The Auckland City Mission says addressing food insecurity must be a critical priority in Budget 2023, which the Government will unveil later this week.
Mission chief executive Helen Robinson told Q+A that the longer the people had to go without, the riskier things could become.
"The more hungry we are, the more we will see unrest," she said.
"Thousands and thousands of us just don't have enough money for food. I'm genuinely worried as to what will happen if there is not a clear response to that in this budget."
She said the charity has seen the demand for food parcels grow over the past decade.
To address it, incomes and benefit levels need to increase, she said. Food prices have risen by 12.5% in the year to April - the largest increase since 1987.
Additionally, Robinson said there was an "utter lack of affordable housing", which affects "thousands and thousands" of people who were already struggling.
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"You don't have to look far or be far just to acknowledge someone who is struggling, who just doesn't have enough money."
She said every Government in the past 40 years had contributed to the issue.
"I have yet to meet an individual or party that hasn't tried [to tackle poverty].
"We are where we are because we, as a country… have underinvested in the provision of affordable housing for 40 years," the charity's leader said.
She said there were only three options for solving the lack of housing.
"We're going to do that by increasing taxes, or increasing our debt, or spending money on housing and not spending it on somewhere else."
The country also needed to have an honest conversation with itself, Robinson added.
"How do we acknowledge the impact of colonisation? How do we actually see that poverty in our country has both a colour and a gender?"
Auckland City Mission research finds women, Māori and Pasifika are at the pointy end of food insecurity.
"Until New Zealand is brave enough and courageous enough to actually face ourselves in the mirror and see our own shadows, it's very, very easy to cast judgment on any one individual or [political] party,” Robinson said.
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Until then, she said she felt "a deep-seated rage of the reality of what is the suffering of so many of our people". She recalled a recent instance where a man under 25 died while in the Mission's transitional housing service.
"What we see here at the Mission is too many people who die and die young.
"And, particularly, too many Māori people who die young."
The Government has ruled out introducing a wealth tax, capital gains tax or cyclone-specific levy in the budget.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson will unveil Budget 2023 on Thursday. He said the "no frills" budget would have four themes: addressing cost of living pressures, the continuation of key services, recovery and resilience and fiscal sustainability.
Q+A is Public Interest Journalism funded through NZ on Air
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