Ani O'Brien: Answers to Stuff You Wanted to Know.

A couple of days ago I asked you what you wanted me to write about between now and the election. This was, in retrospect, dangerous. You could have jumped the shark and I would have had to politely ignore all suggestions. But my faith in the intelligence of my readership was justified!

You had a lot of questions. Some of them are enormous and deserve proper essays of their own. Quite a few of you want me to go back down the He Puapua and co-governance rabbit hole, others want a forensic examination of TOP, and several want me to work out what a Labour-Green-Te Pāti Māori-TOP government might actually look like. There was also interest in strategic voting, electorate races, and what the minor parties could extract from National or Labour in coalition negotiations.

I will endeavour to write essays covering as many of those topics as possible. But there were also lots of questions that have reasonably straightforward answers. So I thought I would begin with a kind of Q+A format.

Consider this the first instalment of Stuff You Wanted to Know.

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”.

Lindsay Mitchell: What the Left constantly ignores

Here is the political argument from the Left:

Poverty causes hardship for children. Whether the parent is working or on a benefit makes no difference. It's the lack of income that matters.

My argument is that the source of income matters. A lot.

Children in households with the same low income suffer hardship disproportionately if their parent is on a benefit.

Dr Bryce Wilkinson: Thoughts for reducing child material hardship

Last month, the Ministry of Social Development released the latest of its excellent statistical reports documenting the extent of child poverty, hardship/deprivation in New Zealand.

The proportions are much below their peak rates around 15 years ago but are still too high.

Lindsay Mitchell: Outgoing Children's Commissioner calls for bigger benefits as swansong

Today on Q&A outgoing Children's Commissioner Claire Achmad told Jack Tame the idea that work alone will lift children out of poverty is a "fallacy".

Yet the US evidence says the opposite.

NZ has a very high rate of sole parent benefit dependency. So did the US. The two countries share the family breakdown of African Americans and Maori. The Maori ex-nuptial birthrate is currently 81 percent and Maori make-up 51 percent of sole parent beneficiaries (with a recorded ethnicity).

Mike's Minute: What's the answer to our child poverty issue?

To the so-called poverty issue.

The report actually uses the word "hardship".

Kids in hardship, roughly, is flat. About 14% of kids allegedly live in some form of hardship.

Professor Alexander Gillespie: NZ report card 2025 - how the country fared in 28 key global and domestic rankings

Standardised testing and regular progress assessment became key features of the education system this year, so why not apply those same principles to New Zealand as a whole?

There’s an important difference here, of course. This exercise is about prompting discussion and debate, and should be read with a degree of caution. The metrics tell us only so much – but it’s still possible to trace the nation’s ups and downs.

David Farrar: Jacinda’s record on child poverty

Jacinda entered politics to end child poverty. One thing she did (which was good) was to ensure we have annual data to monitor it. There are nine different measures of child poverty. Six of them don’t actually measure poverty – they just measure income inequality (so if your income goes up 5% and the median 6%, you are deemed to have gone into poverty which is nonsense). The useful measures are:

Greg Clydesdale: Why Jacinda Ardern’s Poverty drive failed

Jacinda Ardern came to power with the stated goal of reducing poverty. At the end of her tenure, we could comfortably state her achievements were under-whelming. In fact, when we compare her goals to what she achieved, we can say it more explicitly – she failed! This represents a long list of failures to reduce poverty including the ‘Working for Families’ program and ‘Closing the Gaps’.

I had the opportunity to speak to Ardern’s Child Poverty Unit (CPU) in 2020 and recognised at the time that they would fail. They were driven by the same ideologies behind other failed programs, that is the poverty cycle.

Lindsay Mitchell: The child poverty conundrum

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.

Lindsay Mitchell: Babies and benefits - no good news

Ten years ago, I wrote the following in a Listener column:

Every year around one in five new-born babies will be reliant on their caregivers benefit by Christmas. This pattern has persisted from at least 1993. For Maori the number jumps to over one in three. Add to this Treasury's advice to the Ministerial Committee on Child Poverty,

"...around 1 in 5 children will spend more than half of their first 14 years in household supported by main benefit. This group is at the highest risk of material hardship and poor outcomes across a range of dimensions”.

I am reflecting on this as I receive the latest update in an OIA response from MSD.

Lindsay Mitchell: Child poverty - complex or simple?

Question: Do you understand how the child poverty statistics are derived?

Clearly some people do not.

Last week the latest child poverty statistics were all over the media. But there are a number of misunderstandings that need addressing. Like this one from NewstalkZB’s John MacDonald who wrote:

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.

David Farrar: Labour’s great success with child poverty

The 2023 child poverty statistics are out, and they show slightly more children living in material hardship than in 2017. So six years of Ardern, Hipkins and Robertson saw no actual progress, while four years of key, english and Joyce saw 60,000 fewer kids living in material hardship.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 22/2/24

Willis tells us before dawn about her travel plans and – early this afternoon – she reports on her meeting with Aust Treasurer

Finance Minister Nicola Willis – and press secretary Nick Venter, too, we may suppose – were up and about before sparrow’s fart.

Her bags would have been packed and her passport checked.

Lindsay Mitchell: On the 50th anniversary of the DPB

The Domestic Purposes Benefit has been variously described as a “disaster” (David McLoughlin 1995), an “economic lifeline” (Jane Kelsey 1995) and “an unfortunate experiment” (Muriel Newman 2009).

Its effect on family formation can never be definitively ascertained. But the growth of the sole parent family dependent on welfare has correlated with more poverty, more child abuse and more domestic violence. Each of these was intended to be reduced by the introduction of the DPB.

Susan St John: If NZ’s new government wants a simple fix to improve child poverty, here’s what it should do

With a National-led coalition government taking shape (how long it takes is another matter), the nation’s “squeezed middle” awaits the financial relief promised during the election campaign.

As the lead party, National’s policies should be central to negotiations. For those without children, its proposed payment of the full Independent Earner Tax Credit for incomes between NZ$24,000 and $66,000 would kick in from April 1 next year.

Susan St John: Family Support

The Labour-National consensus on family support means the election won’t change much for NZ’s poorest households

Casual observers could be forgiven for thinking the National Party’s recently released Working for Families tax policy had been cut and pasted from the Labour Party’s own policy. The similarities are certainly striking.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 19/6/23

No honeyed words on the Beehive website about Meng Foon – nor about the role of ethnicity when priorities for surgery are decided

Two ministers and/or their press secretaries have gone missing in action.

Point of Order: Blessed are the poor in jargon

Still puzzled by the existence of child poverty some years after PM Ardern decided to abolish it? You might be interested to know that the question was addressed at the same time by a couple of Brits. More transparently; and – one imagines – with much the same success.

In fact, they went a bit further in ensuring the experiment would tangibly impact on the decision-makers themselves. They made a bet of it.