Commisioner Of Kindness

He’s Committed To Changing The Lives Of Our Most Vulnerable Kiwis.

- Julie Jacobson

Boomfa”. That’s the word Children’s Commissioner Andrew Becroft uses to describe the moment New Zealand became a more inequitable country.

It was the late ’80s, early ’90s. The time of the global financial crisis and of Ruth Richardson’s “mother of all budgets”, of user pays educational and health reform, and of benefit cuts.

It was a different Aotearoa to the one he was brought up in. That New Zealand was where Andrew – born in Kuala Lumpur and the oldest of four siblings – played backyard cricket with his Kilbirnie schoolmates and where egalitarianism still fostered a sense of community responsibility and togetherness.

“When I was growing up, there was a very wide middle class,” he says as he reflects on his two-year anniversary as Children’s Commissioner. “We didn’t have the sorts of extremes of wealth and disadvantage that we see now. It went boomfa very suddenly. Right now, we have one in 10 children, about 100,000 – and you could fill Eden Park twice over with that group – doing it really tough.”

These are the kids living in homes without access to enough food, who are twice as likely to end up in hospital as their better-off counterparts, and who are at risk of poorer educational outcomes.

They are the kids who drive Andrew in his efforts to address childhood deprivation.

He winces at the suggestion there are people who continue to argue poverty is a lifestyle choice, that those 10% of kids are, somehow, at fault for the circumstances of birth.