Priorities

Back in 2018 the then-Labour government legislated formal targets to reduce child poverty with the Child Poverty Reduction Act - and took actual steps to achieve them, with a $5.5 billion families package to boost incomes and a school lunches scheme to ensure kids didn't go hungry. While a lot of work needed to be done, it made a good start. And then National came along and gutted the targets, replacing them with more "achievable" ones. Why? Because they didn't want to spend the money required to met them:

Documents showed year-on-year progress was not on track and meeting the targets "would require investment in the region of $3 billion per year".

Officials presented Upston with two alternative targets for 2028 that they believed could be achieved.

However, Upston told RNZ the government "disagreed with the advice and this approach, as it would further entrench long-term welfare dependency and the number of children growing up in benefit-dependent homes".

Instead, the government spent $3 billion on landlord tax cuts, effectively deciding to give to the greedy, not to the needy (they also scrapped the survey tracking child poverty, to prevent any evidence of failure). Its a stark illustration of National's priorities, and who they favour in society.

As for child poverty, Upston thinks it will be solved by "growing the economy, improving health and education outcomes, and getting more households into work... rather than welfare payments and tax credit changes". In other words, the usual capitalist magical thinking that if you make rich people richer while shitting harder on the poor and gutting health and education, everything will magically get better. National applied such cruel "solutions" in both of their previous times in government, in 1991 and 2012, and their efforts are why we have a child poverty problem in the first place. Do they seriously expect us to believe it'll be third time lucky? Or are they just spewing bullshit to cover for the fact that they do not give a shit about anyone other than the ultra-rich?