Jacinda’s record on child poverty

Jacinda entered politics to end child poverty. One thing she did (which was good) was to ensure we have annual data to monitor it. There are nine different measures of child poverty. Six of them don’t actually measure poverty – they just measure income inequality (so if your income goes up 5% and the median 6%, you are deemed to have gone into poverty which is nonsense). The useful measures are:

• Percentage of children living in households that experience material hardship (primary)
• Percentage of children living in households that experience severe material hardship (secondary)

You can debate whether you compare from the year starting when someone comes into office, or the year afterwards, so let’s do both for the primary measure.

• Jun 17 – Jun 23: 4,500 more children (-0.2% pop share) in material hardship households
• Jun 18 – Jun 23: 9,000 more children (+0.1% pop share) in material hardship households

So basically more children in materially deprived households, and almost no change as a percentage of the population. But how did the evil Key/English Government go? Again let us use both Jun 17 and Jun 18 so there is no cherry picking.

• Jun 13 – Jun 17: 56,200 fewer children (-5.4% pop share) in material hardship households
• Jun 13 – Jun 18: 48,200 fewer children (-4.8% pop share) in material hardship households

Maybe someone should be making a film about John and Bill and the 50,000 kids they lifted out of poverty.