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Sunday, February 25, 2024

Ele Ludemann: Another Labour legacy of failure


Worsening child poverty is another legacy of the Ardern and Hipkins Labour governments:

Three of the nine measures of child poverty increased for the year ended June 2023 compared with the previous year, according to figures released by Stats NZ.

“We have seen an annual increase in material hardship, indicating that more households were going without some of the essentials due to cost,” general manager of social and population insights Abby Johnston said.

“We also saw that, for many households, incomes after deducting housing costs did not keep up with inflation, leading to an increase in one of the low-income poverty measures.”

These annual increases were for two of the three primary measures specified in the Child Poverty Reduction Act 2018 (the Act) and were accompanied by a year-on-year increase in severe material hardship, one of the six supplementary measures. . .

Under Labour the number of children in homes dependent on welfare increased and inflation increased. Both of these have led to the increase in child poverty.

Labour was oh so very good at announcing but so very bad at delivering positive change and more people – children and adults – are living in poverty as a result of that.

The National-led government has policies to reduce welfare dependency and inflation, both of which will help to reduce child poverty.

Ele Ludemann is a North Otago farmer and journalist, who blogs HERE - where this article was sourced.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well as someone else said the real salary earners are off to Oz leaving the rest of us with low tax take and a large number of beneficiaries,

A bit of biblical wisdom could be appropriate 'If anyone is not willing to work ,let him not eat. 'If anyone does not not provide for his ' household he has denied the faith ' 'Let the thief no longer steal but rather let him labour doing honest work with his hands so that he may share with anyone in need'
and so on ' It's sort of curious isn't that there are multitudes of references many very specific about work and income?

But who takes any notice of that sort of sanctimonious stuff any more ?

The reality is our welfare state is dependent on a full working force and without that we will completely fail as a caring society. When welfare began in the 1930s it was immensely shameful, comparable to being a criminal to be on welfare with no good reason. People had a well developed conscience about that.

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