The Cabinet reshuffle of Housing with multiple Minister’s now overseeing it bodes ill for the poor of NZ.
National have decided the solution to the horror situation of the increasing numbers of NZers living in cars is to flog off the state house stock to religious groups to manage all in the name of solving child poverty.
National don’t care about Child Poverty other than its embarrassment factor, but with the vast chunk of voters loving Key, inequality can be safely ignored. Consumer capitalism and neoliberalism place personal success above everything else. Your success is yours and yours alone, it has nothing to do with invisible hegemonic structures like race, class, gender and orientation so when you ‘fail’ (are poor), well that’s your fault too.
Look at the number of NZers who resist feeding hungry kids at school because they believe it is the parents responsibility, regardless of the fact that the benefit was set by Ruth Richardson to be slightly below the nutritional needs of a person so that beneficiaries are always hungry, despite the appallingly low hourly pay, despite the insane property speculation by baby boomers and overseas investors.
If you are poor, it is your fault and assistance is only offered as an after thought, not a solution, that’s why when National moved to start throwing state tenants out claiming ‘no state homes for life’, Nu Zilinder’s cheered.
They are still cheering.
The euphemism National use to justify flogging off State Homes and starting Auckland’s urban sprawl in Hamilton is ‘community-provided social housing’, it’s an abdication of social obligations to religious groups so the Government aren’t responsible any longer.
With property renovation porn the leading TV flavour right now, Key’s sick version of ‘The Block’ has beneficiaries renovating homes only to then be forced to sell that state house to a ‘community-provided social housing’ agent who prosecutes the beneficiary for having a lodger they haven’t declared, forcing the beneficiary onto the street, while Paula Bennett ends the show by burning the house to sell the land to an overseas property developer.
Housing the poor is no longer a serious goal, rampant property speculation and an unchecked property bubble means most NZers false sense of wealth is all they have. The idea of allowing poor people to have homes in such a hot market is not acceptable to those creaming it from multiple property ownership and everyone else who aspires to multiple home ownership.
If National were serious about housing the poor, they would build MORE state homes, not flog them off and pass the buck to churches.
Those with the money write the rules while the poor huddle and shiver in cars.
Absolutely true. This is shaping up one way or another to be a massive handover of taxpayer money and assets to the private sector and it will involve actual ‘mom and dads’ this time. There are already subsidies galore for private landlords. I wonder how many of these selfish money grubbers are in receipt of middle class welfare as well–WFF?
There are state houses empty on purpose all over New Zealand. Three in the street next to mine in West Auckland in a week! The developers and individuals that buy them are bludging on the efforts of previous generations of kiwis that built and supported state housing aka the real social housing.
The “Block” is the level of political comprehension for so many aspirational and established mortgage holders out there.
Community action is the only way to go. Defend state housing where residents can be organised–what is there to lose? early entry to the caravan ghetto? At a minimum stickering and artistically embellishing empty state houses would draw attention to homelessness and the bankruptcy of this Nat policy.
Going back to the bad old days in Europe when the church provided the Workhouse and the Poorhouse, and wealthy businessmen and land lords grudgingly gave a few pennies to support the poor? Another sick joke? If you reading this voted for Key and his rich mates, I hope you feel sick every day from now until the next election.
The top ten things you won’t hear at a Cabinet meeting:
(unless said in a sarcastic, smirking voice)
1. Let’s practice random acts of kindness today.
2. Get the police onto those dirty politics perpetrators.
3. We can’t do that. That favours our mates.
4. Let’s go after the $6 billion in taxes the wealthy aren’t paying. It’s just not right or fair.
5. This inequality in our society has got to stop.
6. No more GST or fee increases. Those are hidden taxes that affect the poor the most.
7. No more welfare for the rich. Let’s rescind their tax cuts.
8. Those obscene CEO compensation packages have got to be curtailed.
9. Ministers shouldn’t retire overseas. They should live with what they create right here.
10. It’s for the common good.
And ten more:
11. Let’s stop calling our citizens, “the stock.”
12. This rape and pillage of our resources on land and sea must end.
13. Trucks are causing carnage on our roads. Let’s promote rail and sea long-distance delivery.
14. Let’s increase extraction royalties and put it into green tech.
15. That neoliberal economic trickle-down theory is bunk.
16. We’ve got to act on climate change as quickly as possible.
17. The GCSB is more trouble than it’s worth.
18. Let’s put Cabinet meetings on public TV.
19. Let’s mute all that “terrorism” hysteria.
20. Those financial transaction tax, Sovereign Fund, and electricity control ideas were great ones. Let’s move on those.
And finally:
21. We’ve got to have binding referenda. It’s democracy in action.
22. Stop that “mom and pop investors” gibberish, Bill. They all know
it’s a nonsense.
23. No more free pass for the rich into our country.
24. Foreigners can’t buy existing houses, only new ones that they reside
in.
25, Ministers will divest all rental property. It’s affecting our policies.
26. The post of trade envoy to Hawaii should never be filled by a former PM.
27. Let’s bring in some real business people to teach us how to run an economy. A background in currency trading just doesn’t cut it.
28. What an economic mess the last government left us…oh wait, that was us.
29. It doesn’t make sense to sell assets that generate 10-15 % interest income just to help the 2% and our overseas mates.
30. We blew it by stopping Cullen Fund contributions when the stock market was so depressed.
Whatever happened to separation of church and state? My tax money was never intended to create revenue for religions. I don’t trust any of them.
I think that is a silly comment, the Salvation Army do huge amounts of good work in the community. What does worry me is that the government is handing over their responsibilities to other organisations.
MICHAL, The salvation Army has done good work but taking over our public assets for free????
Where do we get to input our wishes here?
I am 70yrs old and we helped pay through taxes for the state house project, and now the Government is fleecing us by selling them without returning our investments?
Salvation Army or anyone else should pay back us firstly for that right!
I vividly remember filming on the steps of Parliament during the debate on homosexual law reform. A platoon of Salvation Army people were helping deliver an anti-reform petition.
Do we really want to hand over vital social functions to judgmental people with their own agenda?
All this is going to do is push up rents in the private sector, and make more people homeless.
Key designed new deception,
A backdoor way of sneaky selling of last remaining the public’s assets.
Key will sell everything he can while he can urgently before the legal corruption he has engineered finally catches up with him.
Come fast that day please.
Seems to me Key simply HAS to keep selling assets in order to balance the books and deliver on the promised and much hyped “surplus”. That the surplus clearly comes with many, many strings attached and can’t realistically be maintained due to the finite amount of assets he has to flog off to his rich crony mates. This apparently hasn’t caught up with voters yet, because My Kitchen Rules is on.
What the fuck is “social housing” really, because its sure as shit not what John Key says it is.
I’ll take a guess and say its private housing provision for tax payer hand outs to get the government off the hook for a subject it cares nothing about. And they do so safe in the knowledge at least 50% of New Zealanders who voted National/Act/National/Dunne/Maori Party approve.
And it’s about now with the GREED is good that is Auckland’s property market that getting a roof over ones head is becoming a bit of a crisis
But guess what, we’ve been here before. You don’t need to go back much further than the 50’s, an era National seem to have taken quite a shine to, to see this answer to a badly worded question. Charity homes, Church homes, call them what you like they were an abject rat infested failure.
I see nothing different this time around either.
Oh and by the way, since the election is over and National are back in they have officially racked up their 6th deficit and its a hum dinger as well. Who didn’t see that one coming?
Forget the fiscal deficit NZ is morally bankrupted for at least the next 3 years
[…] Houses That’s right the solution to more and more desperate families living in cars is to flog off 30% of the State Housing stock to churches for them to run them. Abdication of social responsibility didn’t come up much in the […]
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