Jacqui Southey: Save the Children Advocacy and Research Director on New Zealand's Child poverty stats

There has been no change to child poverty in the last year.

That's according to data released yesterday by stats NZ which shows 17.7% of all children are in poverty. 

That's based on household income after housing costs have been paid. 

Save the Children NZ's Advocacy and Research Director Jacqui Southey says we need to start looking at how we can build more affordable homes and lifting incomes for sole parent families. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
There has been no change to child poverty in the
last year. Data released yesterday by Stat's New Zealand shows
that seventeen point seven percent of all children are in
poverty and that is based on household income after housing
costs have been paid. So Save the Children New Zealand's
advocacy and Research director as Jackie Southy, who joins me now, Heather,

(00:20):
Jackie Kilder Andrew, did you have any confidence that maybe
the figures will be better or were you expecting this?

Speaker 2 (00:29):
We were expecting this. We've we come off the back
of a period of very high living costs, high inflation.
We're also seeing that there's a lot of financial strife
out there and people have lost their jobs. People are
really feeling the cost of living, and we know that
we're in a recession. So we didn't expect a rosy picture.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Are you expecting it to get rosier or do you
think this will continue on in the medium term.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Well, Unlessie makes significant changes to the way that people
can access housing and that make it more affordable, whether
renting or owning a home, and also lift the lowest
incomes of the lowest income families, particularly for soule parent families.
This is not going to significantly change.

Speaker 1 (01:10):
So seventeen point seven percent of all children are in
poverty based on household income after housing costs have been
taken out of the equation. So does that show that
the housing costs are the real issue in this country?

Speaker 2 (01:22):
Absolutely. We can see that the families on the lowest
thing comes to spending more than forty percent of their
income on housing, and that compares to twenty percent as
a national average. And so quite simply, it's not affordable.
It doesn't leave enough money to pay for the other
necessities in life, such as the energy costs, food costs,
to be able to service your car and make sure

(01:43):
you've got a decent car, money to get you where
you need to go.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
So look, I had an interview earlier this morning where
I was talking to a guy about the cost of
building and it's gone up forty four percent over the
last four years. Housing is not getting any more affordable.
We know this is the problem. We have been trying
to fix it for an AID. So do you have
any great ideas about how the government could tackle child poverty,
because so far, with all the will in the world,
it hasn't worked.

Speaker 2 (02:08):
But I think we've seen some changes in the way
we build houses and the sort of houses we need.
You know, for a long type of decades, we were
building very big homes, multi bedroom, very expensive, and we've
seen that people have gone towards and more less the
kits at home and that they've really improved in quality.
They're more compact, they're cheaper to build, and you know,
that's a potential way of solving our issues as looking

(02:30):
at how can we build smaller, better, good quality homes
but are definitely more affordable. And the other thing is
we need to look at the lowest incomes and that's
for our sole parents families. They're struggling on forty six
thousand per annum disposable income and that's absolutely shockingly low
by any measure for a family to be trying to
live on in this day and age. Amongst the costs

(02:53):
that we face for fase a.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Living, Jackie, you face a challenge. Thank you for all
the work you do. Jackie is Save the Children, New
Zealand's advocacy research director.

Speaker 2 (03:02):
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