Put up or shut up

Children’s Commissioner Dr Russell Wills didn’t want the job. He wasn’t interested. Until a meeting with then Social Development Minister Paula Bennett and a passion to change the lives of children eventually drove him to apply.

Four years on, Dr Wills says New Zealand is in a ‘remarkable’, world-leading place when it comes to discussing the issues around care of children. Yet, as a single-minded advocate for the worst-off children, he says there’s a long way to go.  

When the job of Children’s Commissioner was advertised back in 2011, with Commissioner Dr John Angus’ term due to expire, Dr Wills says didn’t even see the advert and certainly wasn’t looking for a job.

After spending 11 years away, studying and working in Australia, the United Kingdom and Wellington, he was finally back home and settled in his beloved Hawke’s Bay, the place where his family and friends were.
Hawke’s Bay, and Napier in particular, is at the heart of Dr Wills’ story. It’s where he grew up and where he lives today, near his parents and the house where he grew up. His father owned a pharmacy and Dr Wills tells stories of going out delivering prescriptions on his bike when he was 10 years old, or going to school barefoot in summer.  

Just as important as coming home, though, he had a job he loved, as Head of Paediatrics at Hawke’s Bay District Health Board. It was a job that was getting results, allowing him to make a real difference to the lives of children in one of the poorest district health board areas in the country.

A person of influence

So, when he was asked by local MP Chris Tremain, a man he grew up with, to apply for the job as Children’s Commissioner in Wellington, he wasn’t keen. ‘There was an incoming National government and I wasn’t convinced that would be good for children, or that I’d be keen to work with them.’

What changed his mind was when he was persuaded to fly down to Wellington to talk with Ms Bennett, who had just organised a Green Paper on child welfare with the intention it would become a new law targeting child welfare and poverty. ‘She told me about her determination to turn that into a children’s plan. I have always been taught to put up or shut. It was clear there was going to be a Children’s Action Plan and if I wanted to influence that, I had to be a part of it.

‘I thought, “This is actually quite exciting—a centre-right government with little track record of showing interest in children committing significant resources for the most vulnerable.” And I thought, “That’s something I have to be involved in!” ’

With support from family and work colleagues, Dr Wills decided to apply. His one condition for taking the job was that he kept working part time as a paediatrician. It was about staying credible for politicians and the public as someone working in the area he was talking about, and also to help him stay grounded, he says.

His decision has become a helpful bridge between policy and practise, allowing Dr Wills to see how government policies work and suggest changes. But it has also led to a heavy workload. He works two days in Wellington each week at the office of the Children’s Commissioner, two days with children with severe behavioural issues, and one day of mixing the two jobs, as well as nights on call at Hawke’s Bay Hospital. When we speak he’s getting ready for an unexpected night on call, filling in for a sick colleague.

Inhabiting two worlds can be tiring, but for Dr Wills it’s all for the same reasons it’s always been, the same reasons he got into paediatrics in the first place. ‘There’s nothing complicated about that. I love children! This is my passion.’

Improving the lives of children

Dr Wills describes the support of family and friends and the feeling of making a difference as what keeps him going, but it’s also that laser focus on making the lives of children better that drives him. Talking about himself he jokes, the conversation flows, relaxed, through familiar stories. But, when it comes to issues of caring for children there’s a subtle shift. The volume goes up, the words come faster and the voice becomes harder, the message more blunt. Dr Wills sounds frustrated at times, but most of all there’s an intensity to it that comes from a clear love of his jobs.

‘I’m the luckiest man in the world. I get to work in an area I’m passionate about, with some of the smartest people, who share my passion. And I still love paediatrics. I look forward to being on call tonight. Tonight I’m on a ward in the Emergency Department making sick children better. Why would I want to do anything else?’

Some of those children, he admits, will be struggling with serious poverty-related illnesses or facing violence at home, but those are the children he’s the most passionate about and they’re the ones he’s made the focus of his advocacy as Children’s Commissioner.

‘We’re still admitting 44,000 children a year with poverty-related illnesses. We still have far too many children abused and neglected and in parts of the country we have rheumatic fever rates similar to Africa and Asia. In a first-world country that’s not acceptable.’

According to the Child Poverty Monitor, which Dr Wills helped establish, almost one in four children in New Zealand today grow up in poverty. Child poverty, neglect and abuse are important issues for the country because they have a major impact on children’s development and their productivity and health in later life. However, he also says that focus fits who we are as a nation.

‘We’re a country that’s always cared about our children and about [people getting] a fair go. Not all children and young people today have a fair chance at success in life—and I don’t think there’s many New Zealanders that think that’s okay.’

Children paying the price for NZ’s wealth gap

It wasn’t always like this. In Hawke’s Bay and across the country, things are much worse for those in poverty than when he was a child, Dr Wills says. On those bike rides delivering prescriptions for his dad he would ride through Maraenui, the poorest area of Napier. He never considered it might be dangerous for a 10-year-old to be riding around with a stash of medicines. And it wasn’t. But you’d never do that today, Dr Wills says.
Today, the gap in wealth between children attending decile one and decile 10 schools is much greater, along with the gap in children’s achievement.

‘My school, Napier Central, is now a decile 10 school and almost exclusively New Zealand European. When I was at school there were heaps of Māori kids there and very few children did without. I can’t remember children coming to school with no lunch or no shoes. Well,’ he laughs, ‘no lunch anyway. Most of us had no shoes in summer.’

In the late 1980s, inequality was much lower and outcomes were better for children. But the statistics show a clear change in the early 1990s, when the government of the day cut benefits in the widespread belief it would encourage people into work, he says. ‘Child poverty tripled in 18 months and we never got back. We’re 20 years on and child poverty rates are still two to two-and-a-half times what they were in the mid to late ’80s.

‘We have a generation and a half who have been raised in real poverty; genuine material deprivation. That has exactly the impact you would expect: terrible health, particularly mental health, terrible education outcomes and very high stress, which reflects in their parenting.’  

Without fair or favour

His determination to fight for the needs of the children that are his charge has seen him speaking up publically and loudly even when it has been against his bosses in government.

During his time as commissioner he has set up an expert advisory panel, bringing together leading business people, academics and social service agency experts. The panel produced the 2013 Solutions to Child Poverty plan.  

When the government refused one of the panel’s core recommendations, to take figures measuring child poverty, Dr Wills announced his office would collect and release the information itself, establishing the Child Poverty Monitor.

He rates the work of the expert advisory panel as one of the two major successes in his time as Children’s Commissioner. The other one being the State of Care report into Child Youth and Family (CYF) released in August, which he said had ‘an enormous impact’ on CYF procedures, the government’s approach and the modernisation panel that is working to update CYF practices.

‘What we have done is make the invisible visible, for both child poverty and children that are abused or neglected or at risk.’

Dr Wills argues that the focus his office and others—including The Salvation Army—have put on changing the lives of the most vulnerable has led to major changes that put New Zealand in a unique, even world-leading position.

‘Before the office took this on, poverty and equality weren’t on the agenda for any party apart from the Greens—now it’s on the agenda of every party. It was the main driver of investment for the last budget, and the government’s already planning for the next budget.’

Those investments included raising the baseline of benefits for families with children, free doctor’s visits and new funding for prescriptions for children up to the age of 13, investments in social housing, early childhood education, and making sure children get on-time vaccination and protection for Rheumatic Fever, he says.  

‘These are new investments and they’re hundreds of millions of dollars at a time when finances are tight and we have a centre-right government. I think that’s remarkable! New Zealand is very unusual in that the needs of children who are at risk or poor is a policy priority for all political parties. I can’t think of any other country where that’s the case.’

Next steps for New Zealand

The key next step is to monitor child poverty and set targets on its reduction in the same way the government monitors and sets targets for all other areas from the economy, to health or bio-diversity, he says.

The area that research suggests would make the biggest difference would be fixing New Zealand houses that are in ‘a shocking state of repair’, leading to sick kids and long-term problems. ‘When my colleagues and I go into the houses of our patients we find cold, damp, mouldy houses that are not fit for human habitation—and it’s absolutely no surprise that children in these houses get sick.’

Other solutions are less easy and will require intelligent investment in Kiwi solutions, because New Zealand doesn’t have the wealth of other countries and can’t afford to just throw money at the problem.

Another positive, Dr Wills says, is that attitudes are changing in the wider community, with a poll before the last election showing poverty and inequality going from nowhere, to be the most important issue for intending voters. Surveys of parents’ attitudes to hitting children are also showing a shift away from violence, but Dr Wills says Kiwis still need to step up when it comes to New Zealand’s unacceptable rates of domestic violence and child abuse.

Poverty and inequality help encourage this violence, along with colonisation, loss of language, resources and mana, unemployment, ‘very easy access to ridiculously cheap alcohol’, the targeting of gambling machines in the poorest areas, and ruinous interest rates from finance companies. But people’s acceptance of violence is a major contributor, Dr Wills says. The White Ribbon ambassador, who wears his White Ribbon badge every day, says men in particular need to take responsibility.

‘Men have to be the solution for men’s violence. White Ribbon is a movement of men who take responsibility and encourage other men to do the same. It’s about taking responsibility for their behaviour and seeking help.’
But he also has a message for people who want to judge. ‘My experience of many, many violent families it that the vast majority of violent people—men and women—want to change, but don’t know how. It’s what was modelled for them. Violence is often common in their neighbourhoods and family and they need someone to walk alongside them and help.

‘What doesn’t work is telling people they’re terrible people and they just need to sharpen up. That’s not only ineffective, but brainless! Nobody should expect that would work. You need to engage people and support them to make the changes they want to make.’

As for his own role, he feels his office has laid a foundation for changes that could significantly impact the lives of the most vulnerable children in society, but it will take action from everyone in the future to make sure those foundations are built on.

‘It requires public support. It requires faith communities, NGOs, large organisations, employers and local government to all be saying that we believe in a fair go for all New Zealanders—particularly children. And it means we need to invest carefully, but purposefully, in our youngest and most vulnerable.’

As for Dr Wills, having laid those foundations, his term as the Children’s Commissioner is due to end in June. He hasn’t decided what’s next. His only firm plans involve making sure everything’s in good shape for the next commissioner, and enjoying time with his own children and friends on an annual summer camping trip to Mahia Beach.

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by Robin Raymond (c) 'War Cry' magazine, 31 October 2015, pp 5-7.
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