called the ‘Reverse the Neoliberal Anti-inequality Approach Act’.

Except that would be too honest. And there is a caveat. Because of its woolly analysis, the conventional wisdom thinks the task is to reverse the neoliberals’ outcomes without seriously tackling its policies. That is why it focuses on marginal and often ineffective policy changes, rather than recognising that this is a very expensive target. .

If we were serious (and expert) we could measure the effect of each policy change on many of the indicators rather than loftily announcing ‘it will reduce child poverty’. That would enable us to think more carefully about the cost effectiveness of each policy; but it is not the way we do social policy in New Zealand.

For example, although it was not described as such, the replacement of school fees by government grants should reduce poverty (in the sense of alleviating financial pressures on struggling families). For interesting technical reasons – at least they are interesting to experts – the effect will not appear in most of the poverty indicators that the government uses.

I was struck that the government measures to support incomes introduced immediately before the lockdown were not particularly child targeted. A key element was a $25 a week across-the-board permanent increase to main benefits, so it did not discriminate by giving families with children more (and more, the more children in the family), which would have reflected child poverty being high among its priorities.

Perhaps, and understandably, the Covid Crisis overwhelmed everything else. Possibly in the dash to get policies in place in an impossibly short time – New Zealand did this impressively compared to many countries – the government took the easiest administrative path . But perhaps officials had not already been thinking about a regime which would have given more support to children and could not recommend an alternative.

The answer to such questions is that there is not really a ministry for all children. It was hoped that the change of name of Oranga Tamariki from ‘Ministry for Vulnerable Children’ to ‘Ministry of Children’ would have led to a refocus. That does not seem to have happened. The defence may be that the ministry has been so overwhelmed with managing ‘vulnerable’ children that it has had no time to think about all of them, that the change in name did not change thinking.

Oranga Tamariki remains a ministry for dealing with dysfunctional families. It describes itself as ‘We're a Ministry dedicated to supporting any child in New Zealand whose wellbeing is at significant risk of harm now, or in the future. We also work with young people who may have offended, or are likely to offend.’

Responsibility for child policy is shared with the Ministry for Social Development. Presumably they are meant to deal with families which are not deemed dysfunctional as though there is not a continuous spectrum and effects on one side of the divide do not relate to effects on the other.

So there is but one reference to poverty on the Oranga Tamariki website – a 2017 presentation from an outsider. Does poverty have anything to do with children at risk? You do not get a sense that there is a whole-of-government approach to poverty reduction.

It is typical of New Zealand social policy that we are so busy providing ambulances at the bottom of the cliff, we do not think of fences at the top – of policies which would prevent or reduce the failures we are struggling with. That ought to be one of the purposes of child poverty reduction, but as the ‘expert’ advisory group’s report illustrates, we avoid thinking systematically about such things.

It is surely no accident that recent international reports have found New Zealand children falling behind in education and health. Nor that for all the legislation, there is little progress on the child poverty front. We need a Ministry for All Children with integrated and expert analysis to go with it.