Picture a city roughly the size of Dunedin – around 126,000 people. Now, imagine the entire population of this city as children under 18.
All of them live in deprivation, routinely going without essentials because there isn’t enough money. They don’t have fruit and veges; there is little protein in their diet; they are cold; doctors’ visits are delayed; they don’t have decent shoes.
In reality, the population of desperately poor New Zealand children are not all gathered in one place, which is why it’s possible for those of us who have everything we need for a comfortable life to be blind to their existence.
“If you live in a nice area in a nice house, and you have enough food, you’ve got plenty of money, you’ve got two cars, and you go on holidays, it’s easy to forget that there are kids 20 kilometres down the road who are starving,” says Judge Frances Eivers, the second wāhine Māori to occupy the position of Children’s Commissioner since the role was established in 1989.
In early December, Eivers released the annual Child Poverty Monitor – a richly detailed exposition on the scale and nature of deprivation suffered by New Zealand children. It contains dozens of graphs describing various degrees of poverty, school attendance and achievement, immunisation rates, and deaths from assault, neglect or maltreatment (seven every year, on average, between 1990 and 2018).
It tells a story of glacial progress in some areas, and worsening conditions in others.
There is too much information to take in, but somehow the abstract figure of 125,700 children living in “material hardship” (lacking in six essential daily items because of cost) coheres into the concrete image of a prominent city that hugs a pretty harbour, slopes up green hills and spreads across low-lying flats.
Half of this
