Reporting on the latest Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report has repeated its claim that New Zealand has the second highest average (mean) wealth in the world – and the highest median wealth. But is that true? It sits oddly with personal experience. Does anyone who has been overseas, or seen other countries depicted, think that…

A little while back, Finance Minister Bill English gave a speech in which he claimed that “poor urban planning is one of the significant drivers of inequality”. His logic is that bad urban planning drives up the cost of building new houses, limiting supply and thus causing rents to rise sharply and house prices to…

The combined wealth of New Zealand’s Rich Listers in 2015 turns out to be $57.4 billion, around $2.4 billion higher than initially estimated and a striking 12 per cent increase on the previous year’s figure. When the Rich List was announced in July this year, the National Business Review (NBR) put the value of its…

Following the announcement that the Green Party’s Russel Norman would be stepping down, to be replaced by Marama Davidson, I did this chart of Parliament’s gender breakdown. It doesn’t make pretty reading.Only the Greens have more female MPs than male. Labour have 12 female MPs to 20 male (although if they had won more seats,…

This document summarises the key points on inequality and poverty from the 2015 Household Incomes Report, published by the Ministry for Social Development. Inequality On most measures, income inequality is either at the highest level it has been since records began in 1982, or is very close to that level. It has also risen sharply…

Did the small child poverty package in May’s Budget makes the issue go away for National? Not in the slightest, according to the polling shown in the graph below. Concerns about poverty and inequality, which had already skyrocketed since 2010, have only increased in recent months – and the last poll was taken in June,…

At the end of last week, there was a brief flare of outrage about a shot from Beyonce’s new video (available only on Tidal), in which she apparently pours a bottle of champagne worth thousands of dollars into a swimming pool. As someone observed on Twitter, when there are people starving and homeless, this isn’t…

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…