Caught in the net

Three years after a landmark report on the broken welfare system, poverty remains a serious problem. Is anyone listening?

- REBECCA MACFIE

In April this year, Emeritus Professor Innes Asher wrote to the Minister of Social Development, Carmel Sepuloni. There was nothing unusual about that; she has corresponded with politicians for years.

Ever since she made the link between political decisions made in 1991 and the epidemic of a disease she was seeing as a paediatrician and respiratory specialist at Starship Children's Hospital small children with pneumonia that advanced into lung-scarring bronchiectasis and rheumatic fever that too often triggered lifelong heart disease and serious skin infections - she has been trying to make politicians listen.

The deep cuts to welfare benefits in 1991 - reductions of up to 27% had created a Petri dish for the infectious diseases she was now treating in unheard-of numbers.

Without enough money to get by, families were crowding together to save on rent; without enough money for good food, children weren't getting the nutrition vital to a healthy immune system; without money for heating, their houses were cold and damp and the resulting mould harmed their respiratory systems; without money for doctors' visits for minor illnesses, the minor became major; because children were too often sick, cold and undernourished, they didn't learn as well; without enough for the necessities of life, these households were stricken with acute stress.

Decades passed, and the conditions established in 1991 worsened (see first graph on page 26). When extra relief was provided to families on low and modest incomes, governments of both stripes excluded from the full package children in households receiving benefits. Punishments were designed into the welfare system so that even families raising kids risked losing half their incomes for breaching this or that rule.