Creating poverty-busting opportunites that work for people with disabilities

By Alex Penk

by Alex Penk and Danielle van Dalen This week there’s been a lot of coverage about employment opportunities for people…

MEDIA RELEASE: Creating work opportunities for people with disabilities to get out of poverty

Thursday, 23 May In New Zealand people with disabilities earn just half of the average income of people without disabilities….

Policy Paper: Creating Opportunity

By Danielle van Dalen

People with disabilities are overlooked in the national conversation on poverty and overrepresented in New Zealand’s poverty statistics. They face…

Two-and-a-half cheers for child poverty bill

By Alex Penk

I was born at the tail-end of Gen X, so I grew up with a pop culture saturated by “fear…

The collision of research and real life

By Alex Penk

I’ve never been to Maraenui, but I’ve now had a pretty eye-opening introduction to the Napier suburb. The devastation caused…

Sabotaging the lifts in New Zealand’s tower of wealth

By Julian Wood

If you haven’t seen the 2018 Side Eye Inequality Tower by Toby Morris and Max Rashbrooke, it’s well worth a…

Submission: Child Poverty Reduction Bill

By Kieran Madden

Maxim Institute supports this Bill and proposes amendments to strengthen it. We welcome this Bill and its potential to increase…

Promises and plans to change poverty in New Zealand

By Kieran Madden

A few weeks ago, my colleague wrote about Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s “courageous move” to introduce the Child Poverty Reduction…

The too hard basket: Breaking the link between disability and poverty

By Danielle van Dalen

Less than half of New Zealanders with disabilities are in paid employment. New research from the Maxim Institute suggests employers…

Acknowledging Ability

By Danielle van Dalen

When we talk about poverty, we rarely consider people with disabilities as a group who are particularly at risk. But…

Discussion Paper: Acknowledging Ability

By Danielle van Dalen

 People who are living with a disability are vastly overrepresented in New Zealand’s poverty figures, and 74 percent of those…

Read our column on The Spinoff and RNZ

By Alex Penk

This week, Alex Penk and Julian Wood’s column Triumph or disaster? A guide to the minimum wage increase featured on The…

Investing in people, regardless of return

By Julian Wood

Like the proverbial frog in the slowly heating pot, many of us are blissfully unaware of the change currently going…

The State must serve

By Kieran Madden

Is the government’s flagship Social Investment approach simply the “incremental privatisation of social services?” When journalist Richard Harman posed this…

The trust trade-off

By Kieran Madden

The Government is going all in on its Social Investment strategy for fixing social ills, but the big data it…

Creating opportunities to contribute

By Danielle van Dalen

Last week New Zealander Robert Martin took up his position in Geneva as Spokesperson for Disabled People on the United…

Poverty in New Zealand – The Heart of Poverty research series

By Kieran Madden

Every society tells a story about the good life, getting a fair go, or what it takes to live well. Sadly,…

Not helping harms us

By Julian Wood

Last week the Hamilton Central Business Association enacted the “Your Help May Harm” campaign, aiming “to educate the public on the…

Posturing doesn’t help those facing poverty

By Alex Penk

“I know that’s not PC, but you know, that’s me,” said Judith Collins last week as she commented on child…

Between risk and reality

By Kieran Madden

We use statistics to inform policy development and public discourse—it is a tool to better society. But like most tools,…