Opinion: The Cure Kids’ 2023 State of Child Health Report makes for embarrassing and uncomfortable reading, the sort of report you might expect to come from a so-called third world country. But this is New Zealand, and this “report card” into the state of health among our young people is so shameful, so troubling and so distressing that it almost needs to come with its own health warning.
When it comes to sickness - respiratory conditions, rheumatic fever and rheumatic heart disease, skin infections, dental disease, and mental health – this snapshot shows our poorest kids are suffering more than ever.
Pasifika children are 115 times more likely, and Māori children 46 times more likely, to be hospitalised with acute rheumatic fever compared to their European counterparts; hospitalisation rates for respiratory conditions in children under one year have increased by 44% during the past two decades.
It’s an understatement to say the report is a black mark against us, and it’s not rocket science to work out why we’re seeing these results.
These are diseases of poverty, and we’ve created the environment for these diseases to take hold and thrive. Blame poor housing – housing with weathertightness issues, damp, mouldy and leaking. We know the story. Blame overcrowded housing.
For decades, the powers-that-be allowed housing to be built for our lowest income Kiwis - whether Māori moving to cities or Pasifika immigrants coming to New Zealand for work – which is cold, prone to dampness and because of this, quite frankly, dangerous. That includes state housing as well as private stock.
When I worked in Wellington, I rented houses in Mt Victoria, Thorndon and Karori; all were cold, none were insulated. I doubt any would get close to passing a rental housing WOF today. And would I bring kids up in any of those places? You’ve got to be kidding. All my suits went mouldy in each of those houses, but the Thorndon one was by far the worst. In fact, it was so freezing that even when burglars broke in they were quick to leave.
As a country, we really only started to address this from 2009 onwards with an insulation scheme put forward by the Green Party that was initially seen as quite alternative. It’s more standardised and normal now, but in many case the damage has already been done.
Until these standards were put in place, we had no idea how cold we really were or what kind of long-term damage was being done to our health. It reminds me of an experience I had when I worked for the Holmes Show. Today, the accepted “gold standard” temperature for a house is 20 degrees but back then, I met an insulator who insulated walls by pumping foam through small holes. He took me to a flat in Mt Eden. It was 8 degrees inside the house. It was winter and it was warmer standing on the street corner.
Sure, some of our older housing stock had “great bones” but, without insulation anywhere and often built to face south, no fat. I’ve written about the cost of housing and in some cases – far too many – that’s forced families to cram together, sleeping side be side, which further encourages diseases of poverty.
It’s taken 25 years since Helen Clark’s Labour government began insulating state housing. Labour’s Healthy Homes scheme, introduced in 2017 under National, brought minimum heating standards for rental homes. Yet, there’s still a way to go and continuing debate about the cost of it all. Along the way, countless billions have been spent on initiatives like paid parental leave, free doctors’ visits for kids, 20 hours free early childhood education, lunches in schools, breakfast in schools, milk in schools, subsidised after school care, and significant lifts in the minimum wages.
But none of it seems to have kept pace with the cost of living, so we still see the diseases and health conditions you’d expect in far less prosperous and stable countries. I can only imagine what the report might say if the measures outlined above hadn’t been taken – most of them hard fought for – but the rising cost of power will now be taking a toll.
There’s one piece of good news, though. We’ve got the Rheumatic Fever Roadmap 2023-28 as an action plan and its authors say if we’re vigilant about this, and stick to the plan, we can get on top of it. Let’s hope it’s a success story; we could do with one.
Which brings me to the Cure Kids’ report findings about mental health. In 2022/23, 21% of young people aged 15-24 reported psychological distress compared to 5% in 2011/12. That’s a three-fold increase in just over a decade.
Maybe that’s because it is now more acceptable and there’s more encouragement to talk about mental health, which is how it should be rather than being told to “harden up” and pretend nothing is wrong.
Whatever the reason, our young people could do with some good news, something to give them encouragement for the future. So, let’s do the right thing by our kids. They deserve better than this. It’s happening on our watch, so let’s make more of a concerted effort to stop the bickering and the cost cutting, and put the time, effort, energy and, yes, money into making it right. Another 25 years of the same results is simply unacceptable.
