Why don't Auckland councillors jump on a bus and take a study trip south to the People's Project's Garden Place headquarters in Hamilton, asks Brian Rudman.

The number of Kiwi children in relative poverty has jumped over 300,000 for the first time since 2010 - but it's because of record inequality, despite falling absolute hardship.

I'd like to see the Conservation Minister visit the sub-Antarctic region, perhaps for her Christmas holidays, writes Paul Charman.

Forget the hikoi and library training, the answer the council needs is in Utah - and it's quite straightforward, writes Brian Rudman.

For one 17-year-old living rough on West Auckland streets, snuggling up to her boyfriend was the one way she kept warm at night.

Meridian Energy has joined with charity KidsCan to raise awareness of child poverty in NZ and help to provide food, clothing and basic healthcare.

Mills Lane at the back of the Herald building has offered the unmistakable stink of urine and a ledge of ramshackle cardboard beds where some of the city's homeless sleep.

Vicki Carpenter asks what the boards of two dilapidated schools have been doing about basic maintenance.

Trailblazing legal crusader Dame Silvia Cartwright speaks candidly to David Fisher about longer jail sentences, child poverty and the strain of being Governor-General.

If we want to resist the trends dividing New Zealanders into the haves and the never-wills, the OECD has some policy suggestions the Government could take on board.

Just over two years ago, Housing Minister Nick Smith announced that "this year" the Government was developing a housing warrant of fitness, writes Brian Rudman.

You'd be surprised just how hard it is to find a family willing to let a Herald writer snoop around their home and ask all sorts of intrusive questions about their substandard living conditions, writes Peter Calder.

"It makes me feel happy." Darcy Rakete, the poster boy for the Jammies in June fundraiser, is glad to help others less fortunate than him.

Broadcaster Wendy Petrie has joined the campaign to get warm pyjamas on needy kids this winter.

Not only will the benefit boost do little to alleviate poverty, but it is accompanied by cuts to other associated benefits and payments, writes Dita De Boni

The Government recognised in last week's Budget that the gap between market and benefit incomes has become too wide.

Child poverty figures can be hard to believe. The very word poverty hardly seems appropriate for a country with New Zealand's welfare net.

Finance Minister Bill English says there will be no new initiatives to address poverty in tomorrow's Budget New Zealand - despite the Prime Minister suggesting otherwise last month.

The petition comes as the Salvation Army said it fed 9.5 per cent more people last year in its Midland region than it did in the year before.

The house where Freddie Gray's life changed forever sits at the end of a long line of abandoned row homes in one of this city's poorest neighbourhoods.

Returning home to New Zealand after more than 10 years away I find a country both hearteningly buoyant and unsettlingly fragile. Let me explain - the view of one returning son.

The conservative Maxim Institute think-tank has joined the call for official targets to reduce child poverty.

Popular pet food brands sold in New Zealand have been caught up in disturbing claims of slavery on the high seas.

An 8-year-old Manurewa boy is one of 11,000 disabled children to lose a welfare benefit, even though his asthma is so bad that he missed one in every four school days.

With more children coming to school hungry, a scientific study will for the first time guage the impact nutrition — or lack of it — has on learning.

There's growing economic segregation across the USA - wealth is concentrating in areas just as poverty does.