Tuesday, 31 March 2015
What Are New Zealand’s "Bare Necessities?"
What is the bottom line standard of living we would expect any New Zealander to enjoy? Maxim Institute wants Kiwis to be
given the chance to define a minimum “basket of goods,” establishing the bare necessities any of us would need to
participate in New Zealand society.
The paper’s author, Kieran Madden says, “Any definition of poverty has to be meaningful to all New Zealanders. So it
makes sense to find out what most of us would consider the basic needs of life in present day New Zealand, and set the
poverty line at the income level it would take to have those things.”
Madden also calls for measures of poverty to be more practical, capable of identifying different groups who need
specific solutions: “What helps a single mother in Auckland with high levels of debt is not going to be the same thing
as what is needed to help a single mother in rural New Zealand with no local jobs.”
These are some of the nine recommendations in the policy paper Maxim Institute releases today: The Heart of Poverty – Defining and measuring what it means to be poor in New Zealand.
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