Bay an area of ''high deprivation''

Children's Commissioner Dr Russell Wills

More than half of the children born in Hawke's Bay are disadvantaged before they even take their first breath, says Children's Commissioner and Hawke's Bay paediatrician Russell Wills.
Dr Wills says District Health Board statistics show the region has one of the poorest populations of children in the country.
"More than half of kids born in Hawke's Bay are born into the three bottom income deciles. What that means is that those children are disadvantaged before they're even born," he says.
The issue of poverty in Hawke's Bay has been hotly debated recently with the gap between rich and poor in the province being highlighted. Many believe the gap in the province is more pronounced than anywhere else in the country.
"To use a really bad rugby cliché, we are a province of two halves," says Stuart Nash, Labour's Napier candidate for the September general election
"For many people, Hawke's Bay - and Napier - aren't the art deco fruit bowl little sleepy city that many people see on the marketing brochures. For many it is an area of high deprivation, no jobs, poor houses and diseases of poverty, like rheumatic fever."
Hastings Mayor Lawrence Yule says his perception is that the gap between rich and poor in the region is growing.
"In relative terms we have some people living in very difficult circumstances in New Zealand terms and that's not good. We need to do all we can to fix it."
Mr Yule says the region's lower socioeconomic areas are dealing with a combination of issues relating to housing, education, health, employment and income levels.
"They all flow together. When there's not success in a majority of those things over a long period of time you start breeding intergenerational poverty and that's the most worrying thing - when you see a number of families that have several generations in prison or families who haven't worked for two generations. You can't let people get into those spaces because it's very hard to get them out of it." But Tukituki MP and cabinet minister Craig Foss says research does not support the notion that the poverty gap in the region is expanding. That is a "narrative" that tends to emerge close to election time, he says.
"Our employment statistics here are always 1 or 2 per cent behind the rest of the country, even in the so-called boom times.
"That points to other issues rather than just how much cash someone has to spend," he says.
"The educational outcomes for Maori in New Zealand are not as good as we'd like them to be and in Hawke's Bay about 25 per cent of our population is Maori, so those outcomes are accentuated because you have a higher percentage than the average across the country.
"When young men can't come out with NCEA level 2 they don't have many skills to offer an employer who wants to employ them. It's those things that take time to put right."
Dr Wills says there are encouraging statistics showing that where a "concerted effort" has been made to target certain public health issues in Hawke's Bay, the region is able to achieve better results than other parts of the country.
"We can see that in Hawke's Bay our rates for admission to hospital for inflicted injury, immunisation and breast feeding are better than the rest of New Zealand and they're all areas where we've put in a concerted effort.
"What that shows is that poverty is not destiny. There are areas where we know improving the services we deliver to poor families can turn those outcomes around. Poverty need not be destiny."
Outcomes have been improved over recent years by changing the way services are delivered to Maori, the Pacific community, and the poor, Dr Wills says. "What we've discovered is it's not that they are hard to reach, it's that we are. They find health services - and social and education services - hard to get to. What that means is we're delivering services very differently now to how we did, say, 10 years ago.
"We now deliver a lot more services in people's homes and on marae and in schools - where the children who we most need to get to are. So we've had a huge improvement in access to care for a number of families. That's why, for example, immunisation rates are so much better."
However, the region still continues to see a high number of children admitted to hospital with illnesses that are related to issues of poverty and over-crowded housing, he says.
"As the economy picks up I'm hopeful we might see fewer kids in hospital but until housing affordability improves, and therefore over-crowding improves, we're going to continue to see very high numbers of poor pre-school children in hospital with preventable disease."
Mr Yule says Hastings District Council has limited scope to address poverty but has put a strong focus on economic development and job growth "because income is one of the fundamental ways of dealing with poverty".
A recent success for the council was attracting a Kiwibank call centre which will bring 100 new jobs to the city and Mr Yule says he is confident other job-creation initiatives will come to fruition over the next six to nine months.
"We're putting a lot of work into it and [council] staff are committed to it, and we're getting some runs on the board," he says.
"I've had more positive feedback on the call centre initiative than I've had on anything else in terms of what we've done because we've landed some jobs - they're new jobs and people love it because it's what they're crying out for."