There is real poverty out there and we need to deal with it compassionately, humanely and as a decent society.

But it does no one any favours by exaggerating it for effect or political agendas.

Peter Dunne in a recent address to Petone Rotary:

Feeding the children

I would also like to talk about breakfasts, lunches and our children.

There has been some very useful media coverage recently of the issue of children in lower decile schools turning up without breakfasts and often without lunch as well.

It goes without saying that no child can thrive, let alone learn, in such appalling circumstances, and it is a blight upon us all as New Zealanders that any child in this country should suffer like this.

Unfortunately, I think we also have a lack of clarity around this issue, when we truly need all the insight and understanding we can muster if we are to resolve it.

Of course, we owe it to every child in the country to make sure they are fed and looked after.

But who, in the first instance, is the “we”?

Let us not beat too lightly around the bush here: first and foremost, the “we” are the parents of any child.

If you have a child, your very first duty is to provide for their welfare.

And it does not get more basic than feeding them.

We must ram home parental responsibility and we must do so without apologising.

And when there are situations where people simply cannot provide properly for their children, then we must look at how society can step in, be it with school food programmes, from charities or corporate sponsors, whatever it takes.

Our children must be fed.

I, however, do not feel that the cause of these children is helped by the fiction that seems to have been accepted as fact, that there are 270,000 children in poverty in this country.

That is a politically-loaded number which actually has little to do with any real measure of poverty – it certainly does not mean there are 270,000 starving children heading off to school each morning.

As Rodney Hide – who is saying much more useful things since he left politics – said in his Sunday newspaper column recently, the 270,000 figure is a very relative term.

That figure is based on a household’s net income being less than 60 per cent of an equivalent sized household’s median income.

The cut-off income for a couple with four children is just over $1000 a week, net.

Enough for cereal for breakfast, and a couple of sandwiches and a piece of fruit for lunch for all of those four children.

Certainly it would be tight.

And, no, I would not want to be living on it, but let’s not call it poverty.

Being poor is having much less than that.

Unfortunately, it is ideologically driven and self-serving exaggeration such as this by the proponents of some causes that – even if well intentioned – starts to dent the credibility of their cause.

There is real poverty out there and we need to deal with it compassionately, humanely and as a decent society.

But it does no one any favours by exaggerating it for effect or political agendas.