Dr. Tricia Keilthy:

I thank Deputy Bacik for her question on the New Zealand model mentioned earlier. From our engagement with some people working in New Zealand, we know it has seen first the establishment of the child poverty unit in the Prime Minister's office, and the Prime Minister is also responsible for child poverty reduction. That has really driven the agenda of reducing child poverty from the top down. The most effective change brought through in that country's child poverty Act was the amendments made to the public finance legislation, meaning there must be a co-ordinated approach for well-being and child poverty.

Even with the best plans that we have, we know the process can be quite siloed because the budget process is quite siloed. When it comes to decisions around policy changes and budgetary decisions that affect children's lives, we can have one Department providing a support that may be taken away by a decision taken in another Department. For example, if there is an increase in the minimum wage or in social welfare payments and there is no corresponding increase in thresholds for childcare subsidies, the benefit of that would be lost in some cases. It is really about considering the thread and interdepartmental connections between policy and budgetary decisions and making sure they are maximised to give the best poverty reduction impact. That would be really effective.

In the context of a national co-ordinated plan, we would love to see a specific target for one-parent families because levels are so high. It has been a quite intractable matter for many years through boom and bust, when lone parents have experienced some of the highest rates of poverty. That is continuing, along with people with disabilities. We need to ensure there are very strong and targeted supports and interdepartmental work in that respect.

On childcare, the National One Parent Family Alliance strongly supports the public provision of childcare. Looking at countries with the highest rates of employment among lone parents and the lowest rates of child poverty, these are countries with very high publicly provided subsidised childcare. From our perspective, it is not only about moving to the public provision of childcare and ensuring that it is adequately funded in order to have quality childcare for children and affordable childcare for parents. There must be good pay and conditions for workers as well because many lone parents work in the sector as well. We must ensure that is part of the whole mix. We see the new report that has been published and we hope there is action in that regard. Free childcare should be provided for lone parents under the child guarantee as well.