The attempted media distractions of Max Key photoshopped in his undies were derailed this week when he indiscreetly posed with a cigarette, but how cringe-worthy it was that his fashion poses even make news. He’s famous only for being the son of someone famous, laying claims to authenticity because his parents both once lived in state houses (lucky them), and using the same inane comments as his dad “at the end of the day”; this week, mainstream media’s focus on celebrity went to new lows. And that’s saying something!
Elsewhere in the media though, more serious issues got due focus. Overcrowding; Whole families living in cars while state and private investment houses sit empty; Kids trying to study for exams under street lights while living in vehicles. Personal debt up to almost half a trillion dollars, or more than $100,000 for every New Zealander. The overdependence on property investment leading to a precarious economic state, with economists saying ‘the housing bubble will burst’, ‘it’s not a matter of if, but when’.
Governmental responses are too little, too late. Widespread financial ignorance (illiteracy), an undiversified economy and incentives of low interest rates and tax distortions, means the housing market dominates debt and investment. Releasing more land at the region’s margins to improve housing supply (beyond the thirty year’s provision in the draft Unitary Plan) will be ineffective, limited by the capacity of the building sector. Already skilled tradesmen are in short supply. Try getting small job building work done in the region these days and everyone will tell you they’re too busy. There’s up to a year’s delay on building contractors. The Council are forced to decline one in three building inspections as cowboy operators take short cuts or don’t know what they’re doing. There are only so many professionals to do the work. And of course land bankers will hold on to property and release it for development when they can maximise returns – rather than flooding the market. And as new development opportunities come on stream, lending criteria are tightening like a noose around the neck of potential new home buyers who will increasingly struggle to meet new deposit and repayment limits in the overinflated market.
Apparently home ownership is at its lowest level in 60 years, but the housing market is overleveraged, a huge proportion of house sales are to speculators, rental expenses limit attempts of families to save for mortgage deposits, 33,000 houses in the Auckland region are unoccupied or not fully used. That all indicates that someone is buying all the houses, but it sure isn’t the homeless.
All those empty and underutilised houses around the region could go a long way to accommodating Auckland’s homeless and displaced. The government has other levers at its disposal besides freeing up more land to improve accessibility and affordability of housing -stop selling off state houses!, impose rent controls on private stock, stop subsidising speculation through tax rules and accommodation supplements.
Housing is a basic universal right. Article 25 of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights says ’Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services’. A hedge is not a home, neither is a bus stop or a car. It rightly alarms many compassionate New Zealanders that we have become a country, and a society, that otherwise generally accepts and ignores homelessness, people sleeping on the streets, out in the open, and in makeshift shanties, on footpaths, under bridges, and in public parks, while elsewhere baches and holiday homes, and speculative housing investments sit empty. People on Queen street walk unseeing past beggars. People sleep in shop doorways in the suburbs. The homeless are moved on from the shelter of public buildings even when it’s late at night and they have nowhere else to go.
People living on the street and in cars, is no accident, but a direct symptom and result of inequalities in society – Unequal access to finance, unequal pay, unequal social relations based on ethnicity, education, status and gender; unequal lending criteria. The housing crisis is a distribution crisis built out of inequality as much as a shortage of supply. While many investors and home owners have dangerously put all their eggs in one basket, other groups in society don’t get any eggs at all. Until governments address fundamental inequalities in society, these distributive injustices will remain, and perpetuate through generations as the young, and poor people of today find it increasingly difficult to afford to rent or buy a home.
The other scenario is an increasing gap between the haves and the have-nots as those already in the housing market see their values continue to rise, with prospects for more lending on equity accrued, and eventually a popping of the housing bubble leading to a potentially radical rebalancing of property values, causing wider macroeconomic instability, mortgagee sales and grim prospects for all. Then at least some of the current ‘haves’, may encounter what it’s like to be without a home too. But that’s not something we should aspire to, and which we futilely rely on the government to address.
I thought the media were to steer clear of politician’s children? That’s always been the case in the past. So what’s with the obsession with their ongoing publicity for John key’s son? The Herald has become notorious for this. Now we have Max key in underpants holding a cigarette shoved in our faces. Is it mere media distraction? No doubt, but John key himself will have to ok all this publicity for his children. Is John key trying to drum up careers for his apparently useless son or something? Is John key trying to make his son famous? even though he’s doing nothing other than being ‘a privileged rich man’s kid with aimless and pointless photo shoots” while our country burns, and kiwis drown in poverty and homelessness under his father’s failed leadership.
Good article Christine. What we are looking at here is a crisis of inequality. What will happen per Robert Reich (inequality the movie) fame is a snap back or a break apart. So when society gets so split the underclass either one fights back or two society brakes hence people live in gated communities more and basically have nothing to do with other groupsq. I think we are heading towards one of these two outcomes very soon. I guess another financial crisis could spur it on.
It’s a direct consequence of capitalism and competition.
Or, more likely, the government will step in to protect these people from the risks that they took – just like they did with SCF.
After the GFC the population saw those who took risks being bailed out.
If there’s another collapse (and I think there will be, only this time bigger) then I do not think the public will tolerate more bailouts.
If it is clear that bailing out the risk takers last time not only didn’t work but encouraged them to keep taking more risks, so leading to another collapse, then I’m betting that next time the public will not have the stomach for it.
And personally, I’ll be damned if I’ll see public money bailing out the greedy who over leverage their mortgages to buy “investment” properties (read speculate in a bubble) or crap like BMW’s and jet-ski’s. Let them face the consequences of their greed or they’ll never learn.
100% right! Christine. It’s really sad to see our society come to this dire situation.
They have the same disaster in Ireland but they’re trying to address it:
Both us and them are victims of Neoliberal profit before people and society and solidarity.
Ireland’s New Rising: An Exclusive Report from The Laura Flanders Show
http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=16497
The Stars and Stripes bandana speaks volumes.
Was just about to post about the irony of that US bandana bad boy image as well Trey.
Shades of Bruce Springsteen it could be argued perhaps, but more likely Croby Textor’s diversion to Kiwis being shut out of the housing market and people living in cars.
Key-dashian’s poster boy for his daddy’s US ships coming into NZ’s harbours, TPPA signings, 5 eyes and endless lines of homeless on our streets like the US has.
Who will we NZ buying our 20 billion dollars of Defense armaments from over the next 15 years? China? Russia? Syria? Or maybe the country emblazoned on Key-dashian’s forehead.
Does Max and his despicable daddy have US citizenship, hence the allegiance to the flag?
You people here are so gullible. The Stars and Stripes bandana was photo-shopped in afterwards.
Originally, it would have been the Lockwood flag with the Silver Fern strategically positioned to bounce light around and follow you around your living room, just like the Mona Lisa.
It’s marketing the Key-dashian brand.
So you people of the left, nothing to see here except abs, move on.
There was just too much homelessness in the media, so they needed a click-bait, diversion from the master click-baiters [sic.] Crosby and Textor. It’s straight out of the Goebbels manual for propaganda, and and most of points 1-18, but specifically #19
http://www.psywarrior.com/Goebbels.html
“Little Leader”? A new political dynasty?
Yep, they bred the Bushes, they breed the Clintons, they breed others, so next will be the Key Dynasty, they have also bred the Royals, and tens of thousands were out cheering on the Queen yesterday, I heard. Underling or “Untermensch”, I do not know what to call it, that is the result of this capitalist style of brainwashing, it is depressing.
The other problem you touched on is the population is over leveraged ie the population is carrying far to much debt relative to income or even the size of Of the econnomy is not large enough to pay back the debt .the victims of misalocation of capital are you poor and homeless also savers .these indebted voters cant afford any disruption to the status quo as whole house cards will collapse if intrest rate rise or imigration stops .as doctor Michael hudson has said you cant tapper a ponzi scheme they are doomed to collapse .a population the size of Birmingham can not borrow half trillian dollars without paying the piper there will tears sooner or later
“Apparently home ownership is at its lowest level in 60 years, but the housing market is overleveraged, a huge proportion of house sales are to speculators,”
The Key dynasty, “Kiwi’s will be tenants in their own land.”
As I have mentioned earlier, Max Key was paraded on the herald website every single day of this past week, including an article today from Rodney Hide.
Not once was Max asked about inequality or homelessness. Sums up our fourth estate really. And I wouldn’t have thought Hide to be giving advice to anyone on courting fame, unless it’s about the infamous yellow suit!
“Not once was Max asked about inequality or homelessness.”
Come on, are you serious? Such is no longer “news” these days. What counts is “social media bunker” stuff, just watch and listen to Paul Henry on Media Works (For Some) in the mornings.
Analytical, careful, even scientific research and thinking, oh, get off, stuff that, it only pains the brains, we want easy stuff, funny stuff, giggles and chuckles, and no more, thanks.
We have ever deeper lows in the media, because the mentally and emotionally deprived, the bulk of the people out there, they crave for something to cling to, they do as precariat, or working slaves and servants dream to one day also be the master, or the VIP that has his body shot and published all over the show.
People do not live in a conscious and aware manner anymore, they are working ten to twelve hour shifts, many of them, I know of courier drivers working as self employed contractors 12 hours a day for 5 to 6 days a week, some to make ends meet and pay off the expensive van they were expected to “invest” in, others to make a lot of dosh and then buy into another “investment”, possibly real estate.
It is all adrenalin driven, the whole show is run on adrenalin, people are told from the day they are born, to compete, the constant messaging by advertising industry also tells them, their lives are not “complete”, unless they buy all those things that are on offer, and that others also buy.
They sit in the choked traffic, competing with others to get to work, and to beat the traffic, they compete as students at university, even at primary and secondary school, as they are told, if you do not make it, do not get those certs and papers, you will be stuffed.
They compete at the supermarket, at the checkout, who gets in first, to get out first, who gets the best bargain, never mind slave labour, environmentally questionable production of goods, never mind the one way waste, they want, they need, they buy, and that is usually based on the “best” price they can get it for, never mind the rest.
They compete for homes, hence we have the market, the high prices, the first home buyer is forced to compete with the investor, the investors compete with each other, they all compete, compete, compete, like the hamster in the hamster wheel they keep running.
Tonight at the supermarket I saw nasty faces, not one smile, the only smiles came from some of the imported, foreign labour checkout operators, they come from places where they compete to get out of the slums, so they feel New Zealand is a paradise to compete in, hence they smile, also because the boss tells them, hey smile, or get another job.
They compete for every morsel that drops off the plate of the better off, they compete for parking spaces, for a seat on the bus, for the next ticket for the rugby game, compete, compete, adrenalin rushes through the blood vessels, switches off most of the brain, so only the fight or run mechanisms function well. Forget careful considerations, social skills, expanding thinking, planning ahead, and thinking of the collective. The collective also competes, at sports events, they scream at the supporters and players from the other side, to f*** off and so, as they are told, they must support their tribe.
Hence on the news tonight, I saw, football fans at the European Football Championship fight each other.
Competition in Parliament, competition, tension, adrenalin everywhere, certainly in the MSM, where it is a fight for survival of the fittest, to keep their jobs, so click bait is the best, the easiest, the cheapest, and hence we get fed with that, with giggles and silly comments, with sports, weather, crime, court hearings, all easy stuff, again feeding the adrenalin, shutting healthy, balanced brain function off.
We are caught, in this, and hence we get the shit we get, people actually get what they deserve, I think, because they are too lazy, stupid or indifferent and rather choose to join all others in the game of competing, hunting, chasing, attacking or if needed running for survival. This is not the future, and hence this country is where it is, it is stuffed, but those at the top want it like this, it keeps all the rats in the lab busy fighting each other, while the ones running the lab can lean back and enjoy a drink, watch it all, reap benefits, go unscathed and have a great time laughing about the idiots.
Fed up with the blaming of decent hard working NZrs who’re working hard at min waged jobs to feed their families.
To dismiss the poor hard working people to “use any bit of soil to grow gardens, no matter the economic status of their families”, is an insult to decent people. It ignores the facts that families cannot rent a home for less than $500 from income of $600. With rents are so high and wages too low, its no surprise working families end up homeless.
We are being set up here, with the photographs of Max Key.
John Key is struggling for popularity. By allowing his family to set the good click-bait agenda, it portends more “personal issues” can be used to get out of his unpopular spot. His upcoming media releases might read:
“I’m not comftuble with my family being abused on social media because I’m thu PM, so I’m resigning for personal reasons”
Sorted
Never mind Max. He’s an unimportant distraction.
Along with an RNZ item on Friday I think this is the first time I’ve heard or seen the “Trillion” word connected with NZ’s economy. It’s an American number, I didn’t associate numbers like a half trillion with tiny NZ, especially regarding debt. It’s a shocker!
Because debt is the foundation of our Neo-Lib economy, a figure like this is equivalent to an undermining of the foundations of our economy which will almost inevitably cause collapse. It may not to appear to be collapsing now because attention is constantly being diverted to inanities and irrelevancies. Bad figures (excuse the obvious pun) seldom make the news for long enough to impact public opinion and cause us to demand a change in economic direction.
There is obviously going to be a civil war. “Our” non-country is the canary in the mineshaft. Interesting you failed to mention immigration/neo-colonialism, Christine.
Freedom of speech – whats the problem ? ?
Come on – be honest and explain your reasoning for not posting our comments. Come on.
I haven’t seen your comments Blake
One last thing I forgot to add. I really like your work and appreciate your writings and your passion. You stand out as a writer and journalist.
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