THE PANDEMIC OF POVERTY

This Christmas has highlighted the increasing number of folk who are going hungry. Perhaps its time we asked Unicef for its help...

'I love Christmas. Love it. If I had my way it would be 100 percent Christmas carols, novelty jumpers and decorations for weeks - and New Zealand will not thank me for it.' Jacinda Ardern.

THIS CHRISTMAS WEEK the food banks have struggled to meet the demand on their services. At the Auckland City Mission you can no longer walk off the street and expect to receive a food parcel. In an attempt to manage the demand, folk have been requested that they make an appointment. According to one mission worker, they have been receiving up to 70,000 phone calls a day. While some of these phone calls are obviously repeat  calls from people finding it difficult to get though to an under-pressure City Mission, it is a grim indication of the desperation that is widespread in the community.

In Christchurch  there have been long queues outside the Christchurch City Mission. The Press  has reported that such has been the demand  for food parcels that a section of the street outside the City Mission has had to be closed in order to accommodate the upsurge in traffic. They might be playing 'Snoopy's Christmas' ad nauseam on commercial radio but there's little Christmas cheer evident on the streets.

Of course much of this economic distress could have been alleviated if the Prime Minister had not flatly rejected the widespread  community call for benefits to be substantially increased. Which is also what the Government's own welfare working group advised as well.

So this 'empathetic' Prime Minister, who says she wants people to be kind to each other, is complicit in enforcing the misery and sheer desperation that many folk will face this Christmas and into the New Year and beyond. Not that Ardern seems to care anyway. A fortnight ago, leaving Deputy Prime Minister  Grant Robertson to front the Ihumatao decision, Ardern was doing the round of various media outlets happily telling fawning radio DJ's and breakfast television presenters about how much she loved Christmas and that she was doing most of her Christmas shopping online. There were other banalities but you get the picture. If Ardern lived in an another age she would of been telling the hungry peasantry to 'eat cake'.

Given that this Labour Government has shown more concern helping those at the top end of town,  perhaps its time Unicef came to the aid of the folk that Labour has abandoned to the wolves. With one in five New Zealanders now estimated to be going hungry regularly (otherwise known as 'food insecurity) there is certainly good reason for Unicef to intervene.

This would not be without precedent. In the United Kingdom Unicef recently launched its first ever domestic programme to feed the growing number of hungry people in Britain. Labour MP Zarah Sultana has commented:

'In one of the richest countries in the world, our children should not be forced to rely on a charity that usually works in war zones and in response to humanitarian disasters. The only scandal here  is this rotten Tory government and its policies which have resulted in 4.2 million children living in poverty, a number that will only rise due to the coronavirus. While children go hungry, a wealthy few enjoy obscene riches. When are we going to end the grotesque inequality that scars our society?'

Its a question we should be asking here as well, although its not a question that will asked by any Labour or Green MP.  While much has been written about the coronavirus pandemic and how swiftly and decisively the Labour Government dealt with it, a whole lot less has been said about the growing pandemic of poverty that is spreading throughout the country. The Labour Government has not only ignored this growing pandemic but actually chosen 'to keep people and families in poverty' - as Brooke Stanley Pao of Auckland Action Against Poverty has observed.

If this Labour Government isn't prepared to meet its social responsibilities then Unicef should be asked to intervene in much the same way as it has done in the United Kingdom.