This talk will discuss the wider picture of inequality and poverty, and the government's drive to reduce child poverty and, more broadly, to enhance wellbeing for all children. It will also look at the chances of a cross-party consensus on continuing efforts to enhance children's wellbeing. An under-appreciated fact is that some measures of child poverty have been falling for over a decade, under both National and Labour. National is committed to retaining the Child Poverty Reduction Act in some form; moreover, Labour's "wellbeing" approach and National's "social investment" are quite similar, and would both lend themselves to a continuing drive to improve wellbeing, especially amongst those most in need, and to invest more in the early years of children's lives.