The recent fate of UK leaders in New Zealand highlights the difficulty of parachuting in managers from one country to another. Every country has different rules for its public services – which is why UK civil servants aren’t always a hit overseas. “An unexpected journey” is the subtitle of the first Hobbit film, New...
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This week’s Listener carries an account of three weeks I spent in a cold, dirty boarding house in Wellington, researching the lives of people who have ended up at the bottom of the inequality spectrum, and how they are treated. It was an eye-opening experience, and I urge everyone to read the piece, out...
Read more →Our first talk on inequality at Te Papa, on September 13, was a huge success: a great crowd of well over 200 people, and a fantastic array of speakers setting out all the reasons – personal, social, and economic – why we should worry about the widening divide. Now, we’re gearing up for the...
Read more →The Living Wage campaign launch in Wellington a few weeks ago was a powerful lesson in the way that equal opportunities and equal incomes are inextricably linked. The highlight of the launch was a speech from Sosefina Masoe, a cleaner. Sosofina, who featured in this Dominion Post story, told how she and her husband...
Read more →The latest Roy Morgan poll, released on Friday, shows National’s lead continuing to fall and economic concerns dominating all others. But deeper down in the figures is something far more interesting, and in a way surprising: the gap between rich and poor is worrying more and more New Zealanders, and now bothers twice as...
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