Introduction

Mirroring the picture reflected in the international literature, poverty, low living standards and income support receipt are distributed very unevenly among the population of New Zealand. (For useful international material, see Walker and Walker, 1997, and Part II of Gordon and Townsend, 2000.) The focus in this chapter is on that uneven distribution. The chapter summarises and reviews available statistical and descriptive material, highlighting the uneven distribution, the major groups receiving income support from the state, key aspects of the changes in that distribution over the last two decades and the data on living standards and their implications for children. Because of both their intrinsic importance and their significance for the discussion later in the book, the risks for families with children, particularly lone-parent families, are the subject of particular attention, as are the gendered and ethnic dimensions of both poverty and income support. While, as for the rest of this book, the focus is on the working-age population and dependent children, limited data on the position of superannuitants is included to assist comparison and to provide crucial background for the arguments made later in this book about the importance of political decisions and political choices exercised in policy decisions about poverty and income distribution. The chapter provides important quantitative background for the exploration of the impact of poverty and low living standards in the next chapter.

The chapter begins, then, with a brief general picture of the extent and distribution of poverty and low living standards. From there it moves to a more detailed examination of these general figures through a discussion of the ethnic and gendered distribution of poverty and of the limited data on poverty among disabled people. The next section draws together data on families and the unemployed population, with particular attention to families with children and lone-parent families. The chapter concludes with a brief discussion about housing and its impact because of the significance of housing costs and of changing housing policy in poverty levels and standards of living for the groups discussed in this chapter. The discussion at the beginning of the last chapter on changes in the pattern of income distribution serves as an important backdrop and context for the discussion here.