Listener 3 October, 1987
 

Keywords: Distributional Economics; Social Policy;
 

I t was meant to be a book launching, but it was really a christening. Instead of us all standing around in a bookshop, gallery or library –  wine glass in hand, gossiping and complaining about the latest book awards – we commenced with an hour-long service in a plain church hail. And the packed audience were not the literati either; the majority were the local congregation –  Maori Pakeha, Samoan, including family groups.
 

Poor New Zealand is, for library purposes, written by Charles Waldegrave and Rosalyn Coventry. But without diminishing their effort, the book is also the product of the Family Centre of the Anglican Social Centre in Lower Hutt. Thus the unusual audience and approach.
 

As the service proceeded, I pondered on what was fundamentally different. That morning I had been rung by a journalist for the names of people who could, comment on the book. After the obvious academics, I began listing those with direct experience of the poor. Suddenly I realised that I was naming ministers, nuns, priests who had worked with and articulated the concerns of the poor. I searched mentally for someone outside the churches, picked on a school teacher, then recalled he was a Methodist lay preacher. Christianity was started as a movement of the slaves and the oppressed — “blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth” — and while its membership has widened, that concern remains prominent.
 

Very often the concerns are precipitated by parish pressures. That is what happened to the Reverend Charles Waldegrave who admits to having come from a fairly well-off background. Pauline O’Regan’s A Changing Order tells a similar story. A summary of academic information is in my Wages and the Poor, but no scientific survey captures the reality of families in difficulty through unemployment, sickness, inadequate housing, financial shortage and the personal and family pressures these generate. People like Charles and Pauline see them daily.
 

I am less taken than many with this book’s claim that there are a million people in poverty in New Zealand. This li substantially higher than the estimates ol the numbers in families with incomes below the poverty line (the material standard of living of a married couple on social security benefit). However, the book uses a wider definition of poverty. People may be in families with adequate incomes, yet still be poor–  families in which income is shared unfairly, or in which there is violence, or with people who cannot get jobs, people who are sick or handicapped, families who live in inadequate housing, or suffer from social insensitivity to such things as race or gender. Each of these phenomena is a form of poverty.
 

The result is a higher figure than the conventional income-based estimate. Whether this broader definition leads to a total of a million in poverty I do not .know, although I suspect may be a little high. In any case, the figure is not the strength of the book. Its value lies in the collection of a mass of evidence by Waldegrave and researcher, Coventry, which demonstrates that there is poverty in today’s New Zealand and something ought to be done about it.
 

During the Australian election campaign, Prime Minister Bob Hawke promised to eliminate poverty in Australia by 1990. What was remarkable was nobody laughed. The irony of it is that 12 years ago, when I met the Australian who heads their Social Security Review and whose work has made it possible to make such promises seem plausible, New Zealand was ahead of Australia in thinking and policy on poverty. Today we are behind. Even if the book were to stimulate a proper and urgent concern, we would take about three years to get t the current Australian position.
 

As I thought about these matters, a Samoan matron began speaking. Her child clambered over me – at least think it was hers, not that it mattered, for the Lower Hutt Family Centre is one large family. In this respect, few in th room were really poor because they had their community and their faith to support them during economic hardship. But not everyone has, nor need we penalise their spiritual life by ignoring their material needs.
 

It was that child who led ‘me to the parallel of a christening to celebrate and give thanks for a birth. For these people, the production of a book is a miracle. It is about themselves rather than some clinical academic topic. It had not occurred to me before, but book launches are usually  presided over by the obstetrician and, while I bless them, the mystery of the event gets, forgotten by the hardened attenders.
 

Supper followed the service, which ended with the Lord’s Prayer “in your own language”: English in authorised, revised, and modern versions, together with the quicker Maori and Samoan –  perhaps ,there were some other languages I could not hear. But it was no Tower of Babel for we all finished on the same upbeat.