Breaking the cycle

Our failure to improve the lot of disadvantaged families costs us all. A new report calls for increased accountability for officials and more trust in frontline initiatives that work

- REBECCA MACFIE

Late last year, one of New Zealand's most powerful public servants made a startling observation: "For the first time in recent history, there is a possibility that the next generation won't be better off," wrote Treasury chief executive Caralee McLiesh.

Her judgment was based partly on the impact of climate change - which will be experienced most severely by the young and those who have not yet been born - and partly on the rise of geopolitical instability.

But it's also because of factors that are right under our noses: "Younger people fare worse than older people in three priority areas: mental health, educational achievement and housing quality and affordability," McLiesh wrote. "The latter is particularly the case for those who do not own their own homes."

Her warning that our kids and grandkids may be worse off than us was contained in Treasury's first-ever wellbeing report, "Te Tai Waiora", a document required under the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Act. In 114 carefully referenced pages, it reported a swathe of detail on the state of the nation: tenants here pay some of the highest rents in the OECD; the children of rich parents are more likely to be rich when they grow up and the children of poor parents are more likely to be poor; our 15-year-olds are scoring lower in reading, science and maths over time; we have high - although declining - rates of child poverty, the cost of which ranges from a conservative $6.3 billion to $16.3 billion a year, according to Te Tai Waiora.

No one took much notice. In our 15-minute news cycle, Treasury's wellbeing analysis was gone in a flash, joining the mountain of reports and initiatives that have sounded various alarms about hardship, poverty, alienation and inequality written by myriad expert panels and government agencies over the years.