Recently I was interviewed for an article by a Marlborough girls college media student, Michaela Brooke Baillie, on inequality in New Zealand.

One of the most disturbing parts of the article is the following section, in which she describes an evening meal at the local soup kitchen:

After everyone has eaten and returned their plates, a man approaches the serving area and asks if he may take every diner’s scraps home so he may have something to eat for the following days. It unnerves me to witness this occurring in my community, and shocks me to see that New Zealand is a country where poverty such as this occurs.

When people say there’s no real poverty in New Zealand, I wonder if they know about stories like this.