However, not everyone is convinced the plan is on the right track.
In her media release on the refreshed strategy for 2024-27, Child Poverty Reduction Minister Louise Upston talked up the government’s actions in its first year to improve the lives of children and young people.
She cited tax relief, more affordable early childhood care, and setting ambitious targets to raise outcomes in health, education, housing and law and order.
A mere day after Ms Upston’s announcement, a whooping cough (pertussis) epidemic was declared in New Zealand, with at least one infectious disease authority saying our dreadful vaccination rates were to blame.
In March the government set a target of 95% of two-year-olds being fully immunised by 2030.
There is a long way to go. The result for the three months to the end of June this year was 77.9% of 2-year-olds fully vaccinated compared with 83.1% for the same time in the 2022-23 financial year.
While vaccination rates remain low, the country is also at risk of another measles epidemic, something public health officials have been warning about since the last big outbreak in 2019. That tragically spread to Samoa resulting in 83 deaths there.
The urgency of raising vaccine coverage was highlighted recently by the discovery of a measles case on Waiheke Island.
Incomprehensibly, the government is going ahead with cuts to the National Public Health Service. That news came the same day the whooping cough epidemic was announced.
It is difficult to believe there are millions of dollars being wasted in public health, given years of underfunding in this area.
The child and youth strategy has three priorities: supporting children in the first 2000 days, reducing material hardship and preventing harm against children.
Part of the first 2000 days’ focus is on supporting positive parenting practices.
Where does that fit with the news Parents Centre, the country’s largest parent support centre and education provider, offering childbirth and parenting classes in more than 60 places, is to close at the end of the year?
Rising service delivery costs and reduced national funding availability in a tough climate for charities are behind the Parents Centre demise.
Midwives are not convinced other providers can fill the gap left by the organisation which has been working in this area since the 1950s.
A change in the refreshed strategy causing consternation is the removal of mental wellbeing as a standalone priority, something added in 2022 in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
RNZ reported officials warned against this move because of the risk of losing one of the few "hard" levers Ms Upston’s ministry had to force agencies to work together to improve child and youth mental wellbeing.
It is also difficult to understand why the refreshed strategy has downgraded the importance of food security, given the news the latest New Zealand Health Survey results for last financial year show the proportion of children in homes where food ran out sometimes or often had increased by almost 6 percentage points from the previous year, going from 21.3% to 27 %. The Child Poverty Action Group has expressed concern about this and the removal of the measure relating to housing quality.
As the group put it, there is a sense that some harder goals have been removed and replaced with goals that are easier to artificially achieve.
For instance, the number of children without access to adequate food was indisputable, but the number of families receiving a benefit could be adjusted more easily. The government could create barriers for people to access income assistance, and then claim success in lowering the number of children in households reliant on a benefit.
Ms Upston, who faced criticism earlier in the year for weakening the government’s poverty targets without warning, has much work to do to prove the strategy is coherent and its ambitious vision is more than wishful thinking.
