So now we have a new measure of child hardship and poverty in New Zealand.

Stats NZ has come up with a survey that asked between 3000 and 5500 households how they are faring. Now already I’m confused because of how many households was it. 3000 or 5500?

Anyway. They asked quite a few households how they’re faring and they found that about 183,000, or 16 percent of children currently live in poverty before housing costs are deducted. The figure jumps up to 23 percent, about 254,000 children after housing costs are deducted.

Hell of a phrase that, child poverty. In this report, it’s defined as children living in households who earn less than 50 percent of the median national income. In 2018 the median wage was $49,000 so we’re talking about kids in households with about $25,000 coming in.

That’s not a lot of money in modern New Zealand. In 2018 Trade Me told us that the median rent in New Zealand for a two to four bedroom house was $525 or $27,000 a year. Or $2000 more than the families of quarter of a million kids earn a year. No food, no shoes, no transport for that family.

For a one to two bedroom place, it’s $390 or $20,000 a year, so if you can squeeze a family of three to four into one of those you may have $5,000 spare to eat with.

It’s beyond the understanding of most New Zealanders. They can’t comprehend coping with that sort of situation and how people with children can end out in this situation. They believe that it must be all the parents choice. There’s anger at those parents that they let themselves get into that situation. The reality is that some poverty or hardship is because of stupid choices but a lot is wrong place, wrong time, wrong person stuff.

There’s one comment that you hear all the time from the people who can't understand poverty or hardship. They say "Throwing money at the problem has never worked". Which I’ve always found to be the lamest argument ever because throwing money at problems is exactly what humans do.  

Got a traffic congestion problem. Throw money at it and build a new road or a train track. Got a health problem? Throw money at it and pay for a doctor and treatment. Got a broken tap. Throw some money at it. 

The trick is not just throwing money at a problem but how you throw money at a problem.

Take your tap problem. You could throw money at buying a new tap then fixing it your self. Or you could throw more money at hiring a plumber. Or you could take advantage of the situation and throw money at a whole new vanity unit.

To have Stats NZ find a quarter of a million kids whose household income can’t even pay the rent is definitely a problem. And money definitely needs to be thrown at it, cleverly.

But there are also questions that need answers that need to come from within society. Why do we continue to be a low wage, high housing cost nation? Why do we have parents who have children when they cannot afford them? And why do we have comfortable people who seem to have no empathy at all?