The Children’s Commissioner says the latest report on child poverty reveals the country’s “national shame”.<\/p>\n
The Ministry of Social Development published its Child Poverty in New Zealand report on Thursday.<\/p>\n
It revealed a growing number of children in material hardship, reaching 13 percent between 2023 and 2024, up from 11 percent three years prior.<\/p>\n
Children’s Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad said the government was failing to protect the rights of the 170,000 children living in poverty right now, up by 47,500 in 2022.<\/p>\n
Achmad said the report “shines a light on what has become a national shame in our country”.<\/p>\n
New Zealand did better than the European Union average of 14 percent,.<\/p>\n
But it was overtaken by several other countries – Lithuania, Latvia, Italy, Portugal, and Cyprus – it had previously done better than,<\/p>\n
“New Zealand is a small, relatively rich country. It’s inexcusable for us not to be at the right end of these rankings internationally,” Achmad said.<\/p>\n
“What material hardship means, for example, is that we see children who are going hungry. They are cold because they are in severe housing deprivation.<\/p>\n
“They’re also experiencing preventable respiratory illnesses, which can actually lead to death and can have a lifetime impact on their health.”<\/p>\n
She said childhood poverty could have a lifelong impact on health, education and justice outcomes.<\/p>\n
“Preventing child poverty is absolutely urgent, because to not do so means that children are missing out on their basic rights in childhood.”<\/p>\n
Poverty in New Zealand was preventable but required bold cross-party action and clear policies, Achmad said.<\/p>\n
“We need to see policies that are going to prioritise children’s basic rights to things like housing and their health.”<\/p>\n
Achmad sent an open letter to party leaders earlier this week, calling for a commitment to a child poverty accord, to fight inequality.<\/p>\n
She said child poverty needed to have the same significance as given to other issues.<\/p>\n
“If we can agree a national infrastructure plan, then surely we can do the same when it comes to the rights of our children and young people in New Zealand.<\/p>\n
“We are simply not going to move forward as a country if we keep leaving thousands of children behind.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Children’s Commissioner says the latest report on child poverty reveals the country’s “national shame”. The Ministry of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":540737,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-540736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=540736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/540736\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/540737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=540736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=540736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=540736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}