Littlies Lobby Keynote
Parliamentary Children’s Caucus
Grand Hall Parliament Wellington
15 October 2003

Children’s Day Whakatauki

Tau ana ko te noho tahitanga
O nga whanau, o nga tuakana
Me nga teina I roto I te whariki ngahere
Ara, ka puawai nga tamariki a Matariki

Mahia nga mahi o nga tamariki
Hei apopo ka tu
Hei rangatira

Peaceful earthy colours from the forest weave a mat
For the koru frond to rest upon, smaller koreu are securely nestled. From this embrace stars burst forth to realize their potential.

Fulfill the needs of our children and tomorrow they stand strong.

E nga rau rangatira ma e huihui mai nei ra I tenei ra, tena kotou, tena koutou, tena koutou katoa. Kia orana, malo alei, talofa lava, greetings everyone.

Thank you for taking time out of your busy schedules to listen to me this morning. As the newly appointed Commissioner for Children I have a lot to say, but also a lot to learn about the world of parliament and how best to progress the issues important to myself and my Office. I need your help to do this effectively in the interests of the children and young people of this country. The introductory whakatauki is from Children’s Day, which is a celebration of children to be held every year in the last weekend of October. I will come back to this and explain a little more before the end of this speech.

I have now been in the job for going on eight weeks. I came with a clear hope that key issues such as stopping violence against children, addressing child poverty and promoting the rights of children and young people would be the focus of my work. These are major obstacles to children developing properly and being able to reach their potential. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of New Zealand’s children grow up in loving and safe homes. My job is to recognize this and work to promote and extend opportunities for this potential, but also importantly, to represent those whose lives are blighted by things such as poverty and violence, beyond their control.

I realize increasingly how addressing these can only occur when there is genuine support for this across New Zealand society. Sometimes this means taking a stance on issues where public opinion is yet to move, either because they remain uninformed or because they express views that are shaped by horrific singular acts such as murders.

I am convinced that this leadership and responsibility for what happens to our children and young people is not the sole responsibility of Government, or indeed of politicians. Rather it is a shared responsibility. It is my job to stand up for children and young people in both public spheres such as with Government and other political leaders, but also in private spheres such as with families and communities. There is often a close, but not always easy relationship with media in doing this.

In my first few weeks I have been drawn into debates around violence against children, often through the so-called smacking debate and repeal of s59 of the Crimes Act. I don’t propose to cover this topic now, but would be happy to meet with many of you to explain the position of the Office. Importantly violence is not just a media opportunity, it is a fact of life for many children and young people in our community and one that requires cross-party support to solve.

Underlying violence against children are not just personal values around the use of physical force to exert ones will on someone else, but also a number of patterned behaviours and social circumstances that increase the potential for violent behaviour against children. Most notable in the literature is the effect of poverty increasing the stress on families responsible for raising children. My main message today is that we must prioritise addressing poverty as an underlying cause of extreme causes of violence against children. While this risk does not exist in isolation and many of you know the precipitating factors for violence, it is something that political will and public support can do something about.

A UNICEF report released in December last year summarized a number of key social and economic indicators that affected particularly households with children. You should note that the incomes of households with children are grouped in the LOWER deciles of households (see graph 1).

During the 1990s, the relative economic position of those households with children WORSENED over the decade, as shown in graph 2. Furthermore, this pattern was even more pronounced for Maori and Pacific children who experienced radically more difficult circumstances (graph 3).

Demographic projections for New Zealand in respect of children and young people, show that we will have just under a quarter of our population aged under 15 years by 2010, they will be younger and more ethnically diverse, and that as a total population New Zealand’s population is slightly younger than that of comparable industrialized nations.

Despite this, we continue to have children die of conditions that are largely preventable. Dr Peter Watson of the University of Auckland provided a meta-analysis of child mortality data showing that the leading causes of child deaths in New Zealand in 1999 were; drowning, traffic related injuries (including pedestrian injuries), and homicide (graph 4).

This is a shocking state of affairs. For those skeptics of the latest UNICEF report on maltreatment of children in rich countries where New Zealand shows up near the bottom of the table, Watson’s independent analysis shows that there is something very concerning here about how we treat our children and young people.

Poverty is an underlying cause of violence, often coupled with drugs or alcohol, marital stress and other risk factors leading to destructive pathways. There is something that you can do. The 1990s to the present, have seen the lowest income families responsible for raising children, both those who require benefit assistance, as well as the working poor where both parents or caregivers are in work to try and sustain the family, both require help. This requires direct financial aid from Government. Other macro-economic policies around employment and housing are largely on track to support these families, along with some signals of child care support, but more is required on providing cheap, accessible childcare to assist child poverty.

In work by John Jensen on the Living Standards Index based on 2000 figures, he found that slightly less than 30% of children in households are living in poverty. This is significant because the study uses practical everyday measures to determine what constitutes poverty in a household responsible for raising children. It also confirms evidence found in earlier studies by NGOs on the extent of child poverty in New Zealand.

It is clear that education is a key pathway to extract children and young people from a mire of economic hardship tracking for the rest of their lives, so it also important. Schools are environments where children spend so much of their lives and outside of their families, and they therefore have a major impact on shaping their values, perceptions and attitudes about themselves, their families, community and peers.

However, why should we accept that children grow up in poverty in this country? I simply do not accept this premise. It is true that every household in this country raising children and young people should have the support of our society to raise them. This is not to abdicate the direct responsibility of parents or caregivers, but to recognize that raising children has a benefit to our wider community and that some families do need help at crucial periods. These periods are during times of crisis or transition, just as the children and young people within them do. We collectively need to take action to address underlying causes such as poverty to change the cycle of negative life experiences for children and youth.

The Commissioner for Children has two main functions, advocacy and investigations concerning child welfare and child rights. The latter has tended to focus public attention around particular individual cases of child deaths as a means to highlighting service or practice inadequacies. The former has really been more subservient to this, as death is the ultimate price paid by children when they experience violence. This often catalyses at least short term action. However, it is time to move to a more planned approach in promoting the welfare and rights of children and young people. We need to move beyond the understandable moral outrage to a more co-ordinated approach with strong support for underlying causes of violence against children, poverty and promotion of an understanding of why children’s rights are important to every society, especially ours.

We have become too desensitised to stories of children killed or treated badly. Moving beyond the emotion of the moment to resourcing for action to improve their lot is required.

Clearly political cross party support is essential if we are seriously going to move children’s issues forward. These are endemic and multi-causal problems that cross generations and structures. This requires changing the way we think about policy, budgeting and service delivery.

This also requires each of us to act in a way that is consistent with our talk about how important children and young people are. Among these are two key ideas; firstly that of First Call for children. This means that children should have first call on societies resources so they may develop. Effectively this is a call for investment as a priority into children and young people.

Secondly, I want to promote the idea that children are more than just passive recipients of our protection. They are from an early age, actors in their own right capable of understanding in a limited way both the morality and complexity of action – both their own and other peoples. This is off course dependent on the age and development of individual children.

The implications of both of these are that children are capable of more active involvement in decisions affecting them than we have given them credit for. If we are serious about creating a society that cherishes its children, then we need to adopt the view that children really are worth investing in. For example, someone gave me a figure recently that while children comprise around 22% of the total population (0-17 years of age), they receive only around 5% of the total health dollar investment.

While each of us as adults have been children, we quickly forget the world of childhood and become preoccupied with our own adult concerns. Everything is interpreted through this worldview. How can we ensure that those things that are both important to children and also impact most profoundly on children are heard at cabinet, and are considered when legislation and policy initiatives are being considered? There are some simple steps that can lead us beyond rhetoric to action.

The way we value children is demonstrated by our behaviour.

Children’s rights are not oppositional to other rights such as those of the elderly or those with disability, but let them have an equal weight. As a population, more children are growing up in poorer (lower decile) households. These include both lone parent families and also low income two parent families where both parents are working.

There are many urgent areas that need addressing in relation to children and young people in this country, including in areas of youth justice where we for example have too many youth locked up in police cells in contravention of UNCROC (around 450 youths for just under 1200 nights in 2002). We have serious deficiencies in our mental health services for children and young people with evidence of inadequate ownership by health and education and care and protection services of children and young people with serious behavioural and mental health needs (tendency to pass off as care and protection issues according to Child Youth and Family Report on Child Mental Health & Wellbeing Report, 2002). There is also public opposition to the treatment of children and human beings with the difference in legislation in respect of corporal punishment, and minimum working conditions, as identified by the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.

When I look back on my term as Commissioner for Children I want to be able to say that I stood up to the challenge of not just being outraged at the way in which children are treated, but rather for identifying the causes of these and working constructively with whoever will work with my Office and myself, to make things better for children.

Having said this, I want to finish on another positive note, that of celebrating Children’s Day on the last Sunday of October. This will be marked by events all around the country to acknowledge that children should nurtured and treasured by all. As the whakatauki in my introduction said, “Mahia nga mahi o nga tamariki Hei apopo ka tu Hei rangatira”.

Thank you again for your time.