Pee Kay: “Show me a starving parent, and I will…”

“More than one in four children in South Auckland growing up in poverty”

This was the searing headline in a recent edition of the Herald, serving as a blunt reminder of a crisis we can neither ignore nor fully agree on how to fix.

The report calls the rise in children living in material hardship between 2023 and 2025 “statistically significant”.

“There has been an unambiguous increase in material hardship rates from 2022 through to 2025,” the report says, reversing what had been a downward trend in most poverty measures from 2017. ( a barb levelled at the current government by comparing 2017 with 2025?)

Across the country, 169,000 children are in material hardship, a key poverty measure defined as living in a household that cannot afford basic daily essentials.

The report shows that in Auckland’s southern wards, 28% of children are living in material hardship, compared with a nationwide average of 14-15%.

Notice how the headline says “growing up in poverty” yet the article continually references “hardship” and this is typical MSM deliberate ambiguity and obfuscation and in this case, to sway the readers thought. But that is another issue altogether.

Although they are closely related material hardship does not mean the exact same thing as poverty. Material hardship measures your ability to purchase only what you can afford or lack of choice when purchasing essential items. Whereas poverty measures a lack money coming in or shortage of income.

Examples of Material Hardship are – Putting off visits to the doctor because of cost, inability to heat the home properly in winter, inability to repair a household appliance and relying food banks etc.

The family might earn an income that puts them above the “poverty line”, but face large unavoidable costs, they cannot afford basic necessities, meaning they experience material hardship.

There is a significant difference, but in this case the MSM chose a “clickbait” headline. With that headline the Herald didn’t just deliver a statistic, it purposely delivered a gut punch!

A “one in four” number commands our immediate attention; attention that quickly moves to anger, sorrow, and debate. But do the readers read the full article or have they learnt enough from the misleading and sensationalised headline? But let’s say, in this instance, the initial wave of emotion has cleared and we are able to ask, how accurate is this picture?

To understand this issue, not only the reader but politicians and social agencies must look beyond the cold statistics, look past the political theatrics and thoroughly test the accuracy of the data against the real world truth on the ground.

How plausible is the picture painted by the headline? “More than one in four children in South Auckland growing up in poverty”

Is it not a fact that the media and in the political arena, child poverty figures are regularly weaponised, employing emotional rhetoric in the game of political point scoring?

I suggest the child poverty statistics contain a certain amount of bureaucratic spin. Politicians and the heavily funded “poverty industry” who have a massive vested interest in keeping this crisis alive, love to parade these numbers because they know full well, they lead to taxpayer cash!

Because when you look closely, poverty data is, at best, deceptive. It relies on relative income measures; meaning someone is labelled as living in “poverty” simply because they earn less than a moving, average wage, not because they are actually starving. By manipulating definitions, the bureaucratic and self interested create a mock crisis that justifies endless interventions, while completely ignoring, what could be, the real, underlying cause of family hardship.

There is an old saying that should apply to this or any real poverty crisis. “Show me a starving parent, and I will show you a starving child.” But in today’s New Zealand, that’s not what we are seeing. Instead, we see parents with money for indulgences while their kids turn up to school without having eaten breakfast, relying on taxpayer-funded lunches.

If the parents aren’t missing a meal, the child shouldn’t be either. Is this a failure of government funding or is it a failure of basic parenting?

Take our school lunch programme as a prime example. We are told government must step in and feed thousands of children every day. But why? Does this massive intervention actually fix poverty or does it merely mask the symptoms while increasing an ever growing culture of dependency?

By turning schools into government funded soup kitchens, does not the government strip away the fundamental obligation of a family to feed their children? When the state takes over the role of providing lunch and quite often a basic breakfast, is it not signalling to parents that they are no longer accountable for the very children they brought into the world? The very children they have a duty to care for and nurture!

The painful, politically incorrect truth that policymakers refuse to look at is that vices bleed households dry before the children ever see a cent! When a household is trapped in a cycle of heavy smoking, drinking, gambling and even drug addiction, those addictions are fed first by the parents, not last!

Obviously, a parent struggling with those issues will allocate their scarce cash to the bottle store, the pokie machine, or the tobacco counter long before prioritising fresh vegetables or winter shoes. In these environments, the saying “show me a starving parent and I will show you a starving child” takes on a different, darker meaning.

The child isn’t starving because government agencies didn’t provide enough funding; the child is starving because the adult in charge chose to starve the family budget to nourish their vices!

At this point I need to be clear, this is not the story of every family in hardship. Many parents fight a brave, daily battle against genuine economic deprivation, skipping meals themselves just to ensure their children have shoes and food. Their struggle is not one of broken priorities but one of scarce resources and they deserve every ounce of targeted public support available.

However, policy failure occurs when the state treats a crisis of parental addiction exactly the same as a crisis of pure financial hardship. By failing to differentiate between the family that lacks money and the family whose money is swallowed by vice, current welfare strategies will always fail the very children they are designed to protect.

So, do our official poverty measurements need to move from measuring how much money is needed to how it is actually spent? Is policing how beneficiaries spend their cash a step too far? You would have to say yes, wouldn’t you? That’s nanny state on steroids.

So, what is the answer? Is there an answer or we have run out of alternatives? New Zealand is broke, and we can no longer afford to fund poor parenting.

It defies all credibility to claim a household is completely incapable of putting together a basic sandwich, yet they magically possess the funds to keep local bottle stores, pokie rooms, and vape shops thriving. The state steps in to fill the child’s lunchbox, but all this seems to accomplish, in many instances, is freeing up disposable cash for the parents to feed their own vices. By outsourcing parenting to the taxpayer, we aren’t curing hardship; we are subsidising a lifestyle of zero accountability.

It is a scathing indictment on our society that we now applaud the state for doing what any decent parent should consider their absolute minimum obligation!

Pee Kay writes he is from a generation where common sense, standards, integrity and honesty are fundamental attributes. This article was first published HERE