• Articles

    Feature and news articles by Max Rashbrooke

    Are British civil servants doomed to fail in the land of the Hobbit?

    by  • January 30, 2013 • Articles, Comment, The Guardian • 0 Comments

    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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    The threat of inequality

    by  • January 23, 2013 • Articles, Features • 0 Comments

    I’ve just written a piece for an international project aimed at improving governance – the way countries are run – known as the Sustainable Governance Indicators. The piece is about our rising inequality, and how it threatens some of the things we hold dear: a relatively free and transparent political system, for example. It’s...

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    A chance to hear from a visiting child poverty expert

    by  • October 18, 2012 • Articles, News • 0 Comments

    Greg Duncan – an American academic with three decades’ experience researching poverty, welfare dependency and childhood development – will be giving several public lectures in Wellington next month about the long-term damage caused by child poverty. Duncan, a distinguished professor from the University of California, Irvine, has spent his career examining the long-term impacts...

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    A rug from a homeless man

    by  • October 3, 2012 • Comment • 5 Comments

    Rug from a homeless man 3

    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...

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    Inequality – what’s the solution?

    by  • September 21, 2012 • Comment • 4 Comments

    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...

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