What keeps people in poverty? Aren’t the minimum wage and the benefits enough to live off? Why are there 285,000 children in New Zealand being raised in poverty? Surely it is mismanagement of money, and the fact that people have too many children. People are lazy and want to stay on government hand outs.
These are the excuses that some New Zealanders trot out to excuse turning an uneducated blind eye to the suffering of our fellow countrymen / women.
Where is the understanding and compassion that should come in an egalitarian society, where we all respect and care for each other?
Emily Garden is the Project Officer for the Family 100 Research Project – a ground-breaking project that followed 100 Auckland families living in long-term hardship. Family 100 seeks to give a voice to these families in order to understand what factors work to keep people in hardship while others are able to move on to lead more secure lives. Emily has a Masters in Sociology from Goldsmiths College, University of London, and a background that includes tertiary teaching and community mental health.
Emily explains that many of the Family 100 Research Project participants spoken to describe having to choose between keeping warm or eating. One of the clients described it as a juggling act. One mother tells that she and her husband went without meals many times, just for the fact of knowing that their kids are fed. “We always put the children first. If it means we have to go without so they can have it, well so be it”. Another client described the stress that she goes through, and the everyday feeling of being overwhelmed. She said “I more or less thought there was no light at the end of the tunnel, I felt like I was knocking my head against a brick wall”.