Hundreds of thousands of Kiwi children living below the poverty line

Tuesday, 2 April 2019

Spurred on by the Government's desire to more thoroughly track and ultimately reduce child poverty, Statistics NZ has released new figures which paint the clearest picture yet when it comes to the number of Kiwi children living in poverty.

About 183,000 – or 16 per cent of – children currently live in poverty before housing costs are deducted. The figure jumps up to 23 per cent – about 254,000 children – after housing costs are deducted.

Further to that, 13 per cent of children live in households experiencing material hardship. That means they are missing out on more than a handful of things expected in a typical household, including having insurance, regular dentist visits and at least two pairs of good shoes.

The figures are based on a face-to-face survey of between 3000 and 5500 households undertaken over a one year period in 2017/18, household statistics senior manager Jason Attewell said.

**READ MORE: 

* How to tell which Kiwi children are living in poverty

* NZ comes under UN scrutiny over its treatment of children

* Child Poverty is everyone's problem - Children's Commissioner

* Government sets targets for reducing child poverty**

The statistics, released on Tuesday, will be used as baseline rates for the purposes of the Child Poverty Reduction Act 2018, which was introduced to help achieve a significant and sustained reduction in child poverty. 

The Act requires the Government to set three-year and 10-year targets on four primary measures, and specifies that the Government statistician report back annually, with their first report covering the year ending June 2019.

Principal statistician Diane Ramsay said that report, due for release in early 2020, would have a significantly larger sample size of 20,000 households, thanks to additional funding being made available to Stats NZ.

It would also be made more robust by using a range of statistical techniques and other data sources as well as targeting low-income households, she said.​

Child Poverty Action Group economics spokesperson Susan St John said the data was likely to underestimate the problem because it only captured households with a fixed address.

'The depth of the problem may be better understood if it incorporated more information about transient families who have been without a secure home.'

BY THE NUMBERS 

* About 183,000 Kiwi children live in poverty before housing costs are deducted - that's 16 per cent

* That jumps up to 23 per cent - about 254,000 children - after housing costs are deducted

* In the year ending June 2018, 13 per cent of children lived in households experiencing material hardship

* The government set interim targets last year to reduce those children in material hardship down to seven per cent

* The timeline for that reduction, as well as several others, is ten years

*comments on this article have been closed