Child poverty in New Zealand

How political polls in prime-time + no serious political debate in prime-time = catwalk values and dumbed-down voters

Is John Key such an inspirational leader that he deserves to enjoy the support of 57% of New Zealand voters? Is Phil Goff such a hopeless leader that he deserves the support of only 8% of New Zealand voters? Has the National Party’s record in office been so impressive that it deserves to enjoy the support of 56% of New Zealand voters, including one might surmise, a significant number of Labour defectors? And has the Labour opposition been so feeble that it deserves the support of only 30% of New Zealand voters?

Well, if the polls are right – and there is no great difference between one and another – then the answer to all of these questions would seem to be Yes. But are they right? The extremity of their findings – the adulation of John Key and the seeming invisibility of Phil Goff; National having twice as much support as Labour – seems curious, given the parlous state of the economy, the high level of unemployment and the near-Third-World conditions in which so many of our citizens, both adults and children, are currently living.

Brian Edwards raises a question that is worth asking in this blog: why is the National government receiving so much support under economic conditions which for one in four children mean living in poverty?

The notion of poverty is contentious in New Zealand. This is perhaps why the debate is failing to gain traction. One only had to watch Back Benchers the other night to see the crux of the debate in action - it is difficult for New Zealanders to call their own poor, in comparison with global conditions. These are, after all, the global poor that most in this country are aware of who pick their tea, make their shoes, and sew their designer brands. This is hardly surprising considering that national debates have erupted over the last few weeks over Adidas jumpers costing $220 when they cost $8 to make; we are now in the kind of globalized world where we are aware of global inequality, and the contrast between our own kids and the images that we see on TV often leads people to overlook the poverty in our own society.

While the National government has made cuts to early childhood education and is placing increasing pressure on beneficiaries as a result of the plan to get 100,000 beneficiaries into work, the effects of the quite serious poverty that affects one in four children in New Zealand seems to be hardly making its mark in the mainstream media, which tends to focus on upbeat stories that boost ratings or appeal to the demographics with disposable income that can be sold on to advertisers. The 25% of children that are in poverty are read through the lens of crime statistics in this environment, which tends to reinforce narratives that position the threat of poverty as one that can be individually sold through effort, as foretold in John Key's own rags to riches story, or as one that is not a white problem. This is not to say that National have not made some important incentives towards reducing child poverty - whanau ora is one - but that by and large, these concessions have been made under the pressure of supply and demand agreements, and lack overall organization and cohesiveness. To put it bluntly, it is difficult to construct cohesive social policy when Key has to run the gambit between the hard right elements of his party who believe in minimizing government intervention and the appeal to ideas of social justice that must be made in order to appease the so-called centre ground.

The research that is emerging on poverty in this country is very clear: it does exist, regardless of whether the poverty is relative in global terms. People who are in poverty are defined as those that earn 60% less than the median income. A UN Committee Report on the Rights of the Child found that cuts in early childhood education were having a significant impact on our appalling levels of child poverty. We have made headlines in Australia for ranking 28th out of 30 in the OECD in the Every Child Counts report. We spend only 1.5% of our GDP on social services for the early days of life. As Executive Director of UNICEF in New Zealand Dennis McKinlay argues, "New Zealand spends $US14,600 ($NZ17,500) per child whilst, in comparison, Scandinavian countries spend $US50,000 per child under six. Other countries, like the Netherlands, spend less but have better outcomes. The stark reality is that poor outcomes for children are costing New Zealand $NZ6 billion per year in areas such as health, welfare services, crime and justice."

Take for example the Children's Social Monitoring Group's Report that was released yesterday, which found that:

In New Zealand, children and young people living in more deprived areas experience significantly worse health outcomes across a range of measures (e.g. infant mortality, hospital admissions for infectious and respiratory diseases, non-accidental injuries) [1]. Growing up in a low income family also increases the risk of longer term negative outcomes, such as leaving school without formal qualifications and economic inactivity.

Similarly, Dr Elizabeth Craig highlighted the links between child poverty and health outcomes yesterday.

Child health and poverty linked: study

As the economic downturn progresses in New Zealand, hospital admissions for children with poverty-related conditions such as asthma, pneumonia and skin infections has increased, Dr Elizabeth Craig, of the University of Otago, says.

"We've got to really look at the impact our economic environment has on our kids," the head of the university's Children and Youth Epidemiology Service said yesterday.

She was commenting on the Children's Social Monitor's 2011 update which is to be released today at a public forum at the University of Otago in Wellington.

Dr Craig said they could not prove the uncertain economic times were the cause of the hospital admissions as the data provided was anonymous, but it was "concerning".

While the rapid increases in children's hospital admissions for "socioeconomically sensitive" medical conditions seen during 2007 to 2009 appeared to have slowed, rates rose further in 2010, with 4890 extra admissions per year compared with 2007.

It is costing us socially and economically to have these levels of poverty. As Professor Innes Ashir, the head of the Department of Paediatrics at the University of Auckland highlights in her open letter to the Ministerial Group of Welfare Reforms, the current policies are punitive on solo parents whose children already face many challenges. The equation is simple: penalize parents and you will pass on the stress to their children. Reducing the threshold for abatement of earnings to $20 as proposed by the Welfare Working Group will mean that for every $100 a parent earns, they will take home $40 (ibid). Perhaps the most telling social statistic is that New Zealanders are only 6th in the OECD with the percentage of the working population in paid work (ibid), meaning that the myth that parents are in this situation to breed and out of generations of welfare dependence is a damaging one.

Child poverty is a serious problem that affects every thread of our social fabric and must be addressed through a cohesive approach. Labour intends to establish a Children's Commissioner if elected (I have to agree with Annette King on this one that it seems ridiculous that we have a Gambling Commissioner and not someone who represents the rights of our children), Mana intends to address poverty more generally, but it is the Greens in this instance that have the most comprehensive social policy for lifting 100,000 kids out of poverty. ACT have some policies that, while arguably well meaning in nature (establish mentors, etc), work to further extend the current National government's raison d'être of penalizing parents for their inability to find work. Whatever your perspective, it is clear that there are serious social issues that deserve discussion.

A new Australasian wave of terror for refugees?

NZ facing threat of refugee boats: Key

New Zealand is not prepared to extend the number of refugees it accepts and needs to address the increasing risk of refugee boats reaching our shores, says Prime Minister John Key.

Mr Key yesterday said he had discussed with new Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard the possibility of creating a "regional processing centre" in the Pacific region.

East Timor President Jose Ramos-Horta has also been included in the discussions - fuelling expectations the centre would be in his country.

Speaking in South Korea yesterday, Mr Key said New Zealand's interest in the proposal was partly due to the prospect of boatloads of asylum seekers arriving in New Zealand.

With only a week or so in power it is interesting to see how quickly Key is cutting to the geopolitical chase with Gillard, this time proposing regional processing centres for Australasia. Key's future imaginings of "I see boat people" are a very real concern, but the proposed alliance with Australia marks an abrupt change in policy from the Clark era. Australia is not exactly a great bastion for human rights - the way they sent the military in to deal with the Aborigines just a few years ago is a great example, or Labour's plans for more desert prisons following overcrowding in their Christmas Island facilities.

The politics of scarcity in an increasingly globalized world are problematic, but inevitably for first world nations tend to result in an attempt to sweep people under the carpet in the most terrifying ways. We should be incredibly wary of any proposed alliance with Australia, a country that has a record of keeping people and children in desert prisons. These people are refugees not criminals, and the impact of these detentions on people's mental wellbeing is horrific. Take the example of the Iranians who, without hope in 2004 at their detention in a desert prison, went on a hunger strike sewing their lips together to refuse food. Or the examples of children bashing their heads continuously against walls, suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from their imprisonment. In many ways, the current refugee processing centres in New Zealand are traumatic for refugees, who languish without certainty over their future having fled terrible situations in their home nations, but nothing compared to the 'out of sight, out of mind' policies of Australia.

When Key says these centres are unlikely to be in New Zealand, we should be worried. There are debates in Australia at the moment over whether these detention centres should be on domestic territory, which leads me to think that the proposed Australasian centre would be outsourced to a poor nation state, as happened with the boat people from the ship that Australia just allowed to sink off its shores in 2002. Rescued by the Norwegian freighter the TAMPA, this incident sparked international controversy over Australia's refusal to take refugees, and the implementation of a 'Pacific Solution' that saw Nauru and Papua New Guinea being paid off to take these people in detention centres in an exchange of aid for refugees. While under the Clark government New Zealand took many of these refugees, saving them from the distress of being trapped in between borders, many who were stuck developed severe post-traumatic stress disorder, in an event that was widely criticized by human rights proponents and the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

While the influx of refugees across borders is a problem that many nations are struggling with - take Obama's calls for vigilance over the 11 million illegal immigrants in the US over the last week - I want to highlight the following caveats in dealing with this issue in such an inhumane manner:

1. As security reports for Australia and the US highlight in looking at the impact of climate change on the geopolitical enforcement of borders, we are part of the problem in generating a mass of refugees. We do consume more than these nations and in some cases have been linked to nations that have had a role in destabilizing the states these people come from.

2. People come to countries like Australia and New Zealand as they believe in our records for democracy and human rights. That we would even consider participating with Australia in a system that treats people in this manner raises serious questions about what we stand for as a nation, and also could potentially contribute to further security threats in the future as word of our treatment is circulated around other nations and we become increasingly aligned with Australia and the US in the global imaginary. (For all of Clark's faults, you would have to agree that she was someone acutely aware of this paradigm, which can be seen in the way she distanced New Zealand from Australia in this discourse). If, as some commentators are saying, this detention centre is likely in East Timor, then I would like to draw your attention to the fact that there is something very ethically wrong with placing a detention centre in a country where we have ignored the Indonesian genocide of East Timorese people and given its political record, can hardly be called a bastion of human rights.

3. Treating refugees in this manner might be a political drawcard for nationalism, but it hides the very real costs that are created through this maltreatment. Basically, people are much easier to integrate into society if they are kept happy, and traumatizing them creates a much larger burden on the society where they end up. The costs of keeping people under the Pacific Solution was estimated by the Democrats at more than a billion from 2001 to 2006, so exporting them to poor nation states can hardly be called a viable solution.

This is an area of immigration we need to keep an eye on; regardless of your perspective it creates ramifications that affect us all. If we are to go with Australia, which I really think we should not, it is our responsibility as citizens to ensure we do not participate in the kind of policy that criminalizes and destroys some of the world's most vulnerable people.

When businesses make people starve

Dead Children Linked to Aid Policy in Africa Favoring Americans

The bag of green peas, stamped “USAID From the American People,” took more than six months to reach Haylar Ayako.

For seven of his grandchildren, that was a lifetime.

They died as the peas journeyed from North Dakota to southern Ethiopia. During that time, the American growers, processors and transporters that profit from aid shipments were fighting off a proposal before Congress to speed deliveries by buying more from foreign producers near trouble spots. As a result of legal mandates to buy U.S. goods, the world’s most generous food relief program wasn’t fast or flexible enough to feed the starving in Ethiopia’s drought-ridden South Omo region this year.

“I am so grieved that I lost those children,” said Ayako, a Bena tribesman, speaking in his local Omotic language. “They died of the food shortage.”

The dry peas Ayako took home almost eight weeks ago had traveled more than 12,000 miles (19,300 kilometers) by rail, ship and truck, starting 15 miles south of the Canadian border with their harvest in August 2007. Stops included Lake Charles, Louisiana; Djibouti, the small African country whose capital on the Gulf of Aden serves as a port for food aid; and Nazareth, Ethiopia, two hours south of Addis Ababa, the capital. Warehouse stays punctuated each leg until the peas finally arrived in the village of Shala-Luka.

A great essay from Bloomberg.com and a must-read for all those that think putting social needs into the hands of business directly translates into efficiency. Aid taking six months to reach Ethiopia because of the intervention of big business, whose primary motivations are profit rather than people. Interestingly, the true criminals in this case are not the Government, who under a proposal by Bush tried to move towards at least 25% of the food aid being locally-produced, but the big business lobbyists who moved to stop this. While the story characterises this aid as benefiting all Americans, the truth is that that it does not, the additional revenue gained from sending US-produced food only goes towards those who are siphoning off profit from the top of these companies. Like Lehman's apparent remorse for shareholders melting away in the shadow of the half a billion dollars of profits he took from the company, ADM, Cagill and Bunge do little to spread the wealth to those everyday Americans now living in Grapes of Wrath tent cities across the United States, having lost their jobs in the quest to cut down on costs by moving production off-shore and their homes through foreclosures.

International aid policies have often been devastating for developing nations, such as the IMF's knowledge of the impending 1965 Indonesian massacre (see Pilger 2001), the flooding of Uganda with American rice which undercuts those living on subsistence living, or the outrageously stupid IMF conditions for Bolivian aid in 2000 - aid in exchange for the privatisation of water in Cochabamba - which led to widespread riots (banning people below the poverty line from collecting rainwater has to be one of the most cruel policies ever).

The article goes on to detail the level of lobbying these companies do and how the donations of aid is seen as a cash cow for US industry hoping to capitalise on the poor. While some will say that these Africans are lucky to see the aid that they do, the story has a fable for us in little old New Zealand about the dangers of letting business intervene in the administration of the state. We should be seriously questioning the assumption that privatisation is the equivalent of good governance that many people have lapped up. Both state control and business control have their foibles, although certainly both approaches can learn off each other. Before we let Key privatise our prison system, our health care system and our screens, we should look at changing the guidelines that position profit as the central goal and ensure that business has learnt enough from models of state governance to be able to look after people before their pockets. Blind faith in either system is just as ideologically biased.