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OPINION: Last Saturday I took part in a Liveable Incomes march in a chi-chi suburb – and drivers in BMWs genuinely clapped and cheered us on. In general, all of us – even Beamer drivers – want to know that our whole “team of 5 million” (TM) have enough to live on. And yet currently, one in five children live with the toxic stress and long-term health and educational effects of food insecurity. Parents cry when interviewed about bringing up their children on inadequate income support: they talk of hopelessness, despair, hunger, existing not living. So for those parents and their c...

A Budget boost in infrastructure investment could help Nelson first home buyers get into new builds, says electorate MP Rachel Boyack.

Thursday, 20 May 2021, 3:36 pm Child Poverty Action Group welcomes the income support increases announced today by the Government, saying the rises will be a good step towards income adequacy for many children in need. "The changes today are useful if insufficient. Our modelling shows the changes fall short of liveable incomes, but these increases should still be high enough to make a difference for many families," said CPAG spokesperson Professor Emeritus Innes Asher. "This holds particularly for couple families, who are currently worst-off." CPAG modelling shows many families paying low re...

The government’s recently announced health sector reforms go well beyond what its expert health review had recommended. This was rightly welcomed by many in the sector, but it does raise the question: if radical change can be made in health, why not the same for welfare? For years now, benefit recipients, welfare advocates and their allies have been calling for a significant increase in core benefit levels to provide a liveable income. They have also called for major changes in how Work and Income (WINZ) deals with people with chronic illness and disability and those in relationships; how ...

Warwick Smith/Stuff Boon was diagnosed with Friedreich's Ataxia when he was 17. As the disease progressed it made walking and talking increasingly harder, and also affected his hearing. That’s where my people were: the creatives and the outspoken. But it was the welfare system, in part, that eventually forced me to leave. I worked for as long as I could as an administrator at the Ministry of Health, between 2015 and 2017, before my mental health became too bad to continue. At the time my degenerative neurological condition was progressing. A trusted friend in the disability community vi...