Opinion Pieces

If You Want to Solve the Homeless Crisis, Listen to the Homeless by Gillian Cook of Closing the Gap   Sleeping in her van while holiday park cabins around her are vacant raised the hackles and voice of Maxine Smith. She made headlines in her hometown of Whakatane for challenging

People have taken to noting that New Zealand’s level inequality hasn’t changed much in the last 15 years. And it’s true, up to a point. But it leaves out a couple of things. First, it conveniently omits most of that period between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, w

The Remuneration Authority is responsible for determining the salaries of senior public servants, judges, central and local government elected representatives and a swag of other individuals based on their official roles. Have a look at the legislation – it’s quite fascina

An important perspective on Working For Families by one of our supporters…….

“If you care about the long term sustainability of superannuation, you need to care about the extent to which the social contract is supporting the people whose taxes are going to pay for it when you need it.” Read more

I have just had a look through SSC’s annual chief executive remuneration tables at 30 June 2014: http://www.ssc.govt.nz/rem-senior-state-sector-staff-to-30june14 As expected and as usual, spectacular salary increases for public sector chiefs, typically of the order 5% to as much

Zero Hour Contracts Immoral The introduction of Zero Hour Contracts is the latest in a line of government edicts courtesy of neoliberal economics and the politics of selfishness to widen the gap between the rich and the poor and damage children.  Zero Hour Contracts are not only a lic

The long-run history of income inequality in Denmark:Top incomes from 1870 to 2010 By A. B. Atkinson, Nuffield College, Oxford and Institute for New Economic Thinking at the Oxford Martin School and J. E. Søgaard, University of Copenhagen and the Danish Ministry of Finance ‘We use his

Dr Paul Dalziel at the time of writing this article in July 1999 was working in the Department of Economics at Canterbury University. He challenged the glowing reports attributed to the reforms of the fourth Labour Government from 1984, and showed that it was not as great an economic