Today is Budget Day eve, an appropriate time to be thinking about what the morrow might bring when it comes to policies and solutions. So, following last week’s column on why centre-right voters might be concerned about inequality, here are some policies that a centre-right government could implement. I don’t necessarily expect to see anything…
At the moment, the left is dominating the debates on income inequality. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of reasons for people on the centre-right to be concerned by widened income gaps – and plenty of things they can say on the subject. Here are just three. The first reason…
The Maxim Institute thinktank have a new paper out on how to measure poverty – and it endorses the idea that people need to be able to participate in society, not just survive, if they are to be deemed to have escaped poverty. This is significant because ‘participation’ can be such a dividing line in…
The Reserve Bank has just published a revised set of its household balance sheets – how much New Zealand households own and owe. The data is significant because it includes for the first time some things like how much households have invested in businesses that aren’t listed on the stock exchange. The result of the…
I’ve just come across this graph about who gets to go onto higher education in developed world countries – and it seems to make pretty damning reading for New Zealand. Basically, it suggests that if you have highly educated parents, in this country you are nearly 10 times more likely to be in higher education…
Yesterday’s announcement by John Key that, in future, salaries for MPs will rise only in line with salaries for ordinary public sector workers is a big deal for two reasons. First, it provides more evidence that the public is very concerned about inequality in general, and high salaries in particular. Key has made noises about…
One of the things that banks like to do is send out research notes about what they think the “key themes” of the future will be. The ANZ research note issued earlier this month is typical of the genre, with a lot of phrases like “change is the new normal” and “the trend is your…
For years now, one of the main reasons given for dismissing inequality as an issue has been about economics: you need income gaps to generate growth. Without a wide gap between rich and poor, who would have the incentive to work harder and do the things that generate income for everyone? That argument, which had…
I was speaking a little while ago at a literary festival, in a panel session on poverty and inequality with Canterbury University’s Bronwyn Hayward and broadcaster Wallace Chapman, when an audience member got up and spoke, with great emotion, about the struggle that she and her husband faced in making ends meet on his salary…
I’m delighted to have been awarded the 2014 Bruce Jesson prize, to work on a book on wealth inequality in New Zealand. Wealth – as opposed to income – inequality is increasingly a hot topic. I also think it’s time that we looked not just at what’s happening in deprived neighbourhoods but also at how…