Even as New Zealand's income gaps have yawned open in recent decades, public concern about that inequality has fallen.

Egalitarianism used to be one of New Zealand's touchstones, a term that conveyed a kind of pride in being a country with relatively small income gaps.

Even among the politically active, the word has little purchase now.

I was in Westport recently to promote my book Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis and talk about New Zealand's growing income gaps.

I also met Georgina Lomax-Sawyers, a 16-year-old former youth MP. What did the word ‘egalitarian' mean to her, I asked.

"I know about it, I recognise the word," she said. "But I don't associate anything with it."

Others said the same thing. And so I began to ask myself: have the values New Zealand used to pride itself on, which make up that word, vanished - or do they carry on in a new form?

Most people know that, on some level, the rich have pulled away from the poor, but here's some figures that that show how that gap has grown over the last 30 years.

The typical person in the lowest 10 per cent of the country has seen almost no increase in their after-tax income once you adjust for inflation: it has gone from about $10,000 in the mid-1980s to $11,000 in 2011.

The story for someone in the middle of the country is little better: an increase in after-tax income from $25,000 to $30,000.

In contrast, the after-tax income of someone in the top 10 per cent has doubled, from around $50,000 to $100,000.

And the income of the typical person in the top 1 per cent (pre-tax, this time) has skyrocketed, from $150,000 a year to around $300,000 a year. Continue reading.

Source: The Wireless

Image: risk.net

He agrees with Matt McCarten that successive governments have shown no concern for the poor and downtrodden.

"The transformation of New Zealand society from one in which Jack was every bit as good as his master, and Jack's children had every opportunity to succeed, has occurred in just two generations."

Hide says this change has not been caused by just one policy, "but rather through a multitude of interlocking policies."

In his opinion piece in the New Zealand Herald, Hide gives a lists of nine factors which he says " are just a small sample of how government stomps on the poor and blocks upward mobility."

He says a total policy reversal won't return New Zealand to the egalitarian society it once was.

"That's because two generations of bad policy have embedded an underclass. The problem is now cultural, not political."

Source

• The New Zealand Herald
• Image: Zimbio