May 18, 2022
Poverty wages come at a cost
Save the Children hopes tomorrow’s Budget includes measures to relieve the financial pressure on the country’s poorest whānau.
Advocacy and research director Jacqui Southey says it needs to lift benefit levels, tie tax credits to inflation and keep half price public transport.
She says families on welfare have an income shortfall of between $100- and $300 a week.
“It’s strange to think that keeping welfare incomes too low to live on is saving on government debt. Withholding spending, on one hand, is leading to the need to spend on the other and on more desperate measures such as emergency housing or hardship grants and downstream on poor education outcomes an increased spend on health and justice burdens,” she says.
Jacqui Southey says the Government had to spend a record $356 million on emergency housing last year and a $238 million on hardship assistance in the last two quarters, and such emergency spending is not sustainable.