Misleading Unhelpful Poverty Propaganda

Charity is Mandatory

The chattering classes were all agog and aghast for a couple of days earlier this month over child poverty in New Zealand.  Such a problem is worthy of attention and concern.  Unfortunately the protagonists are once again proving to be dishonest traders and so have devalued their cause in a silly attempt to shock and (in marketing speak) achieve cut through to the common mind.  They have grossly exaggerated child poverty in New Zealand. 

A few years ago, the cause d'jour was violence against women (by men).  We were painted as a terribly violent society, since research "showed" that one in four women had suffered abuse.  But common sense is a tenacious beast.  Folk (both men and women) started to think, "Well, I know lots of women--and I am very sure that one in four of them have not suffered abuse at the hands of men.  Where did that figure come from?  Well, in a specious, dishonest attempt to gain attention and traction, the cause-protagonists decided to define abuse so broadly that abuse itself became an inflated, devalued concept.  The end result: people dismissed it and stopped listening.  Those who continued to quote the mantra ("one in four women in this country has suffered abuse") were increasingly seen as coming from the lunatic fringe. 

Now similar folly is being perpetrated by the child abuse industry.  Sadly, the cause is worthy; the issues are genuine.  The propagandists, however, are dishonest brokers.
  How so?  Poverty is defined so superficially and generally that it has no meaning.  It is derived from an income statistic.  Therein lies the deceit.  One in four children in New Zealand is living in "poverty" but, given the definition of poverty, that will always be the case because around twenty-five percent of children will be living in houses where the income is below sixty percent of the national median (which is the most widely used measure of poverty).  According to the NZ Herald:

In fact, that figure is an income statistic. This year, 25 per cent of children in households surveyed by Statistics NZ for the Ministry of Social Development were in families living on less than 60 per cent of the median income after tax, adjusted for family size and composition. Some of those children are going without material necessities but by no means all.

Ergo, one in four children is living in poverty.  The uselessness of this definition can be illustrated thus: in a mythical country with ten families, the median income was one million dollars.  Around 25 percent of the ten families were living on an income of only 60 percent of the median.  That is, they were living on an income of $600,000 pa after tax or less.  Poverty thus defined is a meaningless concept.  It is certainly not newsworthy, since poverty so defined will always be so. Again, common sense will apply, and a national collective yawn will eventually be the result when, once again, "terrible" and "alarming" poverty statistics are trotted.

The best measures are qualitative ones:

A better measure of child poverty, also used for the commissioner's report, is a ministry survey of household possessions and economising behaviour. It asks whether the household can keep its main rooms warm, provide a meal with meat at least every second day, pay for water and electricity on time, provide good beds, replace worn out clothes, visit the doctor, replace broken appliances, afford clothes for important or special occasions, and so on.

A household that says it cannot afford any six of 16 such expenses is considered to be in hardship. Last year 17 per cent of children in surveyed households were in that predicament. That produces a national estimate of 180,000 children, not one in four but more than one in six.
However the households in hardship are not always those on a low income. The report notes that "living above the income poverty line is insufficient to protect some families from material hardship. Conversely, not all with an income below the poverty line experience material hardship." In fact, it says, only 35-45 per cent of poor households are poor on both measures.

Now we are getting into more realistic territory, and as a consequence the incidence of actual child poverty is dropping substantially, once more valid measures are used.

But we need to go further still.  Some poverty is wilful and self-caused.  It is a result of too much money being spent on alcohol, tobacco, the pokies, and drugs.  While children living in such households are not responsible for the sins of their parents, they most certainly suffer because of them.  The kind of help needed in such cases is quite different from households that have fallen on hard times due to no fault of their own, such as losing jobs, sickness, or debilitating health problems.  Then again there are families which have fallen into the debt trap and are now hopelessly imprisoned therein.  Others are temporarily struggling and will soon move out of poverty due to getting more work, having two or more jobs, or generating more household income by more household members finding work. 

The kind of help each household needs can vary substantially.  It is generally true that the best help is from neighbours and relatives and friends.  It is also true that this kind of help is often squeezed out by government programmes.  But one thing is very clear: helping is not optional.  Not for Christians.  But it must needs be the right kind--discerning, intelligent, constructive, and when needed, tough, not emotively driven by guilt and pseudo-pity.