Welcome to my personal website. This is largely a holding site with background information about me and my ongoing projects, rather than something frequently updated. More information about those projects can be found on the Inequality and About Me pages. The About Me page also has my contact details in case you want to...
Read more →The New Zealand government spends more than most OECD countries – but with a smaller number of public sector workers than its counterparts, according to the OECD’s Szuzsanna Lonti. Giving an Institute for Governance and Policy Studies lecture earlier this week, she said general government expenditure as a proportion of GDP was 49% in...
Read more →It’s sometimes said that people living in poverty just need to try harder, but I’m not sure how much more Amy Scott, profiled today in The Press, could be doing: Amy Scott and her two children have moved houses five times since the earthquakes. Scott lost her job after work as a bartender “dwindled...
Read more →There’s been some good news over the weekend, with the government announcing tougher penalties for people found to be exploiting migrant workers. There’s been a lot of coverage of this in recent weeks, including stories that workers in Auckland are being paid as little as $4 an hour, or exploited by the firms that...
Read more →One of the many things obscured in last night’s The Vote about children’s issues was the simple fact that incomes aren’t high enough at the lowest end for parents to give their children a decent start in life. The figure of $30,000 being ‘poverty’ for a family with four children was tossed around as...
Read more →Wellington City Council has just voted to support the Living Wage ‘in principle’, put $250,000 in the budget to research and implement it, and – crucially – has extended it to cover contractors not just in-house staff. It’s a great moment: not 100% of the way, since they haven’t put aside all the money...
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