enhancing food security and physical activity for maori, pacific and ...

Enhancing Food Security and Physical Activity for Māori, Pacific and Low-income PeoplesThose qualifying for the CSC include, as well as households receiving the mainbenefits and most NZ Superannuation recipients, Low-income earners and Family TaxCredit recipients (known as Family Support until 2005). The CSC criteria certainlyappear to cover most households likely to be food-insecure, even excluding NZSuperannuation recipients as in general not troubled by food insecurity. Almost bydefinition, households of low socio-economic status would generally qualify, andprobably most households with persons of Māori or Pacific ethnicities.A third possibility is that a ‘Smart Card’ scheme should be available to all householdswith dependent children, providing a given quantum at frequent intervals perdependent child. A ‘dependent child’ is any child aged under 18 and not inemployment or on a special benefit. In effect, this means virtually every person agedless than 18. This third option is a ‘universal’ rather than ‘targeted’ benefit (apart frombeing targeted at households with children, and targeted also in the sense ofencouraging consumption of specific foodstuffs), and has of course similarities to theuniversal Family Benefit of decades gone by. One advantage is its simplicity. Adisadvantage is the exclusion of low-income households without children. Its equityimplications are worth exploring further.Table 2.1.4 shows the implications in terms of the distribution of the benefit byhousehold income. The five quintiles (in terms of household income before tax) arefrom the 2006/07 Household Economic Survey. 17 The focus here is on specifiedhousehold types, with dependent children, namely ‘couple’ households with one, two,or three children; and one parent households with a dependent child or children s .Table 2.1.4: Distribution of the benefit by household incomeAnnual household income (1)Quintile BoundsariesUnder $25,800 to $44,900 to $68,000 to $98,000 and$25,800 $44,899 $67,999 $98,799 over NumberPercent of households in quintileAll QuintilesCouple with -- one dependent child 7.4 14.7 26.5 25.3 26.3 130,300- two dependent children 5.2 6.1 27.6 28.3 31.9 149,000- three+ dependent children 4.3 18.1 32.4 26.1 18.6 76,900One parent with dependent child(ren) only30.6 45.7 17.7 2.3 0.0 90,300Total Number of households 48,200 83,400 116,500 97,300 96,200 446,500in above categoriesAll Households Number 314,800 313,500 313,200 314,500 313,300 1,569,200Source:HES 2006/07 tables. Table 7. Statistics NZ(1) Income is before tax, from regular and recurring sources only. Income groups are quintiles(aggregated from Stats NZ deciles)s These household types do not include all dependent children, but do cover most.25