One-third of the country’s children, or 300,000, now live below the poverty line – 45,000 more than a year ago

For 14 days and 14 nights Elijah Saitu, 15, has lived in a damp motel room, bordered by KFC to the left and a Denny’s 24-hour takeaway to the right.

He spends his days watching music videos on television and eating white bread, tinned sardines, fizzy drinks and packets of chips.

“He’s suffocating,” says Elijah’s mother, Emily Fiame Saitu, who has been begging the government to help her family.

“It’s cut-throat in New Zealand. If you’re struggling you get left behind.”

Unicef and charities urge New Zealand to act on child poverty Read more

The Saitu family are a tragic portrait of New Zealand’s most shameful national secret: an epidemic of child poverty that belies the image of a Pacific haven offering equality of opportunity and a prosperous, clean, healthy life of plenty for all.

The family of six have been living in two motel rooms in South Auckland for a fortnight.

The motel bill is paid for by Housing New Zealand, a government agency, while the family wait for a state house that is warm and dry enough not to make the Saitu kids sick (they have all suffered serious respiratory illnesses from cold, damp homes).

Elijah, who is autistic, spends all day staring at the pink wall next to his single bed, stroking the flaking paint. His three siblings aged 17, 14 and 12 – also spend their days inside, watching music videos. Their parents are wary of letting them wander around the cut-price motel, which largely caters to solo travelling truck drivers.

None of the Saitu children attend school, and haven’t for months. Without a permanent address – or any idea when or where one will come – in the local catchment area, enrolling in any of the local schools has been a battle.

Two of the Saitu children are severely disabled and need to attend special education schools, where government places are competitive and difficult to secure. Apart from a few picture books and a couple of dolls their play and intellectual stimulation is nil.

“I feel like I am screaming for help,” says Emily Saitu, adding: “When I say we are desperate, people avoid my eye, they don’t listen to me. They don’t want to know that I am going crazy trying to make a life for my children.”

The Saitu children are not alone in their desperation. A third of New Zealand children, or 300,000, now live below the poverty line – 45,000 more than a year ago.

Unicef’s definition of child poverty in New Zealand is children living in households who earn less than 60% of the median national income – NZ$28,000 a year, or NZ$550 a week.

The fact that twice as many children now live below the poverty line than did in 1984 has become New Zealand’s most shameful statistic.

“We have normalised child poverty as a society – that a certain level of need in a certain part of the population is somehow OK,” says Vivien Maidaborn, executive director of Unicef New Zealand.

“The empathy Kiwis are famous for has hardened. Over the last 20 years we have increasingly blamed the people needing help for the problem.

“If you can’t afford your children to have breakfast, you’re a bad budgeter. If you aren’t working you’re lazy. But our subconscious beliefs about some people ‘deserving’ poverty because of poor life choices no longer apply in today’s environment. We have to ask ourselves as a society, are we really prepared to let our children grow up this way?”

We have to ask ourselves as a society, are we really prepared to let our children grow up this way? Vivien Maidaborn, executive director of Unicef New Zealand

For a third of New Zealand children the Kiwi dream of home ownership, stable employment and education is just that – a dream.

For poor children in the developed South Pacific nation of 4.5 million illnesses associated with chronic poverty are common, including developing world rates of rheumatic fever (virtually unknown by doctors in comparable countries such as Canada and the UK), and respiratory illnesses.

Meals are irregular and nutritionally poor, consisting of meat pies, hot chips and 99c white bread. School attendance may be patchy or skipped entirely, and protective clothing and footwear for the harsh New Zealand climate is a luxury.

While poor children don’t die of starvation in New Zealand, they increasingly live a strained existence.

“Poor children in New Zealand don’t fully participate in life, they miss out on so many things that make life rich and meaningful,” says Linda Murphy, a social worker with the Auckland City Mission. “Like music, like sport, like a full education, like the expectation that they will grow up and find a job.

“The momentum in these young lives becomes about survival, nothing else.”

The mission is located in busy central Auckland but the most deprived regions of this increasingly chaotic mega-city are in South Auckland, in the ghettoised suburbs of Otara, Papatoetoe and East Tamaki.

This is where Hirini Kaa, an academic on the management committee for Child Poverty Action Group, and an Anglican pastor, has lived for most of his life.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Homeless families are placed in temporary accommodation, including motels, until the government can find them a home. Photograph: Eleanor Ainge Roy

“It is interesting the world believes New Zealand to be an ideal country,” Kaa says. “But it’s more interesting that we also believe that myth about ourselves.”

Catch a bus or two from Britomart in central Auckland, and after an hour and a half and you will arrive in the urban slum of South Auckland.

Here, houses are wooden, damp and mouldy and often hold in excess of 10 people. Young children walk the streets in mid-winter with no shoes and gummy eyes. Looming over polluted streams and rubbish-strewn parks is the vast Double Brown Beer Brewery.

“Child poverty has always been here – especially among Māori and Pacific populations – but it wasn’t until homeless people started interrupting middle-class voters having coffee in central Auckland that the government decided to ‘tackle’ it,” Kaa says.

“If it’s segregated in South Auckland, fine. If it’s interrupting my latte asking me for money, we have a problem.”

Before the 2014 election the prime minister, John Key, said tackling child poverty would be a priority for his government.

The government’s child poverty strategy is built on getting Kiwis off benefits and into jobs.

New Zealand housing crisis forces hundreds to live in tents and garages Read more

But the problem is that any of New Zealand’s poorest children are now living in families with one or more parents in employment who still can’t get by or make ends meet.

“The consistent message from the government is that work is the route out of poverty, even though around 37% of children in poverty have two parents with two incomes,” says associate professor Michael Anthony O’Brien from the school of social work at Auckland University, who is also a member of the Child Poverty Action Group.

“The government is doing as little as they can get away with … the most significant action they’ve taken is increasing the benefit by about $25 a week for beneficiaries with kids. That’s it – that’s the biggest thing they’ve done.”

Darrin Hodgetts, a professor of societal psychology at Massey University and an expert on poverty in New Zealand, says the government’s stance that jobs would lead poor families out of poverty was nothing more than propaganda. “We have to stop blaming the poor for being poor,” he says.

“The myth that these families are somehow inherently dysfunctional and they can’t look after their kids. That is not true. That children are failing because their families are bad. It is not true. The state is abusive, the welfare system is abusive, and after decades of this many people can’t cope.”

Although child poverty is most visible in the major cities, Kaa says he has relatives in the isolated regions of the East Cape and Northland who are going without many basics – including electricity.

“The level of intergenerational, ingrained child poverty has reached a point that it is challenging the idea New Zealand has of itself as an egalitarian nation; the myth that we are god’s own country,” he says.

It’s Sunday night at the Rayland Motel and Emily Saitu is preparing for another week of holding out the begging bowl.

In her youth she worked for the ministry of justice as a secretary. She thrived on the order and routine of the job, and the regular pay cheques that allowed her to eat pancakes and cappuccinos at Denny’s with her brother.

But that was nearly 20 years ago – before she had four children, before her husband lost his job in a meat processing factory, before life in New Zealand became hard.

“When I meet my counterparts around the world they are deeply shocked to learn of such ingrained, desperate poverty in New Zealand,” says Maidaborn of Unicef. “We have been very good at selling a brand New Zealand. And increasingly that brand is being exposed as a marketing ploy, not a deep systemic reality.”

As Saitu pores over files of documentation – applications for benefits, applications for disability assistance, applications for help – her two daughters draw pictures in the misted glass of the motel room. Looking in from outside the whole door is covered in their finger paintings – squiggly patterns, rain drops and a frowning sun.

“New Zealand is ashamed of us, they want to forget about us,” says Saitu, aggressively wiping tears from her eyes. “New Zealand doesn’t want my children.”

• This article was amended on 19 August 2016 to correct the spelling of Papatoetoe.

