KEY POINTS:
Church leaders say the economic crisis is an opportunity for New Zealanders to turn away from greed and give more time to their families.
The leaders of six mainstream churches - Anglicans, Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians and Salvation Army - have announced their own "summit" with their social
service agencies in Wellington to discuss the social impacts of the global recession on the same day as the Prime Minister's "jobs summit" in Manukau next Friday.
The acting president of their umbrella group the Council of Christian Social Services, Ruby Duncan, said a growing gap between rich and poor had helped to fuel the boom in property prices which led to the current bust when house prices became unsustainable.
"There is a consensus that we have been a bit greedy and individualistic. People have been out for what they can get and we haven't stopped to think about how getting what we want impacts on families, communities and society," she said.
"So for me there is an opportunity here to look at that and say, what does it take to have a healthy society?
"We don't want to go through this recession and come out worse off as a society. We want to come out healthier, having learned some things and realigned some of our values."
Catholic Bishop Peter Cullinane called for a return to "old-fashioned things like self-sacrifice instead of self-gratification".
"Happiness comes not from having more, but from being more," he said.
Anglican social justice commissioner Anthony Dancer said consumption - having things - had become "an abiding organising principle" of society.
"It has come to define us," he said.
"One of the dilemmas facing Western leaders is that evidence strongly suggests that in terms of the planet's future and social welfare we cannot continue to consume at the rate we are doing, but in terms of our economic systems built to nourish consumption and desire upon which many of our nations have come to rely, it would appear we cannot afford not to.
"What we need is to more actively nurture a culture and an economy of 'enough'."
Ruby Duncan, who works at the sharp edge of social problems at the Baptist Church's Iosis family counselling agency in Manurewa, said the house price boom was driven by people rich enough to buy investment properties - but the social price was paid by low-income families forced to work long hours to pay for their homes.
"The two-income family has become the norm just to survive, and that is a tragedy.
"We have supported work. We haven't supported family life."
The Council of Christian Social Services has told the Government in a briefing paper that welfare benefits and accommodation supplements should be raised to boost the incomes of the poorest tenth of the population.
The Government's own figures show that the real after-tax incomes of the poorest tenth did not improve at all in the 20 years up to 2007, while the real incomes of the richest tenth grew by more than 30 per cent.
"We say support families to be families, don't just support work," Ruby Duncan said.
"It's not just about people having money ... This is a time to look at what we value. Family really matters. We need to be putting time into relationships and into learning how to do those relationships well."
www.justiceandcompassion.org.nz
