KEY POINTS:
One of my father's favourite stories is how he furnished our first real home in New Zealand on next-to-nothing ("next-to-nothing" being my description of the wages he earned working as a storeman and cleaner in Wellington).
We had been in the country a year when we moved into
a brand new state house in Porirua. We thought it very flash - but we had almost no furniture to speak of. So my father swallowed his pride and went, cap in hand, to a large furniture store. He approached a salesman and told him what he wanted to buy and what he could afford to pay each month. The salesman told him what the minimum repayments were; he was sorry, but my father wouldn't qualify. My father asked, respectfully, to see his boss.
The boss listened quietly as my father told him about the new house with no furniture, his young family, and the amount of money he'd be able to pay. Then he asked my father what he needed. We got a lounge suite, beds, kitchen table and chairs, and even a TV. It took nearly 10 years to pay it off - mostly because my father was given the time to pay off what he could, when he could.
We remember that man fondly, though it's been nearly 40 years. He's one of the "good people" who made a difference in our lives; like the minister who brought us groceries whenever he visited - the equivalent, I suppose, of today's food parcels.
We were the working poor, in many ways not too different from today's working poor. We had no money, or time. My parents worked several jobs; my mother at night; my father during the day. When my younger brother started school, it was my sister, just a few years older, who enrolled him. Not because my mother didn't care, but because she was too exhausted from the night job and she had small children still at home. We seldom ate fresh vegetables; once a week Mum would splash out on a box of apples, and it would be gone two days later. We lived on the cheapest cuts of meat and fish, which today are no longer cheap. When we were old enough, we fixed our own breakfasts, and if there was nothing for lunch, I'd trek home for a bowl of cornflakes.
We were poor in a New Zealand where inequality wasn't nearly as pronounced as it is today. Most of our problems could have been fixed by a very large pay rise, and while that's still true for many poor people today, it seems to me that this country has become much more inhospitable to poor people.
We lived, I think, in a more caring New Zealand then.
International research shows that, the more inequality there is in a society, the higher the levels of poverty. Why that should be so is the subject of ongoing debate, but it may be that one of the reasons is the diminished ability of the very rich, and even the middle-class, to understand the struggles of those whose realities are so far removed from their own.
As Professor Adrian Sinfield, emeritus professor of social policy at the University of Edinburgh, told a House of Commons inquiry into poverty in Scotland last month: "In those countries where inequality has widened it becomes more difficult to tackle issues of poverty and deprivation, partly because of the social distance. People just do not believe others are so poorly off."
Sinfield pointed to anecdotal research done with bankers and businessmen, who thought the average weekly wage was twice what it actually was. "They had very little idea how far others were behind."
And so it is in this country. While we quibble about how poor the poor really are, foodbanks continue to do brisk business and children fall further behind.
It hasn't helped that the rich, as the late Anthony Sampson, author of the ground-breaking "The Anatomy of Britain", wrote in 2004, "feel much less need than their predecessors to account for their wealth, whether to society, to governments or to God".
"Their attitudes and values are not seriously challenged by anyone. The respect now shown for wealth and money-making has been the most fundamental change in Britain over four decades."
Billionaires like Warren Buffett, who acknowledge that society is responsible for much of his wealth, seem to be in the minority. He's pledged to give away most of his billions and says he'll leave only a few hundred thousand each to his children, taking his lead, it seems, from Andrew Carnegie, a poor Scottish immigrant turned billionaire who gave away $350 million during his lifetime.
Carnegie's 1889 "Gospel of Wealth" held that rich men had a responsibility to give "for the general good". He approved of governments "taxing estates heavily at death" by which "the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life"; and disapproved of rich men leaving vast fortunes to their children, or waiting until they died to give their money to charity. That only showed, he said, that they would have taken it with them if they could.
Carnegie recognised that giving wisely was as challenging as making money. Givers can't help unless they understand the nature of the problem, and can't assume that there's a one-size-fits-all solution.
Which is where John Key went wrong with Wesley Primary. The principal's rejection of free muesli bars wasn't about political interference but the understandable reluctance of parents to be labelled as failures. Particularly when they're not.
Social workers and anti-poverty campaigners say that the only way to truly wipe out poverty is through massive policy changes, requiring a shift in public attitudes and understanding of the problem.
But in the meantime, they'll take help where they can get it.
