135 000 children in Poverty isn’t a success
MSD shows that children in poverty has dropped slightly…
Child Poverty Action Group (CPAG) welcomes the findings in the latest MSD Child Poverty Report showing that material hardship rates for many children had improved between 2013-21, thanks to government measures, rising employment rates, improving wages and the growing number of private charities.
…I’m sorry but as far as I am concerned, 135 000 children in poverty is nothing to celebrate for the following reasons.
- Firstly why is it always a focus on children in poverty? Our neoliberal mythology states all success is individual meaning all failure is personal as well, so if adults are in poverty, fuck them! We have 135 000 kids in poverty, but we also have about 700 000 adults living in poverty as well but there is no sympathy for them, only the little children.
- Secondly when we are spending 1million a day to kettle beneficiaries and these children into dangerous Motels, that is not a success.
- Thirdly, we are spending a billion dollars per year on consultants while 135 000 kids live in poverty so don’t fucking tell me we don’t have money to help them!
- Fourthly, none of the recommendations of the Welfare Advisory Group have been adopted making this exercise merely a bureaucratic counting job, not a do anything about the problem job!
All we have is a counting ‘wellness’ exercise with no actual focus on lifting these people’s standard of living.
All MSD have done here is successfully count misery with no way to actually deal with the poverty they are counting!
Yay?
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“All MSD have done here is successfully count misery with no way to actually deal with the poverty they are counting!”
The survey only covered people in private accommodation prior to the COVID pandemic so how successfully MSD counted misery is debatable and even the headline of ‘improvement’ outside of the limited survey group may be misleading. For example NOT including families living in motels is strange oversight. Surely living in motels, garages and cars is the sharpest of the sharp end of child poverty and those numbers have all gone up.
This feels like a political release for the optics of ‘good news’. It is hard to believe a limited pre-covid survey is representative of the situation today.
CPAG says “the true extent of child poverty in Aotearoa is likely to be much worse than portrayed”.
https://www.cpag.org.nz/media-releases/ministry-of-social-development-msd-child-poverty-report-2022-highlights-need-to-support-struggling-families
These children are mostly born into poverty .Surely the parents need to be helped to stop having children they cannot afford until they can afford them .If we do not act then the circle will continue.
There is always an element of society who seem to have no issue with being impoverished, providing the state provides for them. Having said that, turning the great ship of John’s and Bill’s beloved low wage economy will take some time.
“Instead of war on poverty. They got a war on drugs so the police can bother me.”
From the song ‘Changes’ by Tupac Shakur