Lindsay Mitchell

  An ODT opinion piece recently parodied the rapid adoption of Māori names for government departments. It drew attention to the renaming of...

Am I the only person who has read MSD's latest  annual report ? It's a tedious business but surely a few checkers cast their eyes ov...

My first reaction to today's following NZ Herald  headline was incredulity: One big idea - what PM Jacinda Ardern would do if money was...

  New Report Measures Father Absence in NZ Thousands of New Zealand children struggle with having no father in their lives, and a new rep...

The Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister says : "We've lifted about 66,000 kids out of poverty in the past few years ......

MSD's  Annual Report  was released yesterday. From the CEO's forward: There is a lot we can reflect on and be proud of over the last...

The Supported Living Payment (SLP) replaced the Invalid's benefit. Officially : Supported Living Payment is for people who have, or care...

MSD's annual tome of poverty statistics was released last week. The NZ Initiative provides a good summary here. Eric Crampton wryly n...

 The following graph shows the number of MSD clients living in emergency housing up to 2021: Typically, around 92 percent of clients are ho...

A stoush between collectivist and individualist Māori is long overdue. It has simmered for a long time but this week boiled over when Kelvin...

Stephen Joyce opines in the NZ Herald today about the PM's "performative policy-making": "I thought we'd reached pea...

 A reader sent me the following quote from a Bryce Edward's article at the BFD: The Prime Minister took on the portfolio of Child Pover...

A just-published Listener article asks, "Why doesn't middle-class NZ care about child poverty?" It gathers views from half ...

The longer people are on a benefit, the harder it is to get off it. The following graph illustrates that. Someone who has been benefit-depen...

 As it is now common practice to accord sentencing discounts to criminals with childhood experiences beyond their control, what about surcha...

Our time, the Queen died very early Friday morning. Mike Hosking, a proud royalist and huge fan of Her Majesty ran an excellent show dedicat...

An advert plays incessantly on the radio telling me that "Wearing a mask is an act of intentional kindness." An intention cannot b...

MEDIA RELEASE 28 August 2022 Report - Why Do Our Young Lead Developed World In Poor Mental Health? In 2020, UNICEF ranked New Zealand last o...

Jacinda Ardern in 2017: “...we are small enough that we can absolutely introduce child wellbeing policies so that New Zealand is once again...