KEY POINTS:
About 150,000 children living in severe poverty have been "left behind" by the Government's discriminatory Working For Families package, the Human Rights Review Tribunal was told today.
The Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) today launched its case in the tribunal, after a six-year battle to have it heard.
CPAG is seeking a declaration from the tribunal that the "in-work tax credit" component of the package breaches the Human Rights Act because it discriminates on the basis of employment status.
The credit gives solo parents who work more than 20 hours a week, or couples who work more than 30 hours, who are not on a benefit and have up to three children, $60 a week.
Those with more than three children get more.
Even if CPAG wins the case the declaration does not bind the Government to change the policy.
Counsel for CPAG Catherine Rodgers today told the tribunal that although the stated aim of the in-work tax credit was to create a pay gap between being on a benefit and working, it was in fact a defacto family assistance payment to help meet the costs of raising children.
If the policy was purely to create an income gap between benefits and work, why was it also available to families on relatively high incomes.
For those families it was a child assistance payment, but by excluding beneficiaries it was "flawed and discriminatory".
In Australia and Canada family assistance was universal, while work incentive payments were delivered through a separate policy.
Ms Rodger said about 220,000 poor children were excluded from the payment, with 150,000 of them living in "serious or severe hardship".
She said the aim of Working For Families was to redistribute income to families.
"But on the flip side tens of thousands of beneficiary children were left behind in poverty."
To extend the payment to beneficiaries would cost about $500 million a year, she said.
CPAG's first witness Otago University Professor Richie Poulton, director of the long-term Dunedin multidisciplinary study of 1000 children born in 1972 and 1973, said the study showed there was clear link between childhood disadvantage and poor adult health outcomes.
However under cross-examination he said there was no evidence that when incomes rose in disadvantaged families, the previous negative effects of poverty were reversed.
CPAG has the support of the Human Rights Commission, while the Crown Law Office will present the Government's case.
The complaint was first laid with the Human Rights Commission in 2002.
The hearing is expected to last four weeks.
Speaking ahead of the hearing this morning, Prime Minister Helen Clark said today the in-work payment was there to ensure people were better off when they went to work.
"The best form of social security is a job," she said on TV One's Breakfast programme.
"We don't want to do anything that would stop the movement of beneficiaries back to work.
"The number on the DPB (Domestic Purposes Benefit) has been falling since Working for Families came in because people are better off."
- NZPA
