KEY POINTS:
I took an 8-year-old to the movies last week for the first time in his life. He couldn't take the grin off his face. You would have thought he'd come from another planet the way he looked at everything.
And, in a way, he had. He comes from
a more hazardous world than the one my children inhabit. His family, mum, dad and an aunt had just moved into a small $280 a week 3-bedroom unit in Otara which, despite the leaky bathroom and other problems, seemed almost luxurious after months of sharing a house with another family. They have furniture donated by friends and relatives, including a television and heater, which they don't turn on because power is too expensive. They don't buy fresh fruit and vegetables. They sometimes go without meals.
How did they get themselves into this situation? Bad choices? We'd like to think so, many of us.
But until last year, both his parents were working and feeling hopeful about the future. Then his father was diagnosed with cancer (no thanks to the GP who kept giving him painkillers despite his symptoms) and their life changed. His mother had to stop work to look after his father, and now most of their money is spent on petrol they can't afford to drive him to Auckland Hospital each day for treatment. Each time they call an ambulance, they're charged $67.50, which they're paying off a little at a time. Little by little, they're falling behind.
We know what poverty looks like when we see it in the swollen bellies of starving children in far-off places. But poverty in a rich country like New Zealand is a more complicated, more academic affair.
Which might be why our concern for poor children seems somewhat lukewarm. It's not that we don't care. It's just that we're not close enough to see it, those of us who might be in a position to make a difference. It's hard to be moved by a line on a graph below which, we're told, tens of thousands of faceless children have fallen.
You'd have to be someone like Innes Asher, a professor of paediatrics at Auckland University and paediatrician at Starship hospital, to feel some urgency.
Dr Asher is one of the authors of a major report by Child Poverty Action Group, called Left Behind: How Social and Income Inequalities Damage New Zealand Children, and if she seems outraged by the Third World diseases she's seeing in our rich nation, it's because she has a front-row seat. She's at a loss to know why our policymakers aren't as worried about this national scandal as she is.
The report calls for a commitment to end child poverty by 2020, and one of its most persuasive arguments is the high cost of inaction. It isn't rocket science. What we don't spend on taking care of all children now, we'll end up spending many times over for years to come.
We're already paying in high rates of child hospitalisation for many preventable diseases. The rates rose rapidly after the 1991 benefit cuts, remain high by OECD standards, and haven't fallen back to pre-1991 levels.
It's not that the Government hasn't tried, as the report acknowledges. Working for Families has lifted many children out of poverty, though perhaps not as many as claimed. There's no agreed poverty line in New Zealand, so one measure has child poverty falling an estimated 70 per cent since 2000, and another - the more generally accepted 60 per cent of median household income - puts it at only 30 per cent.
The Ministry of Social Development says 150,000 children were in significant or severe hardship in 2004. CPAG says little has changed for the children who've been left behind - particularly those 212,000 children who miss out on extra money because their parents are on benefits of some kind.
What's to be done? An adequate income would be a start, as well as valuing parenting above paid work and tax reform. In a society as unequal as ours, poverty and its solutions become more complex.
In the last two decades of the 20th century we had the fastest growth in income and wealth inequality in the OECD - a gap that, according to a growing body of evidence, harms our society and our most vulnerable children.
In his book The Impact of Inequality, social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson showed why, no matter how rich a country is, it would be sicker, more unhappy, more crime-ridden and less trusting if the gap between rich and poor grows too wide.
The more unequal we become as a society, the more segregated and divided. We can't hope for social cohesion in a society where people don't feel we're in the same boat, let alone the same ocean.
Inequality hurts us all, and even if it's someone else's child growing up in our poorest, most hazardous neighbourhoods, we all end up paying in the end. It's possible to close the gap and wipe out child poverty - but politicians will need a little encouragement from the rest of us to try harder.
