The bleak picture for the children for whom there is no more

Friday, 29 May 2026

If you’re a child living in poverty, your future looks just as bleak after this Budget as it did before, Max Rashbrooke says.

Max Rashbrooke is a senior research fellow in the school of government at Victoria University of Wellington-Te Herenga Waka. He is a regular opinion contributor.

OPINION: Poor children, it appears, don’t deserve security.

The Government told us this Budget was all about “securing the future”. And for some that will ring true.

There’s more than $2 billion for defence procurement – so if you like maintaining frigates, your future is secure.

There’s $1.8b for extending the Waikato Expressway – so if you want to drive more quickly to Piarere, your future is secure.

There’s $500m extra for Corrections – so if you like locking more people up, your future is secure.

If you’re a child living in poverty, however, your future looks just as bleak after this Budget as it did before.

Currently, one child in eight– 12.6%, to be precise – lives under the poverty line, their families struggling to survive on less than half the typical household’s income. Many spend their days in cold, damp, overcrowded homes, in households where wages and benefits can’t keep ahead of bills, where fridges are virtually empty and there isn’t even a quiet place to study.

The Budget forecasts a temporary fall this year in child hardship, owing to the $50-a-week fuel relief package for certain families. But once that brief respite is removed, child poverty will resume rising until, in 2030, it hits 12.6% – exactly what it is now.

Once housing costs are included, even more children – 17.8%, or nearly one-fifth – are currently living below the line. The projection for that figure in 2030? – 17.8%.

At this point it becomes abundantly clear that the Government’s plan for child poverty is, in the long run, to do precisely nothing. As the head of the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services, Alicia Sudden, said today, “There is no security in Budget 2026 for our most vulnerable children.”

At this point, it also becomes clear why the Government chose last week to announce its rent hikes for state-house tenants: to stop those hikes from contaminating the Budget coverage. And don’t buy the line that there is something equitable about raising rents $31 a week for those in state houses while giving up to $30 a week to those renting privately.

As Ministry for Social Development figures show, 32% of families who get the Accommodation Supplement – the worst-off private renters, in other words – live in poverty. The equivalent figure for state-house families? – 47%.

The “Budget’s $9.5m a year for foodbanks and related initiatives might be superficially welcome,” says Max Rashbrooke, but they treat the symptoms of poverty, not the causes - inadequate wages and salaries and skyrocketing grocery bills.

State house parents, in short, are the poorest of the poor – and this Government has elected to cut their budgets by another $1500 a year. (And then to pour that money into the Accommodation Supplement, a sizeable proportion of which flows directly into landlords’ pockets.)

The Budget does boast a few spots of light, in fairness. Another 20,000 places in secondary school “trades academies” will offer better vocational pathways for young people.

The free school lunches scheme continues, albeit in a form so badly vandalised by David Seymour that, according to BusinessDesk, one in three of its meals gets rejected by students and tossed in the bin. There is also $93m to help sole parents into work.

But much of the Budget’s spending gets things back to front.

The Government has allocated money to tackle truancy and children’s “avoidable” trips to hospital with things like rheumatic fever. But despite ministerial claims to the contrary, neither of these is primarily a cause of poverty: each is more fundamentally a symptom.

Kids often drop out of school because they have to get a job to help prop up the family finances; and they end up in hospital with respiratory diseases because of damp homes and their parents’ inability to afford heating. Increases in family income, meanwhile, have been shown to reduce the very same child abuse that the Budget is spending over $90m to address.

On a similar basis, the Budget’s $9.5m a year for foodbanks and related initiatives might be superficially welcome. But once again it treats the symptoms, not the causes – which are, on the one hand, inadequate wages and salaries, and on the other, skyrocketing grocery bills courtesy of our price-gouging supermarkets.

This Budget is, like so many before it, a monumental failure. Ministers typically argue that slashing child poverty by half – officially costed at $3b a year– would be far too expensive.

But the long-term costs of child poverty are estimated to be around $14b a year, in worn-out bodies, worse school results and lost productivity. Failing to address child hardship is one of the greatest false economies we have ever known.

There is a saying, often attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, that the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members. And this is why we must look at the Budget through the lens of child poverty.

The Budget’s more technical elements – spending allowances, surplus projections, debt ratios and the like – have their own importance, but to a far lesser degree. We won’t have a flourishing society and economy, after all, until we decisively lift children out of hardship, and ensure that no-one’s talent is stifled through hunger and disease.