No government can call their tenure a success when people are struggling the same, sometimes worse off than what they were at the beginning of their tenure, when City Missions have been constantly struggling to keep up with demand and when things like child abuse stats have doubled – that is, jumped from 6000 in 2000 to anywhere between 10,000 and 13,000 per year by 2008.

This country is in a very bad way and it didn’t happen in 18 months, it has happened due to at least 30 years of poor policy that lacked vision and foresight. Everyone wants a quick fix, no one is prepared to battle through solutions.

Btw, WFF is not new – all it is is a revamp of family assistance, child tax credit, accommodation supplement and childcare subsidies under one new title (WFF). These things have been around for years in one form or another. The 2004 merely modernised the concepts in terms of the thresholds, rates and criteria.

These people are not denying the help WFF provided (which reduced the number of families in poverty), just noting that those not covered by it are left behind in poverty. As for the increasing difficulties such people were facing – rising power and food costs, the reason is that the CPI index covers all costs (cheaper manufactured imports take down the average), not just necessities. There is a case for the CPI increase to benefits to be assesssed in a different way based on their actual living costs.

IMO the real value of the benefit (in terms of affording necessities) has reduced by as much as the 1991 cuts because of inadequate CPI adjustments since then. Both parties know this and have chosen to ignore it.

This is the reason for the difficulty for those families on benefits today – and thus for them food banks are becoming a routine part of their support. But despite that, the fact that WFF lifted the low waged poor out of povertry means there are less families in poverty than there were – of course while less, yet more desperate than ever (thus the busy food banks – the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff).

“While the Working for Families package will lift half of these out of poverty, the Child Poverty Action Group’s evaluation of Working for Families clearly shows that around 175,000 children are being left behind.

These are the children of beneficiaries who do not meet the criteria to benefit from the package. Seventy-five per cent of the children of beneficiaries are living in hardship.”

It confirms my point rather than your own – it says that WFF would halve the number of children in poverty (help those on low wages) – but the problem would be still remain for beneficiary families. This is the position shown by the international standard survey showing WFF reduced the number of children in poverty.

Note – there is no direct connection between the number of beneficiary families and the number of fodd parcels as not all beneficiary families have resorted to this help and nor are the number of food parcels to those without children identified.

http://tvnz.co.nz/view/news_national_story_skin/789395

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/news/print.cfm?objectid=10411793&pnum=2

can’t seem to find the actual report that diane robertson wrote – it maybe on the child poverty action group website.

the rest is up to you! cheers.

Was it old people facing rising power bills, was it the rising numbers on IB and SB?

And one suspects that where families were involved it was families on benefits – whereas low wage families were benefitting from WFF – WHICH TOOK MANY FAMILIES OUT OF POVERTY, the others were facing rising costs without as much extra help (unless they found jobs).