The major Working for Families review undertaken by IRD, Treasury and MSD is taking place behind closed doors. There are no published terms of reference, no timeline and no public consultations at this stage.

Meaningful reform to WFF is well over-due. There is much unconscious bias and implicit racism in the current WFF.

Imagine that during the Covid-19 lockdown you had no means to buy online goods, because your EFTPOS-like card could only be used in person at a limited number of shops, many of which were closed.

New Zealanders believe in justice. We care about protecting our right to a dignified and decent life. An effective welfare system is only serving its purpose then, when it is taking care of the people at the heart of it. We know we’re not there yet.

Many of us are anxious about the tally of expenditure and what that will mean for the year to come.

Tuesday's announcement from Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and Finance Minister Grant Robertson about a whopping $7.5 billion surplus came as a pleasant surprise.

My teammates and I recently spent time in a classroom of children at a decile 2 school, talking about hopes and dreams, and what’s needed to achieve them.

There’s a line in the Executive Summary of the Welfare Expert Advisory Group (WEAG) report that sums things up perfectly: “Urgent and fundamental change is needed”.

People should be wary of recent criticism of Working for Families (WFF) tax credits as being a poverty trap. The problem is not the system itself, but the poor design from its inception.

Why are we deducting money that is intended for children’s basic needs, from meagre incomes, just to claw back potential child support losses that are not their fault?

Vanessa Cole, Co-ordinator for Auckland Action Against Poverty spoke at CPAG’s launch of our new report “Further fraying of the welfare safety net”, about her experience working with families who have been sorely let down by New Zealand’s crumbling welfare system.

Should sole parents who are fighting just to get by, and to raise healthy children, really be considered fraudulent, if all that’s happened is they started a new relationship, and possibly shared some bills?

With all the rhetoric around domestic violence and women and children it’s hard to believe that even today when women experience hardship and reach out to the state for support, they are still judged and punished by the very agency that is designed to help them.

The latest figures released by the Ministry of Social Development show numbers of Sole Parent Support recipients are dropping. But a lack of information about what's happened to those families, or why they're off the benefit is cause for concern.