What makes us poor?

Peter Jackson, editor, The Northland Age

TE TAI TOKERAU MP Kelvin Davis should have opened a few eyes with his Northland Age column last week. He wrote of a couple with five children under the age of 8, who had been failed at every turn by a welfare system that should have helped them but didn't. In fact its rules and regulations made their plight much, much worse.

They left a gang neighbourhood, stayed with family and friends until their welcome ran out, then finally took to living in a van. WINZ offered them a bond for a house they couldn't afford to rent, and wouldn't countenance a smaller one because they would be overcrowded. The father, not unreasonably but perhaps a little too colourfully, asked WINZ how crowded it thought the van was, and was banned from all WINZ offices in Northland.

The couple had eventually parted, the kids staying with Mum and by all accounts missing only three days of school during what was clearly a traumatic time. The Minister's response to Mr Davis was that there were other families with a higher priority. And worse, Child Youth and Family was now threatening to remove the children from their mother's care because they had been assessed as being at risk.

The machinations of government departments never cease to amaze, but the absence of common sense and humanity can perhaps be explained by the sheer scale of the job they are charged with doing on behalf of the homeless and enabling them to live their lives with some dignity and in some security. Or can it? The first thing we should do in the New Year is sit down and establish precisely how many children in this country really are living in such dire circumstances that they need help.

We keep hearing that 260,000 children in this country, almost one in four, are living in poverty. That's an emotive word that for most conjures up images of poor housing, insufficient food, inadequate clothing and an inability to pursue the opportunities that should be the birthright of every child. It's not that simple though.

There is an official definition of child poverty that is so voluminous that it defies understanding. Googling 'child poverty' yields a mountain of information that one would need to take leave to have any chance of digesting. However, last week we heard that, for example, the definition of poverty includes limited access to broadband, limited access to 'play dates' (presumably with other children of a similar age), and limited access to team sports.

What's the bet that those definitions are the work of some idiot bureaucrat who hasn't a clue what they are talking about, and has no understanding of how a lot of people, children included, live in this country? If absence of broadband, play dates and team sport on a Saturday morning are to be accepted as genuine measures of poverty, there will be a lot of children in this country who live in households with six-, even seven-figure incomes who are amongst the 260,000.

For many, broadband, organised play with other children and Saturday sport are more likely to be dependent upon geography than household income. And it would be nice to see some evidence that children who live in relatively remote but comfortable homes are disadvantaged to the point where they need rescuing by the government.

The first thing we need to do is better-define child poverty, to gain some understanding of the number of children who really do need help. Who are poorly clothed, living in substandard homes, are poorly fed, have developed behavioural problems as a result of their environment, and/or are missing out on an education because of their circumstances. That number will come in at a lot less than 260,000, even if we accept the ridiculous premise that the fundamental marker of poverty is a household income that falls below a certain percentage of the national average. More bureaucratic nonsense. If the average household income in this country was $1 million per annum, some 40 per cent of us would still be living in poverty simply because we were struggling along on less than that.

There has to be a more rational means of establishing which children need help, and given that the taxpayer funds a veritable army of civil servants devoted to this issue there is no reason why we can't have that. Then, perhaps, we can begin doing something about it.

While we're at it, it should be a priority to establish why children whose homes are dependent upon social welfare are missing out as badly as some undoubtedly are. Social welfare should not keep a family in the same style that paid employment would, for obvious reasons, but nor should it be set so low that children go unclothed and unfed. If the problem is that benefits are simply no longer enough to live on, they need to be increased. If the problem is that the adults who receive those benefits are spending them unwisely, then that needs to be addressed. If it's the latter, we will need to get past the lack of enthusiasm we as a society have shown thus far for intervening in people's lives.

It's a fair bet that in a place like the Far North CYF and WINZ staff could give the names and addresses of most if not all the local children who genuinely need help. That's the level we need to get down to. And we have to decide if we care enough to actually force second-rate parents into line, or whether we just keep wringing our hands about a problem that no one can do anything about.

If adults want to live on dope and booze, let them. But if that affects their children, society has a duty to intervene. If we're not prepared to do that, we should stop talking about child poverty altogether.

The story told by Kelvin Davis was a shocker, perhaps the best evidence we need that the system set up to help those who really are in desperate need is more beholden to process than it is to common sense. If he remains true to form he is unlikely to abandon this family as others have, however. And when he's sorted their problems he will hopefully take up the fight for another family. And another family, until the bureaucracy becomes part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Read with careRobin Shepherd has devoted his entire adult life to education, as a teacher, a principal, a consultant, and currently chairman of a rural board of trustees. None of that had changed when he sat down to pen the letter (Blame their teachers) that was published in this newspaper last week in response to an editorial that bemoaned the decline in moral standards in this country over the last generation or two.

His problem was that his indulgence in irony may have been a little too subtle.

Mr Shepherd has been castigated by some for his 'attack' on teachers, the great majority of whom work very hard to give their charges the best education possible. He would not disagree with that. What he was actually saying was that too often teachers are unfairly blamed for social failings displayed by their pupils, when the shortcomings should be sheeted home to others, with parents first in the queue. Anyone who missed that might read his letter again. With more care.