Reforms a grim legacy for NZ kids

Community Action, Dec 9, 2002

FLORENCE, ITALY -- New Zealand's children bore the brunt of the country's neo-conservative policies in the 1980's and early 1990's. The country led the world then in reducing and privatizing social programs. The result has been increased child poverty and suicide rates among youth says a recently released report, When the Invisible Hand Rocks the Cradle; New Zealand Children in a Time of Change, claims. (View the report by link on our website communityaction.ca).

Stating that 18 years of economic and social reforms created "a grim legacy of poverty and ill health among New Zealand's children", the report, credits policy changes from 1984 to the mid 1990's of free trade, deregulation, privatization and welfare cuts for the legacy.

Dr. Alison Blaiklock, a public health physician and one of the reports authors said the result had been

* poverty,

* more youth suicide,

* overcrowding,

* Third World diseases, hopelessness and despair and

* a starker contrast between the haves and the have-nots.

Among the findings were: children and babies are more likely to live in deprived areas; New Zealand's infant mortality rate was by 1987 the 22nd lowest in the world and by 2000 was 19th; youth suicide among males doubled between 1985 and 1989; and one in ten child deaths are from communicable diseases associated with poverty, such as rheumatic fever. Most affected are the indiginous Maoris and the Pacific Islander groups who have migrated to New Zealand over the past 30 years.

The report, commissioned by the Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy, a UNICEF research unit, says that these reforms were among the most sweeping in scope and scale in any industrialized country, but were never monitored for their effect on children despite a request in 1997 from the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child for an impact study by the New Zealand government.