A new government report has laid bare what the Children’s Commissioner is calling a national shame, showing that around 170,000 New Zealand children are living in poverty and that material hardship has been climbing since 2022.
The Ministry of Social Development published the report, Child Poverty in New Zealand, on Thursday. Compiled by researcher Bryan Perry, it pulls together the latest data and analysis on how many children are going without the basics, and what that hardship looks like in everyday life. The report covers the 2023 and 2024 period, when the share of children in material hardship reached 13 percent, up from 11 percent three years earlier.
Children’s Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad said the findings should be a wake-up call for every leader in the country. “This report lays bare that New Zealand is moving backwards on child poverty. Material hardship has risen since 2022, meaning more children are going without the essentials they need to learn, grow and thrive,” she said.
Material hardship is not the same as simply having less than others. It measures whether a household can afford a basic list of essentials, such as fresh fruit and vegetables, a warm home, decent shoes and the ability to pay bills on time. When a family cannot manage several of those things at once, its children are counted as being in hardship.
Achmad said the human meaning behind the numbers was easy to lose. “Poverty feels like hunger. It means living in a cold home, missing out on school trips and sport, or ending up in hospital with preventable illnesses linked to poor living conditions that can impact them for a lifetime, or even cause death,” she said.
One of the report’s clearest findings is how heavily hardship falls on families living with disability. Almost 60 percent of children in material hardship live in a household with at least one disabled person, and among children facing the most severe hardship, two-thirds come from those households. Achmad said any serious plan to cut child poverty had to recognise the extra costs and barriers those families carry.
The report also measures New Zealand against other wealthy countries, and the comparison is unflattering. New Zealand did better than the European Union average of 14 percent, but it has now been overtaken by several countries it used to beat, including Lithuania, Latvia, Italy, Portugal and Cyprus. “New Zealand is a small, relatively rich country. It’s inexcusable for us not to be at the right end of these rankings internationally,” Achmad said.
Achmad has written an open letter to all party leaders, sent earlier this week, calling for a renewed commitment to children and a comprehensive, cross-party plan she has named a Child Poverty Accord. She argues that reducing child poverty should be treated as a long-term national project that survives changes of government, in the same way infrastructure planning is. “If we can agree a national infrastructure plan, then surely we can do the same when it comes to the rights of our children and young people in New Zealand,” she said.
With a general election due later this year, the Commissioner is pressing the point directly at those campaigning. She encouraged voters to ask their local MP and candidates what their plan is to lift children out of hardship. “Children cannot wait for the economy to improve. Poverty is harming childhoods right now,” she said. New Zealanders weighing up where the parties stand on this and other issues can use Newswire’s voting tool to see how their own views line up before polling day.
The Government has consistently framed reducing material hardship as a priority within its wider child and youth strategy. Minister for Child Poverty Reduction Louise Upston has said the way to move the numbers is to fix the basics and lift household incomes, pointing to measures such as increasing the in-work tax credit, lifting Working for Families thresholds, tax relief and the FamilyBoost childcare payment. When the most recent official poverty statistics were released, the Government noted there had been no statistically significant change across the three primary measures, and argued that its cost-of-living support would take time to show up in the data.
Critics counter that the current settings are not moving the dial fast enough. The Child Poverty Action Group said Budget 2026 did little to shift hardship rates, and advocates have repeatedly warned that families with the least are being squeezed hardest by high rents, food prices and the recent jump in fuel costs.
For Achmad, the report leaves leaders with nowhere to hide. “We cannot build a prosperous future while leaving 170,000 children behind. Ending child poverty must become a national priority and a shared commitment across Parliament,” she said.
Do you think child poverty should be a cross-party priority, and what would actually make a difference for families under pressure? Share your view in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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