Luxon’s vision for our children
Waitangi Day speeches are meant to outline not just who we are, but who we are becoming. When the Prime Minister speaks about opportunity for “every Kiwi kid,” it invites scrutiny of whether government policy aligns with that promise — particularly for the children already living furthest from it.
Waitangi Day was described by our Prime Minister as a time ‘to reflect on the future we want for our country.’ Indeed, and that reflection must involve us all.
Luxon’s Promise of Opportunity
In his speech he set out his desire for New Zealand to be:
A country where every Kiwi kid, regardless of their background, grows up seeing huge opportunities right here at home – with schools teaching the basics brilliantly, a growing economy creating jobs and lifting incomes.
Fine words — but where is the plan to achieve them? Does he really and truly intend for every child to be included? Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.
Child Poverty by Policy Design
It flows then he should be concerned that the children with the poorest backgrounds and the ones furthest from his ideal dream are made even poorer by the design of policies endorsed by his government.
The Guardian recently identified the worsening of extreme poverty in the UK. They measure deepest poverty as incomes under the 40% after housing costs median income. Stats NZ produce the figures for New Zealand’s children and an update to the poverty stats below is due any day now. It can safely be predicted that the 2025 stats update will not improve the picture. Nor will this update reflect the worsening child poverty for 2025-2026 as that will not be reported until 2027.
Nearly a third of NZ children live in families whose income is inadequate for them to thrive, and one half of these is desperately poor i.e. under the very lowest poverty line.
How Working for Families Penalises the Poorest Children
Poverty by design perhaps? Working for Families (WFF) is the weekly payment made to the caregiver to assist low-income families with the cost of raising their children. But its very design excludes the worst-off families from the full benefits.
When parents are disabled or sick or unable to find paid work and need a welfare benefit, their children are further penalised by being denied at least $97.50 of WFF a week for 1-3 children and an extra $15 per child for larger families.
The policy design deliberately uses child poverty to incentivise the parents to get off a benefit.
And, confusingly, it doesn’t matter if the parents are doing their best to do some paid work. If they require a part benefit, the policy design does not reward parents’ paid work but punishes their children because it is not full-time.
Ironically Luxon also said he wants “A country where if you work hard and save hard, you can get ahead”.
The Poverty Trap for Working Families
Here’s another kicker for Luxon to ponder. It’s not just that ‘poverty by design’ affects those on benefits. Poverty by design is baked into the highly targeted nature of social assistance policies even for those not on benefits so that even when you work hard you simply cant get ahead, let alone save anything.
This poverty trap is real and dangerous to Luxon’s vision.
A Policy Fix That Matches the Rhetoric
- Give the full WFF to all low-income families without discrimination against the worst off.
- Lift the income threshold at which a family gets the full WFF to at least $60,000.
- Reduce the clawback of WFF for incomes above this new threshold from 27.5% to 20%.
- Pay for it by taking it (painlessly) from the very top end of NZ Super
Putting aside the strange idea of being able to reflect (look back up on, or put a mirror to) “the future”, it is also impossible to take a person who owns so many rental properties to talk about equal opportunity. He is also cis male Pakeha, and a religious extremist. I can only hang my head in shame at the illiterate leaders of our motu. They understand nothing of the past, are ignorant of the present, and will deny any of us “a future”
The biggest cause of poverty in NZ is the high cost of houses and rents.
The biggest cause of high house prices and rents is the regulatory constraints on building new housing and apartments, which have been in place for three decades.
Where are the Left’s joined-up, legislatively-drafted, ready-to-go reforms to free up housing supply and so lift the burden of high housing and rent costs from the poor?
So you are onboard for the resumption of Kiwibuild then Ada?
No, I’d like actual solutions, thanks for asking.
No its not it is totaly due to greed .
I see DR Timoti is wanting to be elected to parliament .He has a very compelling story as to why he should be elected ,but sadly he will be just another well meaning person with massive life experience who should be in government and driving change .He may well be elected ,but once in the sick system he will be shut down and sent to siberia of the back benches along side Brown Butter Bean another great person from south auckland .These two great humans should be part of a task force set up with members from ALL parties to tackle and eliminate poverty .
Until neoliberalism is derobed, defanged and dragged from its crypt along with the failed *pig farmer roger douglas who dropped neoiberalism on us as rogernomics to atone for the carnage he brought on our beautiful AO/NZ while we were too comfortable to need to look we’ll never be free of the effects of the disease he infected us with. We’ll never do as well, so to speak, as we should because of his dirt that must reamin buried.
To aid in a greater understanding of AO/NZ’s own particular iteration of neoliberalism read this book by George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison.
The Invisible Doctrine
The Secret History of Neoliberalism (& How It Came To Control Your Life)
Peter Hutchison George Monbiot
https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/the-invisible-doctrine-9781802062694
* By ‘farmer’ I mean he kept pigs in narrow cages in a huge, gloomy tin shed and artificially inseminated them then harvested the poor animals of their offspring.
Buy this book too by press photographer Geoff Dale:
Contains amazing images including of roger douglas standing in his pig shed smiling like a man no longer in possession of his conscience and the infamous photograph of Lange’s fish and chip chow down. ” Helen Clark, a later Labour Prime Minister, denounced Rogernomics as “a ghastly period” and led Labour back into power by abandoning its legacy.[113] However, political analysts suggest that she did not significantly alter the paradigm created by Rogernomics” and that’s why we’re enduring fucked.
So, as I constantly maintain; roger’s gone nowhere and should be in jail.
Not for the feint hearted.
https://phoenixbooksnz.com/products/press-pass-40-years-of-award-winning-press-photography-by-geoff-dale-signed-by-author
During his absence from national politics, Douglas held senior positions at a number of prominent companies, such as Ron Brierley’s BIL, which he briefly served as Executive Chairman.
Ron Brierly…? Ron Brierly…? Where have I heard that name before?
RNZ
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/544459/new-child-sex-offence-charges-for-disgraced-businessman-ron-brierley
do you really think we are going to study all your links? it takes long enough to read your posts.
No good blaming Luxon. It wasn’t long ago that Jacinda annointed herself Minister for Child Poverty and achieved &^%! all before running away.
How about asking some really difficult questions instead, say for example that single parent homes are actually a really bad idea and that perhaps state support for the traditional family was not such a bad idea after all. Or that green ideology actually makes us poorer and hits the poorest among us the hardest. Or that recreational drug liberalisation leads to serious mental illness, especially the young.
Not exactly thevussues de jour among the left I know but for those that genuinely care, as opposed to those who just want to ranr, surely worth debating nonetheless
Do we blame Luxon for high unemployment, homelessness, NZers fleeing for Australia, and poor race relations HEN or is that someone else’s fault ?
Hen, you say ‘How about asking some really difficult questions instead, say for example that single parent homes are actually a really bad idea and that perhaps state support for the traditional family was not such a bad idea after all.’
Most on the left would support the ideal of 2 loving parents, stable home, enough resources as good for children. The real world however is one where there is much severe family dysfunction, drug abuse, violence, sickness death lack of housing. Sole parenting can be a better way, or the only way for a sizeable group. they don’t need judgement.
Nevertheless, I agree we should not make the traditional intact families worse off by design. In welfare, the family gets a lower benefit than two singles and misses out on around $100 a week for their children- that is nuts.
At the same time of ensuring all poor children are adequately and fairly resourced we need well-funded wrap around services to ensure all children in sole or two parent families can thrive
‘
Lets just cut the bull shit finger pointing and get on with eliminating poverty for all .You can jump up and down about jacinda all you like at least she started us on the right path with well being budgets that took into account all kiwis needs .I and you know Luxon is sorted so he does not give a toss for our grandkids or even his own ,because he would no longer be sorted if we were all on the same level in the play ground .
Poverty is the scourge of NZ and we should hang our heads in shame that we have, and are still ,allow it to happen .Our obsession with owning more houses than the next fella has dragged NZ closer than ever to the cliff of destructive poverty .
Hear, hear GW
GW You are right and we need dramatic deliberative policy change such as I outlined here for children. Its not rocket science. No more reliance on growth and trickle down- it hasn’t worked before. Muldoon eliminated elder poverty in the 1970s with dramatic change to the pensions. Ruth Richardson did the reverse for children in the early 1990s. We have never recovered from that. We cant be happy with 160,000+ children under the lowest poverty line
You are on target when you say it is too easy to blame the current government whoever it is for a problem that has been around for many years.
Many of these children are born into poverty .So many time you see someone claiming life is hard and there is a new born in the picture with 3 plus other children. Birth control should be free and no child should be born who cannot be supported physically ,financially and emotionally. The benefit should be higher for families effected by unexpected illness or job lose and more controlled for those playing the system.
While I will give you the benefit of doubt and assume that you have worthy motives regarding children having supportive home environments the inevitable outcome from breeding only from the inbred rich would be a generation of children with lots of potentially harmful mutations due to a lack of genetic diversity. Its not that big a step from free contraception to compulsory abortion also so your selfish plans to control others instead of using our resources to provide for all is a slippery slope with negative results. While it would be great to only have stable 2 parent families for various reasons that doesn’t always happen so we should provide for those exceptions without encouraging it, maybe by treating real families better others will be encouraged to uphold traditional values.
In my case, I’m really fucking glad my useless father had no input into my life. He would have been an absolutely terrible role model.
My mother on the other hand, made me the person I am and we are mutually proud of each other.
Not all parents are worthy of the children they bring into the world.
I was lucky enough to have a good mother and father along with 3 brothers and 2 sisters and while my dad was dux of his high school my mum was a far better parent as Dad had a habit of thinking only of himself. They don’t smoke or drink also which makes family living a more peaceful experience. I can appreciate your experience and wanted to support those situations in my earlier comment while also encouraging decent relationships and not being judgemental.
Trev -are you consciously a eugenicist, or simply haven’t thought through the implications of what you are saying?
Good idea of some state support for all parents as they need it. And regular workshops on how to do things, with one a year at some outdoor recreation weekend for parent/s and children, well run and helpful and caring and fun. Life isn’t much fun these days. And the money-mad actually don’t want the poor to be happy, it just encourages them you know! And Plunket doing learning sessions on how to cope with various problems of children that age, and then further on when the child is a year older. Kids keep learning growing and changing, unlike our politicians; except they grow older, hoping to die in the saddle. Yeehah!
good reply Bonnie. we never talk that way about the old
yes families need all kinds of encouragement and your suggestions are great. But let’s make sure they have enough income support as the foundation. We do this for the old no questions asked and no moralising
That comparatively unlimited support for the elderly is the reason we can’t have nice things, like eliminating child poverty, or providing climate adaptation.
Also, we won’t be able to fund managed retreat.
yes families need all kinds of encouragement and your suggestions are great. But let’s make sure they have enough income support as the foundation. We do this for the old no questions asked and no moralising
As the proud child of a single mother, please go fuck yourself with your racially coded bullshit.
It belongs in the States along with ignorant grunters like you.
And remember, don’t forget to go fuck yourself.