Speak Up- Kōrerotia26 May 2017

Child Poverty and the Budget 2017

Male This programme was first broadcast on Canterbury’s community access radio station Plains FM 96.9 and was made with the assistance of New Zealand on Air.

Female Coming up next conversations on human rights with “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”, here on Plains FM.

Sally E ngā mana,E ngā reo,E ngā hau e whāTēnā koutou katoaNau mai ki tēnei hōtaka: “Speak Up” – “Kōrerotia”.

Tune in as our guests “Speak Up”, sharing their unique and powerful experiences and opinions and may you also be inspired to “Speak Up” when the moment is right.

Sara Whakataka te hau ki te uruWhakataka te hau ki te tongaKia mākinakina ki utaKia mātaratara ki taiE hī ake ana te atakuraHe tio, he huka, he hau hūTīhei mauri ora!

Sally Kia ora, Sara.

Welcome to “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”. I’m your host Sally Carlton, based here in Christchurch. Today we’re going to be talking about child poverty and the Budget 2017 - a pretty big topic, I’m sure. I’ve got a co-host with me today, Sara Epperson of CPAG - Child Poverty Action Group for those of you who don’t know it. Sara, if you could perhaps introduce yourself and tell us a wee bit about CPAG and why they do these post-Budget information sessions.?

Sara Sure, my name is Sara Epperson and I’m a part of the Ōtautahi Christchurch CPAG regional network. CPAG was established in 1994 out of deep concern for the rising level of poverty in New Zealand and its effects on children and CPAG continues today as a national network with local regional networks throughout the country, including here.

So the guiding principal of CPAG is the right of every child to security, food, shelter, education and health care and this principle is only agreed with is many children in New Zealand don’t have the basics and in a country like New Zealand with ample resources child poverty could be eliminated completely - so we choose not to do this. The Budget each year is a reflection of our choices and our priorities. The annual CPAG post-

Budget breakfasts have provided a child-focused analysis of the Budget and we’re thrilled to have Helen Leahy and Paul Dalziel here with us today to share their insights. This year people will have noticed that we’re experimenting with a medium other than breakfast by recording a podcast. If you would like to listen to a podcast with a friend we’re hosting an event next week on Tuesday at midday, Community and Public Health, 310 Manchester Street so you can come and hear the podcast recording and engage with discussion along with others.

Sally Very cool and both Sara and I will be there if anyone wants to come and ask us some questions.

Paul, we thought we might start with you, you’re going to give us a bit of an overview, what is the Budget, what’s it been like for the last few years, what’s this year’s Budget looking like?

Paul Kia ora Sally, I’ve been doing these post-Budget events for seven years now, I’m Professor of Economics out at Lincoln University with a particular interest in social and economic policy and how it is affecting the wellbeing of people. Over the last nine years… This is the ninth budget that has been delivered by the current Government, the first by Steven Joyce, and when this Government came to power it was very concerned about stimulating economic growth, it was going for growth as it said in the speech from the throne way back then in 2008. It said it believed in the power of growth and of course the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 meant all of that had to be put to one side and instead the first two terms of the Government were all about battening down the hatches and there was very little money for social policy and I think child poverty was one of the victims of that response to the Global Financial Crisis. So we saw things like the reduction in tax rates in 2008, the increase in GST to 15% in the same year, we had the Welfare Working Group in 2011 and all of the reforms to welfare that flowed from that working group. In 2011 and 2012 the Government introduced what it called zero budgets meaning that if it increased expenditure in one area there had to be offsetting cuts in other areas; and finally in 2014 we had the first glimpse of a new families package but it was delayed until April 2015. So for a long time it was only crumbs from the table really available for families and for addressing issues like child poverty.

It was so bad that after the last election in 2014, John Key said the very next day, he was asking his officials to find new ways of tackling child poverty and at that stage we were talking about figures like one in four children growing up in income poverty, one in six going without basic essentials like fresh fruit and vegetables, a warm house, decent shoes and visits to the doctor, 10% growing up in severe poverty and a large number of those growing up in poverty for most of their childhood lives. And so that brought us to the most recent set of budgets. The 2015 Budget provided the first increase in real terms for social welfare since 1972 - so a marked change - but the amount was $25, it didn’t really compare with the benefit cuts in 1991 that was the beginning of the child poverty problems and the

following year it was another “steady as she goes” budget where the Government’s main purpose was about reducing debt and trying to reduce debt as quickly as possible.

They started talking about ‘vulnerable children’ rather than ‘children’ so that it wasn’t an investment in the future of the country but it was targeting assistance towards people it described as the most vulnerable.

Sally I guess, based on that word that you’ve just pulled out, what’s your feeling on the Ministry of Vulnerable Children, Oranga Tamariki?

Paul Yes I think the Māori name is much closer to the spirit of what we are trying to achieve. There are things that we do as parents for our children every day but there are other things that can only be done with the support of the whole community: good health, good education, introduction to cultural for everybody. And if the Government is falling behind in playing its part then our children suffer and we are laying up problems for ourselves into the future.

We know that we have to continually reinvest in physical assets, new roads, and new buildings, repair the housework etc. Here we have the situation where the investment in our children has been deferred for six to eight years as part of our response to the Global Financial Crisis, we’ve fallen behind and as a result we are seeing terrible symptoms of vulnerability, of poverty. But the bigger issue is that lack of commitment to investing in our own future by ensuring our children have the opportunity to flourish. I don’t think trying to separate children doing well from vulnerable children is the answer; we need to see change in the way that we invest in the future of all our children.

Sally Paul you mentioned that you were going to set the scene, which you’ve done, how about this year’s Budget? Is there anything that we can celebrate, look forward to?

Paul Certainly. So the first thing to say is that Steven Joyce, in his first Budget, has returned to that first theme of the importance of a strong and growing economy. So he said in his speech yesterday afternoon that the first priority in any budget must be to take the right steps to keep the economy growing and so that viewpoint infuses the whole Budget. The top priority is to stimulate economic growth without thinking too much about the nature of that economic growth, of what the implications might be for climate change, for example.

So I think one of the disappointments - if we’re talking about the future of our children - is that I can only find $4 million over four years to address global climate change and that $4 million is designed to come up with some options for the Government by 2021 in order to try and meet targets in 2030 so there’s no sense of urgency coming through about New Zealand playing its part in contributing to addressing global climate change,. That’s one of the disappointments.

There’s still a priority given to debt reduction but in contrast to Bill English, Steven Joyce is now talking about investing in public services and infrastructure needed for a growing economy. And the biggest amount of his expenditure is precisely in those two areas so we are seeing more money being spent in health and education after a long time of slow growth in those areas; we are seeing more money invested in physical infrastructure. And then finally he talks about adjusting tax in transfer settings to improve family incomes and simplify the tax in transfer system and that is quite a big change, this idea that one of the goals of the Government is to increase family incomes although at this stage they are talking about doing that through the tax in transfer systems.

So the kernel of that project at the moment is a $2 billion tax relief package. We need to put that into context: the $2 billion is being spent on raising tax thresholds which means that if you are earning $52,000 a year or more you get the full benefit and it’s $20 a week so the price of five cups of coffee during the week, a cup of coffee day. And the reason a cup of coffee a day costs so much - $2 billion - is because everybody gets it. So myself on my professorial salary get that full amount as much as a person struggling on $52,000. If you’re earning less than $52,000 a year you get less than that so if you are earning about $20,000 its $11 a week that you are getting.

So it sounds like a lot when you add it all up but we are actually spreading those resources very thinly across the whole population, the price of a cup of coffee a day.

Sally What’s the rationale of giving more to people who are earning more?

Paul Well it’s an example of deferred maintenance really so as the economy grows and as inflation has its impact both of those on incomes, people rise through into higher tax brackets and so from time to time we adjust the tax brackets so that people are put back to where they were before the economic growth and inflation had their impacts. In a way it’s like painting the house after not doing so for a decade; this is something that gets done from time to time.

The other initiative is an increase into Working For Families and it’s a similar story really. The rules for Working For Families is that it gets increased only when inflation reaches a cumulative amount of 5%, that has happened this year so it was due in any case for an increase. The Government has beefed that up a little bit. It’s a welcome increase - I mean people are really struggling to bring up families - but it’s loose change really compared to the $2 billion going into the income tax relief none of which goes to beneficiaries because the benefits are calculated net of tax.

Sally And finally Paul, just to round off this segment, you’ve mentioned a disappointing lack of focus on climate issues. Are there any other really

big points we should be looking out for?

Paul Well there’s two I think. The first is that the Government is putting more money into the Accommodation Supplement and in a way that is going to fuel the problems in Auckland, there will be people with more money to spend but if the number of houses doesn’t increase then that spending is just going to push up rents further and eventually the money will be captured by the landlords rather than the people who are being supported in the first instance. So we will see some change - people will be able to provide more rental accommodation at higher rates - but it’s not going to be the circuit breaker that we need, particularly in Auckland, to get people into healthy housing where children can grow up in warm conditions and start addressing some of those child health issues that affect learning caused by poverty.

The second big question, I think, is that the increase in family incomes is being achieved through the tax system but we’ve still got that underlying issue of the economy is creating a large number of low paid jobs and it’s the low paid jobs that are trapping people in poverty so that they can’t earn their way out of not having sufficient resources for their kids. So I think, when we look back at this Budget, it may be that the most exciting part of it was the inclusion of the Care and Support Workers’ Pay Equity settlement, this was all done outside the Budget process but nevertheless this was a significant change that’s going to address low pay in a segment of the economy where there are lots of working mums and dads. If we can build on that, start addressing the problem of low-paid jobs, turn the attention to creating jobs that pay the living wage, that would do more to solve child poverty than some of the bandaid solutions we saw yesterday.

Sally Thank you Paul, I’m sure we’ll touch on housing and whānau and all sorts of things when we hear from Helen in the next segment. In the meantime, we’ve got ‘Poi E’ by Aotea Māori Club as your song.

Paul Thank you.

MUSIC BY AOTEA MAORI CLUB – POI ESally Nau mai haere mai, welcome back “Speak Up-Kōrerotia”. We’re talking

about child poverty and the Budget 2017. I’m co-hosting today with Sara Epperson of CPAG, we’ve just heard from Paul Dalziel of Lincoln University and now we’ve got Helen Leahy who is going to be talking about some of the implications of the Budget.

Sara Welcome to Helen, we’re pleased to have you with us today. I’d like to acknowledge just a bit of Helen’s background, her 16 years with the Māori Party including as Chief of Staff and her time as a specialist advisor at Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu. Helen is now the CEO of Te Pūtahitanga, the Whānau Ora commissioning agency for the South Island so we’re humbled to have you here today, Helen, and we’re looking forward to hearing what you have to say.

Helen Kia ora o tēnā rā koutou katoa. Very pleased to be here; an important Budget for setting a foundation for whānau going forward. I think the key thing for looking at what came out of the Budget announcements yesterday, and those leading up to it, is that the Government is walking a tightrope between the spectrum of vulnerability and resilience. This is a Government which is toying all the time with, “Do we call a ministry a ‘Ministry of Vulnerable Children’ or do we call it the ‘Ministry of Oranga Tamariki’?”

From my point of view, I’m looking for what will achieve oranga, what will achieve that state of wellbeing acknowledging that we need to remove the barriers that will reduce vulnerability. But as Paul said, vulnerability is a universal experience and sometimes when we target narrowly we might overlook a situation of vulnerability for another family who may look like they’re in average situations but have issues to do with learning needs, with alcohol addiction, with issues around mental health support that may not get picked up in some of the indicators of depravation. So I think the starting point for looking at this from the context for families and whānau is that $2 billion for a family income package has to be seen has positive. There is very definitely increased support for looking at emergency homelessness, for looking at Accommodation Supplement, for the work that’s gone into adding some difference the income and I know that there’s again a spectrum of distribution of those new family income packages but for families on low and middle incomes the announcements yesterday will help to at least provide more income coming into the household which is one of the key denominators of stress.

I think where I’m most pleased about this Budget is that it identifies those populations that are often on the fringe. So we have some funding for at-risk prisoners, for instance. We have some funding for looking at a range of learning needs within the education sector, for looking at family violence, a very significant endorsement of the work that’s happened within Te Waipounamu on tūpunu te Mana Kaha o te Whānau which has been a family violence pilot looking at what are the solutions that families can come up with. Also increased funding for the Integrated Safety Response pilot here in Christchurch and in Waikato. Now, that new funding is really significant because it’s putting power and control back into the hands of families and communities as well as the system in how to reduce family violence. Some good increased funding in the area of suicide prevention. There is the promise of new funding around addressing P and other mental health supports that have been listed… So as I say, it’s a spectrum of need.

Does it go far enough down the oranga line? Some of the attempts don’t really go there. The youth development portfolio - $260,000 I think for youth development and the relationship with Netball NZ - that could be a really positive thing but we’re wanting to see a lot more of that. If our rangatahi are saying that finding a purpose in life is not just about getting NCEA Level 2 but also finding some means to contribute, we want to see more strategies that enable our youth to be flourishing.

There’s some funding through Culture and Heritage, through Maggie Barry looking at telling New Zealand’s stories and a couple of morsels that are thrown out there. I was looking for funding for acknowledging 150 years since the Māori Representation Act was signed in 1867. Now, this year is going fast so obviously not this year’s Budget acknowledgement but politically when you start thinking about Māori representation across all sectors, that’s something that I would have… There are some inconsistencies, shall we say. There was some funding put into the Māori Electoral Reform or the electoral option but that goes to our ears obviously because being an election year you wouldn’t be funding it for this year.

So some good moves in the right direction in terms of that focus on strengthening families; the announcement that was made around Family Start a couple of weeks ago is a positive move in the right direction. But for me it’s a very clear focus on social investment. The emphasis in the social justice sector is around the social investment unit being set up. What were they going to do with that funding? How does the integrated data infrastructure focus add to the wellbeing of families, or is it more around better information for Government purposes and what are those purposes? So there’s a whole lot of questions I think that come out of it but I can’t complain about $2 billion going into families, of course.

Sally It’s nice to have a positive slant on it.

Sara I really like some of the words that came across in what you had to say, Helen, you talked about wellbeing and about resilience. I understand that it’s the success of Whānau Ora navigators that led to the plan to spend $9 million over four years to utilise whānau-centred facilitators to help address family violence. I’m wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about Whānau Ora, for people in the audience who might not be familiar.

Helen The concept of ‘ora’ really is about wellbeing but when you look in the Māori dictionary you can get 267 definitions of ‘ora’ so that to me is symbolic of the fact that what we’re looking at is wellbeing on many different fronts. And it’s important to acknowledge that for many of the whānau that we’re working with: income deprivation is not the source of lack of wellbeing in their lives; it’s around land alienation, it’s around dislocation from the rest of their whānau, it’s about feeling that their language acquisition has been stymied because there aren’t sufficient resources, it’s not knowing the sense of identity, their connection and belonging.

There’s some interesting research done by Dr Golder Verona [?] called The Whenua Project which looks at the whenua, the land, as being a key asset and conversely alienation from knowing your land, where you come from, leads to a lack of wellbeing. So that’s been really interesting for us a commissioning agency because ‘need’ is not just about an income level and we’ve been trying to look at different ways of addressing that.

We have a commissioning pipeline which has their own ideas about how whānau want to achieve wellbeing so that’s much more innovative but we also have this work stream called whānau enhancement which is about the navigators working with around 20 families at a time, often those families are the ones where we will see the most cause of distress and the navigator essentially is about empowering the family to determine a future forward with the support of a navigator to either guide them through the maze of Government services but also to put them in place with their own whānau connections, neighbourhood support, community resources that might not be immediately visible to a family under distress. So I think you’re right in that the work of the navigators has certainly been seen in this Budget and particularly in that area of family violence, being able to be that first port of call before a notification is made to one of the government agencies to actually say look this is getting out of hand, how can we get some support to change the behaviours in our household.

Sally In terms of family violence, is it looking like the pilot programmes here in Ōtautahi and Waikato will be rolled out in other places?

Helen At this stage the pilot is continuing for another year at least - oh, another two years, $22 million for two more years - and they are going to make a decision around how it gets rolled out after that pilot. It’s involved a great deal of resource before Government resourced it in terms of the NGO sector, we’ve had Te Whare Hauora, the Māori Women’s Refuge, Te Puna Oranga, He Waka Tapu, Te Rūnanga o Ngā Maata Waka, Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu, Te Pūhahitanga, Battered Women’s Trust, Aviva, there’s been a whole host of NGOs and organisations who have been out of goodwill putting their hand up to be part of this pilot and so I’m really pleased for them in particular that this pilot is being seen as a way of getting better information, getting better collaboration, but most importantly placing the family at the centre rather than dividing families into victims, into children, into perpetrators. Saying actually, the most effective solution is when you work altogether.

Sara It’s good to hear. I’ve heard some CPAG commentators say that there’s no specific reference in the Budget speech to funding for NGO and community agencies, those groups have managed under increasingly tightening contractual arrangements and dealt with substantial pressure to meet growing demand, so it’s nice to hear a story from another aspect of the Budget where some of the great work that our NGO sector is doing will get recognised.

Sally OK well we’re going to have our next break and then we’re going to come into a discussion picking up a lot of the points that Paul and Helen and Sara, you’ve all raised. Helen, you chose for us ‘Wairua.’

Helen I chose this because it’s a really positive aspirational upbeat waiata which is being promoted amongst rangatahi using the Māori language so it’s about that sense of identity, connection and belonging, but it’s also about saying we’re going to move forward if we have the faith in ourselves to

believe in ourselves. That’s the X factor.

MUSIC BY MAIMOA FEAT. MEREANA TEKA, MAKAIRA BERRY, PUAWAI TAIAPA, AWATEA WIHONGI, TAWAROA KAWANA, RANIERA – WAIRUA

Sara Now that we’re back it would be great to connect up some of the ideas that our different speakers have brought to the table. Maybe starting with the idea of some of the partnerships that we’re seeing across sectors or the partnership approaches within different issues. Thoughts, comments?

Paul I agree with Helen that there are some very interesting things happening in the interface between Government agencies and private sector, non-government organisations, trying to improve wellbeing outcomes for difficult segments of the population - difficult is probably the wrong word really but there have been people on the margins who have been struggling for a long time and under the Better Public Services Programme the Government is trying to reward agencies that show innovative creative ways of helping people help themselves in that situation. And some of the examples that we’ve just heard are excellent innovative approaches to solving the big problems that have haunted us for a long time like family violence, and it’s wonderful to see those community-led initiatives getting some public funding so that they can expand and reach out to other parts of the country.

Sally Paul, is that unusual in this Budget?

Paul I think it’s a trend that has emerged relatively recently so yes, I think that is still unusual. It’s tended to be in the past that the Government has identified some social need and it has made funding available for groups to bid for and there’s been a lot of concern that that’s stifled innovation in the sector, that people got so concentrated on meeting output targets that they lost sight of the big outcome picture and this new social investment approach is trying to reward people who demonstrate that they are making a difference. So the initiatives now work both ways and community groups who can use the data to show we have had a genuine impact on people’s wellbeing are being rewarded for their innovative and their success.

Helen I’m interested, too, that there’s been an increased focus on at-risk prisoners. This is a Government that’s talking a lot about having to build new prisons and the muster continually increasing but they have put quite a lot of emphasis into prisoners who are at risk of suicide and self-harm. I’m really pleased to see $13 million was allocated for what they’re calling the positive housing pathway for offenders leaving prison - that’s been a real gap area. If you know anything about the Steps to Freedom package, that you leave prison with $300 and good luck and housing has been a really chronic need for offenders or for people rehabilitating themselves back into the communities.

I think that’s an area where it would be really helpful to see more support for a community-driven approach so they’re not just looking at providers as

you do in the social housing sector choosing the housing provider but taking more of a restorative community involvement to when you leave prison, even if you’ve had some effective prison programmes inside, you have to work in a way which is going to achieve change in your life outside the wire and there’s some tentative moves towards that, some positive moves towards that, but it would be good to see emphasis on the outside as well.

Paul Just adding to that: New Zealand has a very high imprisonment rate - much higher than Australia, for example - and if you think about the benefit cuts in 1991 that sort of gave birth to the Child Poverty Action Group, the children who were born in that year are now 25 and many of them have grown up in an atmosphere where they have found themselves in the Justice Department and now in the Corrections Service and so this is one of the big, big questions that if we don’t invest in our children we reap the benefits 25 years - or the costs - 25 years later. Some of these policies that we are trying to introduce now are the consequences of not allowing children to flourish when they were growing up because they were growing up in whānau that didn’t have enough resources, that had been pushed to the margins, who were suffering the loss of good employment, jobs because of the introduction of the Employment Contracts Act and when they became unemployed much less income support than the previous generation had been able to rely upon.

Helen I think a related issue to that, too, is the area of intense learning and support need for our children. There was an announcement made a couple of weeks ago about literacy and numeracy for Year 8 students and of course that’s positive but it would be good to be more focused, more comprehensive early on. The early childhood sector I know is concerned that there wasn’t increased overall funding. There has been some funding, I’d have to say, for Kōhanga Reo which is positive, and for disadvantaged children, but it’s that area of learning support and identifying learning need which I think… The Budget goes some way, they introduce around $15 million for teacher aides in schools - so that’s another 600 or so students that will benefit, that’s positive - but that real support for families that we’d like to see further increase.

I’m sure that the $28 million for Family Start is a step towards that, we have $10 million across four years for three commissioning agencies for Whānau Ora, that’s probably looking at about $500,000 for the South Island for this year if you, on a population basis, look at that $10 million. So while that’s fantastic to get an increase, it’s not nearly enough in terms of being able to reach into those homes and it will be in the homes where that support is required to really understand the challenges of dyslexia, of autism, of chronic learning needs.

Sara You’ve brought up an interesting point about where it might be nice to have more spending. There is a Budget surplus so I’m curious to know how either of you might spend it and why?

Paul In the big picture I think the Government has a whole section based on investment in infrastructure and it devotes a lot of effort to thinking about what sort of new roading, what sort of new railway networks, what sort of new buildings do we need to create a flourishing country. I think the same level of investment needs to be made into social wellbeing. And so the extra dollar that we have, this is the priority that we need to invest in our children in exactly the same way that we invest in our roads and railways. If children emerge from their childhood experience not being able to read and write, not being able to find a good first job to embed themselves back amongst their peers and give expression to their mana as people emerging into adulthood, then we are creating problems that will be with us for the rest of their lives so without investment in social wellbeing the investment in economic wellbeing can only take us so far.

Helen I would absolutely agree. There needs to be far more support to enable whānau to be the best parents that they can be so it is going back to that spectrum between resilience and vulnerability. All of us have periods of vulnerability: what’s the support that’s available for us to know who to reach out to? Or, how do we strengthen our own families so that we’re not going to have our children removed, we’re not going to have our children go down a trajectory which the Government can give us all the data on? And so it is about building up the infrastructure in the family home and of course we would have liked to have seen a lot more focus on environmental responsibility, taking care of the land around us, ensuring that all New Zealanders have an attitude of responsibility for our climate, for the way in which we care for our future.

Sally You mentioned something before, Helen, which I thought was very interesting, it was around statistics and how much is sort of benefiting the sector or in this case the children and how much is the Government needing those statistics. I’d be really interested to hear any comments on that.

Helen I think there’s a huge focus on telling us where the areas of need are, I want to see an emphasis on telling us where the areas of strength are in our families. We have a focus on outcomes within Whānau Ora, a family self-managing leading healthy lifestyles, being economically secure, guardians of the natural environment. Those sorts of outcomes focus help us to see what is our plan, what is our future that we want to prepare for rather than always focusing on what is that that’s going wrong. And of course the cynic in me would say, if we look at it for what is wrong that’s where we’ll start putting all of our money. And in the meantime those resilience factors that we want to develop in our families get overlooked.

Paul There’s two aspects to it, I think. The first is the very positive one that community groups who are helping people with wellbeing are able to use these data to demonstrate their success and so successful community groups are able to expand, and I think this is a very good thing. The hesitation is that what we measure is what we manage and so it can be that the emphasis narrows to things that we record in our data and the

holistic picture of the experience of the entire whānau, for example, gets lost because we are just tracking child health or we’re tracking child education outcomes. And one of the really exciting ways that we approach Whānau Ora in the South Island is that the focus is utterly on the holistic experience of the family and again and again I think this is the experience, Helen, that if we help one part of the family it has multiplier effects through the whole family; if we ignore some aspect like family violence then trying to make changes in the school system or the health system doesn’t have the impact that we would want. So data can narrow our focus when the community groups are continually challenging us to widen our focus to think about the whole whānau said.

Sally Very well said. If I’m being really cynical, how much of these positives you’ve been talking about have come about because it’s an election year?

Paul I think there’s definitely a cycle to budgets, that the first year after an election tends to be tight and constraining and in the middle year it loosens up a bit and then there is a $2 billion income package in election year, I think that is realistic. But I also think that the Government these days, through fiscal responsibility requirements, must always maintain an eye on the big picture. It’s certainly much better than it used to be when I was a university student where Sir Robert Muldoon would suddenly find millions of dollars to throw at his favourite think big project, we’re much more balanced and nuanced here and we can see the balance shifting over the electoral cycle. But those core platforms that we are trying to maintain a stable environment for the economy that we are trying to spread some of the gains from economic success through the whole community - that’s there in every budget to a greater or lesser extent.

Helen And I’m particularly interested in Oranga Tamariki. I was on the expert panel in 2015, so two years ago we were identifying that it’s not just about the placement of children in foster homes, this is far more important - about support families at the very beginning, a preventative focus - and I think that this Budget walks that tightrope of trying to invest in a new organisation, the Ministry of Vulnerable Children, but also trying to do what is right in terms of preventing children from getting into the hands of the State by strengthening families, by looking at the additional learning support, by doing the things that are around risk factors, suicide, self-harm, some of those areas which are right on the margins of where we would look at it in a wellbeing index. So of course, it’s election year, we’re looking for a positive budget but a lot of those initiatives were created many years ago.

Sally That’s really good to know actually.

Sara One of the things I’ve really enjoyed about this discussion is that we’ve managed to come at it from two really fascinating angles. So one seems quite straightforward and budgetary - are we doing enough to address economic hardship? - CPAG expects that the changes to the Budget will result in some improvement for around 50,000 children in severe poverty

although will continue to keep an eye on the 100,000 to 150,000 that won’t benefit enough from the changes. Well that’s a matter of economic hardship. But what we’ve also asked today is does our Budget tell a story about our purpose in life and what our society will do to foster flourishing children and whānau? I think that’s a pretty exciting question. We’ve looked at different ways that we may have started to answer by starting to invest in health, education and sort of physical infrastructure. I’m wondering whether either of you would like to add any closing thoughts to what’s been a well-rounded and rich discussion today?

Helen I’ll just talk about adding that resilience to families. There’s two nice announcements that the Minister for Māori Development made which I think are about strengthening Māori families but also the picture of our nation. One of them is around strengthening marae, not just the infrastructure of marae but those people who keep the marae alive and flourishing. ‘Marae Ora’ he’s calling it and that’s a really positive dimension. Also Māori tourism, and many of our families in Kaikoura whose whole economic outlook has been shattered through the events of 14 November [2016], they want to start again. And it’s not about putting their hand out for necessarily for income support, it’s for rebuilding their businesses and their contribution to the nation that they made through a tourism lens. So there’s some things in there which I think are about our national story and obviously we’d like to see more but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that building families comes just from an income level, it can be through tourism, regional growth, cultural development.

Paul I think one of the questions at the macroeconomic level which keeps on coming up is the division between economic policy and social policy and this Budget reinforces that really, there’s investing in a growing economy as one of its main priorities and then there’s social investment is another priority with a much smaller budget. We aren’t very good at integrating those two aspects into a single vision and consequently I think we are much better articulating what we’re trying to achieve in economic prosperity than we are in achieving social prosperity, community prosperity, whānau prosperity. So one of the wonderful things that Child Poverty Action Group does is continually ask us to think as a country about what is our vision for prosperous children? What do we want to give as our legacy to the next generation by ensuring they’re able to flourish as young people and to acquire the skills and the confidence and to give express to their mana when they become adults in their turn? We don’t carry on that conversation very well at the national level. It happens in schools, it happens in whānau, in families, but as a country we don’t find it easy to talk about the difficulties our tamariki are experiencing.

Helen I also endorse Child Poverty Action Group for that focus because I think it’s too easy to isolate a focus on children and say they are vulnerable or they have learning needs or let’s fix up that child over there when of course children come from families and what the Child Poverty Action Group has always done is say look at the broader social economic context. If we want our children to thrive we need to fix up the walls around

them.

Paul Kia ora.

Sally Exactly. Kia ora, that seems like a fantastic place to finish off. I’d like to thank you both very much. I think sometimes budgets can be a wee bit overwhelming and a bit economics-y - if I can say that, Paul? - but thank you for putting it in an understandable perspective. Sara, any final words?

Sara Just humbled by your contributions today, thank you for sharing your thoughts at a highly analytical technical level but also on a visionary level about what it means to have prosperous children in Aotearoa.