This news item rang a long, strong note with me the other day. I have taught at two low-decile schools in South Auckland, and the child poverty documentary that everyone was talking about earlier this year actually angered me: not because of what it showed, but because the content was only skimming the surface. To see true poverty, you must work with the children in South Auckland.
Elizabeth and Randall's father is a drunk. A skinny, anguished, intelligent drunk.
He came here as a highly-educated refugee many years ago from a country in turmoil. Elizabeth and Randall were born here; their mother has since left the family and lives anonymously somewhere in the city. Elizabeth and Randall's father was tortured, hounded and nearly killed in his country. This one, comparatively, is a paradise. That's what his kids say he thinks.
Elizabeth, Randall, and their father live in a miserable state house house in Otara. I have been there. It is throbbing with mould, cold and dark.
"Elizabeth," I asked her in class one day early in the school year, "What do you like to watch on TV?"
"Oh," she said, "We don't have electricity anymore. So you don't turn the TV on."
I asked why they didn't have power.
"We can't pay it," she said, with some surprise, "Or phone or anything."
I asked her what they do about cooking dinner. She was silent for a while.
"Sometimes my dad can steal a gas cylinder and then we can cook some rice," she said, "And a duck if my dad can catch it."
And if he couldn't steal a gas cylinder or catch a duck?
"We just wait til next time."
Both kids were always - always - scrawny and malnourished, riddled with school sores, nits, and boils. I also suspected Elizabeth had scurvy at the beginning of the school year. Randall's teacher and I made sure they went to the school's breakfast club every day, had fruit from the Fruit in Schools programme, and fed them muesli bars from our own stashes. And this helped. They were wide-eyed at all the food there was available.
But they still had bare arms and legs in winter, just a pair of worn-through jandals between them, and a quiet resilience and watchfulness that is all too common in South Auckland children.
The family was well-known to the school's social worker. Every referral from us would mean that the kids came to school in better condition, with sandwiches and shoes, for a little while. It would peter out, though. It always does when there is an alcoholic in charge. There are a lot of alcoholics at the bottom of the social ladder, aren't there?
Yet Elizabeth and Randall are well-loved by their father. He came to parent-teacher interviews, drunk, of course, and cried about his country. The kids stared at the ground. He praised them for their academic performance. He spoke halting English, praised the school, used sodden hyperbole, vodka-tinted.
"I want their mother back," he wept once, before school, while the class buzzed around him.
Paula Bennett wants Elizabeth and Randall's dad to lose his benefit. Three missed phone calls to a defunct phone number, failure to turn up for work arranged for him (whoever in the world would hire this broken man?) or failure to adhere to a number of pre-prescribed social obligations, will mean that Elizabeth and Randall's dad will be out on the streets. And Elizabeth and Randall? Probably somewhere else. No doubt better off, without their crippled father crippling their lives.
A carrot, or a stick, or even a carrot on a stick - these have not helped Elizabeth and Randall. Their father has received no funded therapy or counselling for his trauma, no funded English classes, and little assistance for running his family's lives.
The worst bit? This is simply one example of thousands of people I have met in similar or worse situations in our country.
How does Paula Bennett intend on helping them?
Because punishment doesn't work on those the world has already failed.
