One in 10 Kiwi children are still living without basic essentials like food, clothes, heating and housing.
Child poverty experts say there has been little improvement in the three years since the Child Povery Reduction Act was introduced and say the Government is not moving fast enough.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who is also Minister for Child Poverty Reduction, says there's still more work to do.
Ardern was at Tuahiwi School near Christchurch on Thursday to check out the impact of free school lunches.
"Everybody's got the same thing - there's no ‘he's got that’ or ‘she's got that’, everybody's got the same thing," says principal Mel Taite-Pitama.
Life is still really hard for so many thousands of Kiwi kids.
"There is more work to be done and we're really clear on that," Ardern said.
In 2018, the Government set itself three targets to reduce child poverty. First, to reduce the percentage of children living in poverty after the cost of housing is paid for - the target was 18.8 percent.
The statistics released on Thursday show that's been achieved and was 16.3 percent in June 2021. The Goverment missed the target before housing costs, however. That goal was 10.5 percent - and it's still at 13.6.
The key target though is the number of children suffering material hardship - or going without essentials. The goal is 10.3 percent, but we haven't hit that - it's still at 11 percent.
"The fact that in the middle of one of the biggest economic shocks in 100 years that we have continued to see child poverty decrease is a testament to the work that we've been doing and the policies that we've put in," Ardern said.
The child poverty figures show there's still stark disparities for Māori, Pasifika and disabled children - and that expensive and unhealthy housing is still a major problem.
What's more, they're not even counting the children who are homeless or in emergency housing. Stats NZ says measuring how they're doing would simply be too hard.
