University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland
New Zealand
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3737599 ext 7432
12th
March 2001
The Editor
The Listener
Dear Sir,
At last the facts are being faced about the economic position of too many children in New Zealand. Steve Maharey (March 17) lays the blame, where it belongs, squarely at the door of the damaging social welfare reforms of the past 15 years. Individualistic, self reliance rhetoric has delivered the underfunding of children's agencies and the destruction of the dream of stable and secure housing for large numbers of families with children.
Everywhere you look children have been the losers. The driving feature of reform of income support for families has been that assistance should be 'only for the poor'. Thus the old Family Benefit was added to Family Support in 1991 and all of it abated against family income, adding to the poverty trap and destroying the notion of community support for all children.
Worse still, we got policies based on the notion of the 'deserving poor'. In 1996 instead of properly adjusting family support for all children the ill-conceived Independent Family Tax Credit was introduced. Now called the Child Tax Credit, this payment has a maximum value of $15 per child per week and is a significant part of the budget of low-income families. But it does not go to many of the children who need it most. Instead, it is supposed to reward 'independence from the state'. Thus it acts as a further punishment by being withdrawn when families, through no fault of their own fall on hard times and must ask for state assistance.
The Child Poverty Action Group calls on the government to extend the child tax credit to all low income children as a measure of good faith in this budget. Ironically this would give gives government an immediate and effective way of delivering cash assistance 'only to the poor'. It may be argued that this will be expensive, but it is part of the price we must pay for years of neglect.
While the rest
of us have had increases in income to protect us from inflation, children and
low income parents have been the victims of slow attrition. Other needed
immediate adjustments include lifting the first income tax threshold (unchanged
since 1986) to $12,500, adjusting the amount that can be earned on a benefit
($80 unchanged since 1986) to $135, increasing community services card
subsidies (largely unchanged since 1992). Then, at very least, a commitment to
continue to adjust all parts of the system for future inflation must be made.
Susan St John
Child Poverty Action Group
Box 56-150, Mt Eden, Auckland