Category: Welfare Reform
Authored by Jonathon Boston and Simon Chapple, Child Poverty in New Zealand was published on June 18, 2014. Two major reasons for child poverty are presented: Child poverty is a result of inadequate benefits, and Child poverty is the result of unemployment.
Reforming the country's failing welfare system has been a priority for John Key’s Government. It was clear there was a serious problem with welfare when, during the boom years of 2004-07, 15 percent of employers found it difficult to fill basic jobs in labouring, production and transport, despite 10 percent of the working age population being on a benefit.
Those who have been on the government’s existing Work Programme, but who have not found a job after two years, will have to accept a work placement in the community, visit a Job Centre every day or take part in further training.
There is a real problem with welfare when a country that has more than 11 percent of its working age population dependent on benefits, has to import unskilled labour. Statistics show net migration to New Zealand is at a 10 year high. Canterbury was the second most popular destination, with a net gain of 5,100 migrants - many of whom were labourers going to Christchurch for the rebuild.
Since the National government took office late 2008, welfare reform has formed a large legislative programme much of which has now been completed. It is perhaps too soon to expect benefit numbers to start reducing, complicated by the global financial crisis driving up unemployment in 2009-10.
If Labour and the Greens - and all of the other advocacy groups that are rallying behind the child poverty cause - really cared about those children who are living in poverty, their primary target would be families on welfare, rather than working families, since all of the evidence points to children living in single parent families that are reliant on welfare in the long term, as being at the greater risk of deprivation and poor outcomes.
Something about the way the Left is presenting the ‘child poverty’ problem doesn't stack up. When interviewed, Green co-Leader Metiria Turei repeatedly stresses that 2 in 5 of officially poor children come from working homes. But for Turei and other anti-poverty advocates to continually highlight this group when attempting to influence voters implies there is something less laudable about being benefit-dependent. Not a sentiment normally associated with the Left.
The rate of child abuse in New Zealand is a national disgrace. According to the Department of Child, Youth and Family, in the year to June 2012, there were 152,800 recorded notifications of potential abuse against children. However, after removing duplicate notifications for the same children and Police family violence referrals, which require no further action, there were 95,532.
A recent Child Poverty Action Group report about child abuse claimed that, " ...the Ministry of Social Development and its predecessors have been researching and writing about child abuse for almost quarter of a century."
The welfare reforms that came into force this month have been described as the biggest changes to the benefit system since the original Social Security Act was passed into law in 1938. The underlying generosity of that scheme - which created a wide range of assistance measures including the Sickness, Invalids’, Unemployment, Emergency and Widows’ Benefits - is attributed as helping to keep Labour in power until 1949.
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