Public Seminar: A Decade Of Debt

Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington’s Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies has over the past few weeks presented a popular series of seminars on the topic ‘Poverty, by Design’, focused on the systems that hold families in poverty and what needs to change.

The final seminar in the series, to be held this Wednesday 28 August, is titled “A Decade of Debt”. The speaker is Jake Lilley, senior policy advisor at FinCap, an organisation that supports more than 180 free financial mentoring services, and advocates for system change to help prevent people from getting into financial hardship. The session will be chaired by Sue Moroney, chief executive of Community Law Centres o Aotearoa.

Financial mentors across Aotearoa continue to see whānau having to manage private and government debt deductions off their benefits, which can leave them without money for the essentials.

Jake will provide an overview of how a change in settings in 2014 has turned Work and Income’s systems into a conveyor belt for private debt collection at scale.

He will also detail how benefit incomes are being undermined by the creation and collection of debt to government along with FinCap’s recommendations for ceasing these drivers of poverty.

Jake specialises in consumer protection and works with a network of more than 800 financial mentors across Aotearoa. He has been a member of the Responsible Lending Code Advisory Group, a member of the Energy Hardship Reference Group and previously worked at the Consumer Action Law Centre in Australia.

Rebecca Macfie, journalist, author, and 2024 JD Stout Fellow, has organised this successful seminar series, and is also one of the organisers of the upcoming conference of the same name. She says, "Over the last five weeks we have heard from school leaders, workers, researchers, and a courageous journalist, each of whom have revealed the ways in which our economic and institutional systems create and maintain poverty in Aotearoa New Zealand.

"The sessions have been confronting, moving, and compelling, as I am sure Jake's talk on Wednesday will be.

"The series has been a rare opportunity to build understanding of the multiple systems that create poverty, and how those systems need to be redesigned for equity. Later this year we will take this work wider and deeper with our conference ‘Pakukore: Poverty, By Design’, from 21–23 November. Everyone interested in an equitable future for all in Aotearoa New Zealand should save the date and look out for the programme when it is published in early September."

Seminar details 

5.30–7 pm, Wednesday 28 August 2024

Lecture Theatre 1

Old Government Buildings

55 Lambton Quay

Pipitea

Wellington

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