There is no poverty in New Zealand. Child poverty is a major problem. The government is not doing enough. The government’s approach is radical.

All of these statements could be true. It just depends on how poverty is measured and defined.
 
More than mere semantics, definitions matter. Different definitions can yield different statistics on poverty, and different policy solutions.
 
Case in point: last week, the media reported that the government has been advised its policies will not help people in poverty. In 2013 the Ministry of Social Development advised that the government had a “credible and wide-ranging programme to address poverty which targets addressing a number of its causes and effects”. Yet, it was unlikely to “result in a large reduction in measured child poverty” in the short to medium term.
 
Now, is the obvious conclusion (as reported in the media last week) that “the government is aware its programmes have been doing very little to help children out of poverty”?
 
Ignoring the fact that the advice received in 2013 does not take into account the most recent policy announcements, this case illustrates how different definitions of poverty lead to different conclusions on whether policies are successful.
 
In fact, the advice to government, obtained by Radio New Zealand, stated that while living with “very low income for even one year is not what we would want for our children, it is the on-going experience of low income year after year that is most likely to have negative impacts on children.”
 
Few in the mainstream media chose to take the angle that the government is following advice to achieve long term impact.
 
If the poverty definition ignores the persistence of deprivation, it will miss the different policy solutions that people in different circumstances require.
 
Is poverty simply about being poor, or being poor for a prolonged period of time? Are families who suffer deprivation in one year suffering from the same kind of poverty as families facing deprivation over generations? Simple income and material deprivation measures do not reveal these nuances.
 
An inability to radically pull people out of poverty in the short to medium term is not a sign of policy failure.
 
For entrenched poverty, it takes time to address root causes if the solution is going to be sustainable. And it is possible that some of the immediate measures could sacrifice longer term outcomes.