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November 2001 Newsletter

1 November 2001

We have been busy with members making submissions (in particular, early childhood education, Claire Dale, Ann Dunphy, Marianne Kayes). Claire also sent feedback for the Agenda for Children project and achieved a letter in the Herald for National Children's day 28th October. The letter points out the general invisibility of children, for instance the lip service given to children does not help families cope with the rise in the food price index. Claire and Dee attended a forums of discussions of government strategy in policy. CPAG's written response to 'The Social Report 2001,' as part of the review initiated by the new Ministry of Social Policy, is available on the website. Dee, Janfrie and Susan represented CPAG at the National Children's service for abused children in Auckland.

News:

• Construction of our new CPAG web page is well under way and members are urged to visit it. If you are looking for submissions or the electronic copy of 'Our Children' there is a link back to the old page. We are fortunate to have Adam Warner, Economics Department, working on developing the new page for us for us. Thank you Adam, it is looking very good! We want to have some on-line discussion and will email members about this soon.

•  We have been busy with members making submissions (in particular, early childhood education, Claire Dale, Ann Dunphy, Marianne Kayes). Claire also sent feedback for the Agenda for Children's project and achieved a letter In the Herald for National Children's day 28th October. The letter points out the general invisibility of children, for instance the lip service given to children does not help families cope with the rise in the food price index. Claire and Dee attended a forums of discussions of government strategy in policy. CPAG' written response to 'The Social Report 2001, as part of the review initiated by the new Ministry of Social Policy, is available on the website. Dee, Janfrie and Susan represented CPAG at the National Children's service for abused children in Auckland. See our website for CPAG submissions: http://www.cpag.org.nz/.

• The trepidation with which we awaited the outcome of the tax review was well justified this week. Our submission, that appears to have largely been ignored, is on the old web page and on the tax review web site: (<http://www.taxreview2001.govt.nz>).   There is little evidence of inclusion of the views of those who are not the business elite in NZ. CPAG has made a request under the Official Information Act to access the breakdown of the staggering $1m spent on the Review. We will be pursuing the review's failure to include the perspective of families and the unwillingness to grapple with the issue of tax credits for children as part of the tax system.

• The health sub committee has been making good progress on developing our policy for primary health care and making a contribution to the new edition of the monograph. On the19th September, 10 CPAG members attended the women's health action smoke free breakfast. A group of five members, motivated by the concern of Dr Innes Asher and other paediatricians over the continued deterioration of the health of Auckland children and the appalling increase in third world diseases, has been trying to see Helen Clark, with no success so far. In meantime we will make our case for urgent action to Steve Maharey on November 9th.

• Despite the rhetoric about children since the 1999 election and the new attention paid to children's issues in the MOSP, there has been no firm commitment to improving family incomes and no improvement in primary health care. We note that there have been improvements in housing for some and more money for early childhood education. We need all members to think how they can make the issues for children more prominent in the coming election year. Letter writing is one way, direct pressure on politicians another. If you would like to be more actively involved please contact an executive member. We hope to have the new edition of the CPAG report out in early 2002, with plenty of recommendations for politicians.