Max Rashbrooke is a Wellington-based writer and public intellectual, with twin interests in economic inequality and democratic renewal. His book Too Much Money: How Wealth Disparities are Unbalancing Aotearoa New Zealand (Bridget Williams Books) was published in 2021.
For me and my family, the Christmas and New Year period is a time to gather, enjoy good food and reflect on the year’s blessings. For too many New Zealanders, though, poverty – and its resultant stress and dysfunction – can make this a sad and difficult time, much as it does at other points in the calendar.
My 2024 wish, therefore, is that we as a country take decisive action against hardship.
In the past decade, we have already made inroads. In 2013, about one child in five (20%) lived in a household that could not afford basic expenses like heating the house, visiting a doctor or buying decent clothes and shoes. That figure is now one in 10 (10%).
Under the Child Poverty Reduction Act, former PM Jacinda Ardern committed the country to halving that figure again by 2028, so that just one child in 20 (5%) lives in hardship. Christopher Luxon has agreed to keep that goal.
What are the causes of this poverty, in such a rich nation? While individual choices always matter, my work interviewing people who live in hardship suggests that their backgrounds, and the social forces that surround them, can leave them with few or no good choices. Poor physical and mental health, abuse in childhood, weak school results, limited skills, unhealthy housing, discrimination, and many other factors contrive to drag them (back) down into poverty, despite their best efforts.
Richie Poulton, the late director of the famed Dunedin Longitudinal Study, when asked by John Campbell to name the biggest factor limiting children’s chances of a healthy and happy adult life, replied simply: “Poverty.” He added: “You can’t really undo what happens during childhood.”
The international evidence shows clearly that raising family incomes has transformative effects. In US research, payments to poor families markedly lift their children’s health and earnings later in life. In British research, such payments close one-third of the gap in school results between poorer and richer kids.
So, we must do everything we can to remove the scourge of hardship. Four in 10 children in poverty have a parent in full-time work, so we need to lift wages. We also need to invest far more in helping beneficiaries retrain – some countries spend 10 times what we do – and better support them when they are going through tough times.
We need to build 43,000 more state houses to plug the shortfall that has built up since 1990, and enforce the Healthy Homes Standards, so that cold and damp housing no longer blights children’s lives.
We need to better support struggling low-decile schools and remove the cost barriers that stop poorer families getting health treatment. And we need to improve mental health services and addiction treatment options.
My hope is that we will, in 2024 and beyond, adopt all these measures, so that New Zealand becomes what we like to think it is, the best place in the world to raise a child – and so that the next Christmas, and every Christmas after that, is full of hope and joy not just for some of us, but for every New Zealander.
