[ad_1]
OPINION: Despite the 2017 Labor-led government taking power with a mandate to fight Aotearoa New Zealand’s abysmally high child poverty rate, only incremental progress has been made.
The percentage of children living in poor households decreased only slightly, from 16.5% in June 2018 to 14.9% in June 2019.
That equates to roughly one in seven children (168,500) living in poverty, according to an official measure used in New Zealand and internationally: households earning less than 50 percent of median family income available before housing costs (BHC ).
Before Covid-19, the government was projected to be within the range of its BHC poverty goal by 2021. It was also projected to meet its post-housing cost (AHC) goal (a measure of poverty based on income family with standard housing cost estimates taken into account).
The reduction targets declared by the government are 5% of children in poverty according to the BHC measure, and 10% using the AHC measure, by 2028. The somewhat stagnant trend lines from 2017 to 2019, however, suggest that the “transformational” policies promised in 2017 were still needed.
Te Kāea
The General Manager of Feed the Need is calling on the government to establish a fund for the central school feeding program to address child poverty. School Food Advocate Laurie Wharemate-Keung Honored with the New Zealand Order of Merit
READ MORE:
* New Zealand Initiative calls for renewal of ‘non-scientific’ curriculum and child-led philosophy
* ‘Children Need More Than Two Minutes of Noodles’: Life for Preschoolers Surrounded by Poverty
* Mom alone cannot claim the benefit because her ex-partner arrived first
* Election 2020: National promises to break the cone of silence around child abuse
The impact of Covid-19
Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, and the government delivered some of those transformative policies in the form of both temporary and permanent economic responses.
Families with children who were dependent on income assistance received an income increase through temporary increases in winter energy payments and a longer-term increase in benefit payments. For those who lost their jobs, the Covid-19 relief payment was much more generous than the normal benefit for job seekers.
These changes certainly made a difference in the daily lives of low-income families. The Treasury estimated that this short-term safety net, along with the full implementation of tax credits through the family package, meant that the government was still on track to meet its child poverty targets in 2021.
Unfortunately, that stagnant pre-pandemic trend line is now predicted to move higher after 2021. The increase consists of children already in families that depend on an income support system that keeps them below the threshold. poverty, and those who are recently in poverty due to their parents’ work or loss of income.
In fact, our research shows that families with children were more likely to experience an economic shock during confinement.
Uneven distribution of the economic shock
The data is based on our survey of people’s experiences during and after the lockdown (March-April 2020). It highlights the disproportionate impact that the economic crisis is having on families with children in general and on low-income working families in particular.
For families with children where at least one adult was working prior to closing, 51 percent experienced an economic impact due to someone in the household losing their job or some income. This compares with a rate of 44 percent for the general population.
In addition to the financial impact, the parents of households that experienced an economic shock reported more negative feelings during the day, such as depression, stress and worry. Those feelings seemed to linger beyond the blockade.
While all parents reported that their sense of well-being improved moderately during the first return to alert level one (July 2020), that spike was not as high for those who had experienced an economic shock during the shutdown.
There was nothing random about which families were hit hardest: 60% of working families living below median family income (roughly $ 50,000 annually) experienced an economic impact compared to 45% of families in income brackets higher ($ 100,000 or more).
All working parents who reported an economic impact during confinement, regardless of household income, reported a decline in the way they rated their relationship with their family. However, for parents from lower-income households, this drop in family well-being was deeper than for higher-income families.
In summary, parents from low-income households were not only more likely to experience an economic impact, but that impact had a greater impact on their family’s well-being.
Temporary policies must become permanent
When we look at the Treasury’s child poverty projections, it is important to place them in the context of these findings.
Families who worked and just managed are more likely to suffer now and potentially in the future. That applies even more to those who were already struggling before the pandemic and who may have a harder time being part of the economic recovery.
Even the most optimistic child poverty projection, which shows that the percentage of AHC children in poverty returning to early 2020 levels by 2024, can be misleading.
House prices (and presumably rents) have continued to rise and are expected to outpace wage growth. In fact, the statistical assumption built into the AHC poverty measure is that families spend approximately 25% of their disposable income on rent, an unrealistically small proportion of the financial resources for low-income families.
If there’s a silver lining, it’s that the government’s short-term policy responses to the pandemic, like the Covid-19 aid and wage subsidy program, gave us a glimpse of what transformative policies might look like: a network of Responsive security benefits maintaining the financial well-being of families at an acceptable rate.
However, without more permanent change, those growing projections of child poverty will become our sad reality.
Kate C. Prickett is director of the Roy Mckenzie Center for the Study of Families and Children at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington.
This article originally appeared on The Conversation. Read the original article.
