Editorial: Child poverty targets may be too broad

Opinion

In one sense, Jacinda Ardern should find it fairly easy to achieve her child poverty reduction target.

Simply by raising rates of benefit or income support for households with children her Government can reduce the number of children relying on incomes that are less than a stated proportion of the national median.

The problem will be that people are not statistics, their personal situations vary greatly. Raising incomes across the board might not ensure all children live in healthy, warm homes, receive nutritious meals and bring a lunch to school.

Of course it will help. But the question that needs to be asked is, will it help more than other policies that aim to improve the conditions of these children?

Public finance is always limited, raising benefits across the board is very expensive. Good government tries to get the maximum value from every dollar it spends on social welfare. This Government and the previous one disagree fundamentally on where that value lies.

The National Government resisted constant calls from its Children's Commissioner and others for the broad statistical targets the new Government has now adopted. Bill English believed poverty would be better tackled by programmes targeted more precisely at individuals and households that need specific help.

As Finance Minister he convinced National to publish a set of concrete targets in fields such as disease reduction and educational pass rates which, to his expressed regret, the Ardern Government has just abandoned.

Now she is urging National to support legislation that would require the broad, income-based targets to be part of all future Budgets. Political calculations certainly favour Labour's sort of targets.

By simply raising benefit and income support payments, or promising to raise them, a political party can claim to raise a big round number of children above its chosen "poverty line".

English succumbed to this temptation at last year's election when he boasted that his 2017 Budget would lift 50,000 children above the line this year. The fact the Treasury has subsequently admitted it miscalculated that figure, and the larger figure it put on Labour's benefit promise, underlines just how theoretical this measurement of poverty really is.

But, undeterred, Labour is persisting with it, the Prime Minister has made it her personal mission in politics and National may find it politically too difficult to oppose it.

Poorly targeted increases for all low income and benefit-dependent households might not significantly improve the situation of children in real hardship but it will reduce inequality, which may be this Government's real purpose.

So long as it can maintain economic growth it will be able to gradually lift all family incomes to within 50 per cent of 60 per cent of the median, calculated before or after housing costs.

If it cannot maintain economic growth and tax revenue does not kept pace with its poverty reduction targets, something will have to give. But in the meantime, alleviating child poverty by any measure will be a popular effort.