Ardern Jacinda: Financial Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeArdern Jacinda: Financial Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 04 March 2014. Volume:696;Page:16287. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JACINDA ARDERN (Labour): It is my pleasure to take a short call on the estimates for social services. I think it is appropriate that we reflect on recent events in this portfolio. For the last few months the Government has been claiming that it has made progress on key indicators. When I say “key indicators” I do not actually mean child poverty necessarily because the Government has chosen not to make that a Public Service target. No child poverty has not been imbedded within the Government’s key goals for this portfolio. Instead it has decided to pick off things like immunisation insulation of housing and so on.No one is denying that they are important areas where we would like to see gains but it would be disingenuous to suggest that any of those do anything to make a nudge make a dent in the core issue of child poverty itself. But even then even though it is not a key goal of the Government to reduce child poverty it has still made a claim—in fact the Minister of Finance made the claim in the chair today—that that has been one of the key focuses of this Government. So says the Government that has spent probably the most substantive Government spend on tax breaks which did not positively affect those families. That Minister still tried to claim that at the fore of his thinking was child poverty and income inadequacy. How can that be? Where have we seen a dent in child poverty figures? The reality is that we have not.If you ask the Government what it has done on child poverty the one thing it continues to raise is that it is focused on moving people from benefits into work. Well that completely ignores the fact that two out of five of the children living in poverty—and that is probably likely to change based on the recalculations that are happening as we speak—are in the homes of the working poor. They are in families where the parents are fulfilling the social contract of old: if you work a 40-hour week you can provide for your family. It is not so. It is not so under this Government.We have a new class of working poor. The Government refuses—refuses—to address income inadequacy and as long as it does it will not make a dent in our child poverty statistics. In fact we know that the statistics are actually worse than we first thought. For a long time now we have been ashamed at the fact that we have 265000 children living in poverty. We now know as of a week ago that we have 285000 children in poverty. That is 27 percent of children in New Zealand. How do we know? Well we know that Treasury made a mistake. It double-counted the accommodation supplement. There are more families worse off than we first thought.But actually there is another devastating statistic that we have not placed enough emphasis on. There is an increase in the number of families who are living on not 60 percent of the median household income which is the general measure we tend to use but on 50 percent or less. That means the number of families living in severe poverty has increased from 12 percent to 14 percent. That is something that all of us should be worried about.What is the Government’s reaction to that? Well actually the Government has said that even then even though there are 20000 more children in poverty than it first thought it has still made good progress because it is fewer than in 2010 when we reached a ridiculous high of 300000 children in poverty—another new statistic based on the recalculation. So apparently we should celebrate that we have gone from absolutely dismal ridiculous failure to shameful failure. There is nothing to celebrate in any of those statistics.The fact remains that still not enough is being done by this Government to move away from the in-kind assistance that it has focused on and towards addressing systemic change. Everything that the Government has put out to try to step away from the fact that we have this now higher and more shameful child poverty statistic has been aboutWorking for Families. Government members say: “Look we’ve got Working for Families. That’s cushioned the recession.” and secondly “All this does is prove that the recession was worse than we thought.” Well I would like to challenge that. No one is doubting that the recession had an economic impact. No one is questioning that. But also on this side of the House our argument has been that it was in the Government’s power to do something that would actually change that and it did not.