Jacinda Ardern, the Minister Responsible for Child Poverty Reduction has released the latest score-card on progress towards her sole reason for entering politics.
Claire Trevett paints the bleak picture that Jacinda Ardern fails to acknowledge: That there has been negligible progress towards eliminating child poverty.
If it wasn’t for COVID-19, child poverty would be PM Jacinda Ardern’s do-or-die issue.
It was the issue she highlighted when she became Labour leader. When she became Prime Minister, she made herself Minister for Child Poverty Reduction.
Not just Minister for Child Poverty. Her KPI is in her job title: child poverty reduction.
She has left herself no room to fail.
Ardern had legislated to require Governments to set targets for poverty reduction, and then set the targets her Government would be held to over three and 10 years.
The three-year targets for the 2020/21 year will be judged by next year’s results – this year’s covered up to March 2020.
On the latest statistics, she is at a B-, not a fail, but not a resounding success.
Yes, since 2018 there have been drops across all measures used to define child poverty. However, many were marginal and on some of the measures things had got slightly worse since the 2020 release.
NZ Herald
Claire Trevett should know that we no longer are allowed to use scores like B-; which is a very generous assessment of Ardern’s lack of progress in this regard. The more appropriate assessment would be a NCEA – Not Achieved.
While child advocate groups have called the improvements “incremental” and a failure to deliver on the transformation Ardern promised, Ardern has naturally chosen to focus on the bright side – saying the Government was “within a sampling error” of hitting the targets it had set on many measures. That included the numbers living in homes with an income of less than 50 per cent of the media income, including housing costs.
The trouble with the sampling error argument is that the opposite can also apply: things could be even worse than the numbers show.
NZ Herald
This woman has more cheek than Megan Woods’ bottom. In shooting, a miss is a miss, it matters not one bit that you nearly scored a hit. To continue the shooting analogy and refining it: for clay target shooting, Ardern shot at 25 clays and missed them all, yet is claiming she is competitive because she nearly hit them.
Well, the old saying goes, a miss by an inch is the same as a miss by a mile.
No amount of spin can dress up the fact that this Prime Minister has developed a habit of not hitting any targets, whether it be building houses, laying tram lines or, in this instance, reducing child poverty.
The survey does not take into account any of the COVID-19 lockdown period: the survey halted in March, three months short of its usual length.
And that is an outrage, that they’d juked the stats. It makes one wonder just how much worse the situation actually is for these measures. It is politically cute and intellectually dishonest to have done that.
Critically for the Government, this year’s release was the first that showed the impact of a full year of the $5 billion Families Package.
That package was Labour’s primary prescription for child poverty – a combination of more generous Working for Families payments, allowances for those on low incomes and those with new babies.
Ardern rejected any suggestion the Families Package had not had the impact expected.
But the concerning thing the data did show was that the improvements for the very poorest households were less than for those who were slightly better off.
The numbers also showed significant disparity for Pacific, Maori, and the disabled in particular.
Asked what the Government would do to address that, Ardern said her next focus for policies will be on those in “deep, entrenched poverty” – but stopped short of saying how that would be done.
NZ Herald
That’s because she has no idea how to do anything, except locking people down and running printing machines for money.
They’ve dropped $5 billion at this problem and it has made not a skerrick of difference, especially for the poorest amongst us.
But perhaps more crucially, the survey period does not include the sky-rocketing property and rental costs since lockdown.
The surveys identify the cost of housing as a key factor in child poverty.
Ardern has to fix housing to fix child poverty – and this is a whole other challenge.
NZ Herald
The reforms to the tenancy laws were supposed to alleviate issues for renters but the opposite has occurred. Rents have sky-rocketed as landlords pass on government imposts to their tenants. That was always going to happen, even Blind Freddy and the Treasury knew that. But the book-learned socialists thought they knew better and as a consequence have socked their less privileged voters with massive rent hikes.
The hurt is building on this Government, and there is precious little those noddies can do about it. They can’t blame the previous Government for rent hikes and the pain associated with that, as that’s on them.
Given the Prime Ministers propensity for failure perhaps she should be called Missed Ardern.
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